Report on a workshop offered by the Tata-Dhan Academy, Madurai
Preface
Post-independence India has witnessed an immense struggle against poverty. A variety of stakeholders have resorted to innovative and diverse models to face the challenges ahead. NGOs have played key roles in furthering the efforts made by these stakeholders to reduce poverty. In this process, development practitioners have amassed a wealth of experience and learning, especially at the grassroots level.
This treasure chest of learning is there for the asking; unfortunately, knowledge sharing in the development sector is severely under utilized and much of the valuable grassroots learning experiences remain obscure and localized. Precious time, human resources, and other resources can be put to optimal use if these learnings are made widely and freely available.
Individual reflections and group discussions on this disparity indicated that a forum was necessary to make these learnings easily accessible to people; such a forum would help develop contemporary development theories and concepts. The Transferring Grassroots Experiences into New Development Theories and Concepts knowledge-building workshop is one such forum, and it was designed to facilitate sharing and learning and to enable practitioners to theorize and conceptualize based on their experiences. By creating this platform and enabling development practitioners themselves to present their theories, DHAN Foundation and the Tata-Dhan Academy hope to set in motion a very powerful process whereby the gaps between theories, grassroots level practitioners, and the community can be narrowed.
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Goodbye “Dear Diary” and hello “Development Diary”
Many people can be a bit intimidated by the thought of diary writing. A large part of this is the recollection of childhood diary writing experiences filled with mundane details which look something like:
Dear Diary,
Today I got up at 6:30 and had five idli for breakfast. Then I went to the tea shop and had two cups of tea and …
You get the point. No one—not even you—is likely to want to read or re-read those words a month later.
So, why are we asking you to keep a “Development Diary” thenThis document was prepared for Tata-Dhan Academy students who are completing the fieldwork or development practice segments of their curriculum. As such, some of the content specifically highlights the types of topics they would be recording about their experiences.?
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India is often heralded both as the land of diversity and as the land of unity. This is a claim reinforced by the wealth of religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity coexisting with many things uniquely “Indian” within the country’s boundaries. Now, with India’s impressive growth, “income” can be added as an element of “diversity”; can the same be said for improving its status as a land of unity? “India: How’s it Growing?” published in Developments magazine asks the question “How many Indias are there?” and tries to evaluate the inclusiveness of India’s economic growth.
Continue reading ‘Is India’s New Growth Reaching the Poor?’
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Snippy Writing Tips
I couldn’t help it. I had to start writing my own writing guide based on a few of the things that really irritate me when I’m editing or correcting something for someone else. It’s a work in progress and it’s being done somewhat haphazardly (which probably means that I’m eventually going to get lazy about it after a while and not add new tips). But I’m having fun doing it—it helps relieve some of the frustration I sometimes feel when editing….
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Introduction
Process documentation and journal writing should become a natural extension of the work that you do while you are in the field. Both of these types of writing are meant to describe what happened in the field, and both of them will include different kinds of information to help you later on when writing your reports. But while these writing tasks are related, they are different in their purposes. Broadly speaking, process documentation is purely objective, while journal writing is more flexible and allows for more subjective commentary. The following document was written to help you get started with process documentation and journal writingThis document was prepared for Tata-Dhan Academy students who are completing the fieldwork or development practice segments of their curriculum. As such, some of the content specifically highlights the types of topics they would be recording about their experiences. Nevertheless, whatever your course of study—or indeed even if you are writing for pleasure!—many of the concepts here should still be easily applicable.. I urge you to take the included information as “guidelines” and not as a prescriptive set of rules or requirements.
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Last summer, the Centre for Micro Finance took on a group of interns to help with several of their projects. Two of the interns, Rachel Bergenfield and Neera Jain—by the way, the most awesome interns ever!—agreed to undertake the huge project of filming a documentary in a few short weeks, and here is the result of their efforts!
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Evaluation and Assessment of Curriculum
This week, as I write this, I am also in the midst of finding a new job. My past few days have been filled with composing cover letters, browsing online job sites, sending emails out to my network of colleagues, and refining my CV—my curriculum vitae. “The course of life.” When looked at from that perspective, the term curriculum is certainly a weighty one; however, despite the import of the term, clarity about what constitutes a curriculum is still unclear for many people. Definitions become even hazier when restricted to academics and used alongside terms like instruction. The education field, like any other, has its share of jargon; curriculum and instruction are two of these. These two related terms are essential to the education field and deserve to be considered more closely.
Continue reading ‘Instructing the Curriculum? Or a Curriculum for Better Instruction?’
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Evaluation and Assessment of Curriculum
Abstract
Our world is full of assessments. This seems especially true to those in the education field who conduct assessments ranging from self-designed assessments for classroom use, to nationally designed assessments to compare students from different states or districts. So caught up are we in the act of either administering or taking an assessment, that we rarely stop to ask questions like, “Why are we conducting this assessment?”, “What will be the added value of conducting this assessment?”, and “Are the assessments we use being used appropriately?” The following questions are addressed in the following first-person narrative account based on some of my experiences with assessments. In the process, I also highlight two experiences with traditional assessments which had drastically different impacts on my perception of assessments.
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Lois Christie | Ananda Mahto | Dawn Parrish | Christopher Wood
Standards-Based Curriculum and Instruction
Testing has always been commonplace in schools—and while students have had to take tests for years, the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) was first administered in 1926; high-stakes testing is largely the result of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The intention of standardized tests is to capture student educational achievement and compare results of different schools in different districts. Parents and politicians are demanding more accountability by increasing the focus on a school’s academic record in addition to a student’s academic performance. These tests are now used to make policy decisions that extend beyond impacting only students; the standardized tests have become high-stakes tests for multiple stakeholders. The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) is an example of a high-stakes test. The purpose of this paper is first to examine whether it is appropriate to use high-stakes test like the FCAT for high-stakes decisions and secondly are there better ways to assess students, teachers, and schools.
Continue reading ‘Is High-Stakes Testing Highly Unrealistic?’
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Standards-Based Curriculum and Instruction
Educational standards have the potential to revolutionize access to high-quality education for everyone. Standards can help parents, teachers, students, and administrators cope with the demands of our increasingly mobile environment. They can aid in providing more efficient training for teachers, allowing governments to train more teachers, and to ensure that teachers are more effective in the classroom. Standards can serve as rulers with which students can measure their own progress, and they can help parents discover new ways in which learning can be a welcome addition to the household. Yet, despite its potential, education that is too standards oriented is often highly criticized, a common complaint being the cold and rigid assessments that often go along with standards-based education.
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Ananda Mahto 