DESCRIPTIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Career and Livelihood Planning
Work has been our constant companion ever since the hands of our ancient forefathers curled around a piece of stone and converted it into a tool – an instrument of production. The tendency to work is a natural and inherent human characteristic. However as with other human activities, work occurs within a social context – a context characterised by patterns of beliefs and ways of thinking. It is within this environment that specific meanings and values are attached to work. Career as a form of work, finds its being within a certain way of thinking.
Definitions of career vary greatly and approaches to career guidance take multiple standpoints.
Given in the presentation below are descriptions and definitions of career and livelihood.
Programmes for Assisted Learning (PAL) is a literacy learning intervention we have designed to supplement the regular classroom instruction a child receives.
PAL focuses on children from the age of five or six going up to about twelve. The topics of the programme are tailor made to suit the interests and the world of experiences of each participating group. PAL attempts to ensure that every session with the child includes activities that will allow:
- open-ended spoken language experiences,
- opportunities to become analytic about the structures within a language,
- practice with stories and other narratives and
- encouragement to express one’s own thoughts in a written output.
The PAL methodology has been used with children in early grades in government schools (public-funded schools), non-formal centers for out-of-school children, after-school programmes, remedial classes, summer camps and vacation programmes.
Comprehensive and continuous assessment is integral to the PAL methodology. For example, children at-risk for reading difficulties may take longer to learn the alphabet or akshara set. They may be less accurate on visual memory tasks or sound processing tasks. They may have smaller vocabularies or a shallow understanding of word meanings, or they may have a lower grasp of the grammatical details of their language. It is good to ask specialists to help when there are signs of literacy failure and this is clearly not because of poor instruction or absence of opportunity to practice. Specialist teachers may asses some less visible processes such as phonological processing, morphological processing and syntactic processing. These processes show us the child’s skills to recognise and manipulate with the sounds, words and grammatical structures of the language, respectively.
Chili pili cheela: An Example of a Resource for Literacy Learning
The chili pili cheela is a learning resource for young readers. A set of 101 Kannada language exploration cards are graded to span several reading levels as is typically expected in a given class. One side of the card has text, the other side a series of activities. The texts range from poems, essays, short stories and dialogues to comics, lists and announcements. The variety of genres that have been brought together for children is a unique feature of these cards. 
The activities range from art and craft activities to activities to promote speaking, listening, writing and comprehension.
The cards have been graded based on a variety of language and text related parameters:
- The support given by illustrations to guess at the content in the text
- The number of simple and complex symbols in words
- The level of vocabulary, especially unusual words not typically found in Std. 1 to 5 level texts
- The layers of meaning in a text, and complexities because of usage and style
- The degree of inference needed, especially whether questions to the child require finding stated facts or information that is implied
The settings in the stories and texts in Chili pili cheela are predominantly rural. The local texts are meant to address the problematic issue of books that have ideas and images that are alien to the child’s context. Chili pili cheela also has cards set in urban contexts and in situations more common in the daily life of small town and village communities. These cards introduce the child to a world they glimpse through the television and stories they hear from travellers and community people who have migrated to other locations. Some cards have clear fantasy content.
Chili pili cheela encourages self learning. The activity side of the card has icons which facilitates independent work by the user. The icons act as an indicator and suggest the kind of exercise required to attempt the activity.
Chili pili cheela was developed as part of the Language Development Programme (LDP) of the District Quality Education Programme (DQEP/Vidyankura). Collaborators in the LDP were National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), The Promise Foundation (TPF), and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, Karnataka). The development and field trials of the cards were funded by Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Karnataka and The Promise Foundation. Copyright for the 2007 version of the Chili Pili Cheela is jointly held by The Promise Foundation, National Institute of Advanced Studies and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Karnataka.
Shabda Maja Programme
Interactive activities improve levels of learning
This simple axiom has motivated the Shabda Majaa programme.
Shabda means ‘sounds’ and Majaa means ‘fun’. Together, Shabda Majaa Boards attempt to capture the fun that is possible when playing with sounds, words, stories, riddles, poems and other aspects of broader language.
A Shabda Majaa Board is first of all an attractive visual display on a selected topic. The topic may be a folk tale, a topical theme like ‘deepavali’ and ‘rainy season’, a serious theme like ‘electrolysis’ or ‘fashion’, or an exam theme like ‘chemical bonds’ and ‘modes of transport’. The central illustration is supplemented with reading materials tailored to the level of participating children.
Peer Learning
We have found children helping each other to access the material displayed on the Shabda Majaa Board and we therefore exploit this cooperative learning process in children’s engagement with our materials.
We have found the Shabda Majaa Boards to be a useful location for depositing a variety of learning activities. We do this by placing a series of activity packets at the bottom of the board. These activity packets have word cards, picture cards, story cards, teacher-authored books, child-authored books and, more rarely, commercially bought materials. The materials we place in these packets are developed to meet specific literacy-learning targets. These include word-building activities, concept matching activities, talk and discussion activities, narrative writing and publishing activities, and extended reading activities. An important target in the add-on materials with a Shabda Majaa Board is to promote inference making and deepen comprehension on the selected topic
Shabda Majaa in Resource-Poor Locations
The Shabda Majaa Boards are particularly effective when teachers are struggling with transacting the curriculum. These may be teachers who are also showing a lack of comprehension of child-focused methodologies and education philosophies (e.g., an activity-based textbook, a continuous and comprehensive assessment scheme). The Shabda Majaa programme appears to also be a visible and easy to understand teacher support system in schools where there is infrequent or absent mentoring of teacher in the new methods of teaching.
In contexts where there is a general passivity, and where education reform has not as yet brought about positive action, the Shabda Majaa Boards make change tangible in the following ways:
- These boards clean up the clutter on classroom walls, and force the posters unlinked to the ongoing lesson to be stored away.
- These boards stop the practice of placing posters out of the eye level of the child.
- The displays allow for a graded introduction of concepts.
- The displays and associated activity packs allow for independent learning opportunities for each child. Some teachers experience this as freeing up time to focus on those who need more targeted inputs.
We have found a particularly quick resonance to Shabda Majaa Boards from teachers who wish for a quality classroom environment but unable to put in the effort needed to do so.
Shabda Majaa Boards as Community Learning Spaces
We have found Shabda Majaa Boards to be a valuable focal point within a community. The Board becomes the place for children to congregate. In some places the boards are close to their play areas, and can become a playground board. These boards lend themselves to changing the literacy environment in the child’s neighbourhood.
The Shabda Majaa Board has been used in village areas and localities within towns where there are stable settlements with concrete constructions built over several generations. The Boards have also been installed within less stable settlements, such as the temporary shacks built for construction workers and their families. Children in these settlements are often left unattended. Infrastructure is also poor in these locations. The Shabda Majaa Board has allowed us to address the learning needs of these children. A sample programme within a shanty settlement has the following components:
- The interactive board includes materials designed to improve oral and written language such as stories well known to the children in the settlement. The stories are presented in picture form. This is supplemented with cards carrying the key words of the story.
- Once in 10 days, PAL specialists from Promise visit the settlement with new story material.
- The story cards are put in sequence and the illustrations are discussed , with vocabulary being the focus. Children attempt story telling in their home languages—Kannada, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Tamil—and the teacher attempts to rephrase the narration in English.
- Children of all age groups attend the sessions.
We have noted increase in children’s interest to learn to read and increase in awareness amongst parents, of the need to send children to school.
A Big Jump, a Big Change…
A first-level analysis of Shabda Majaa suggests that the programme:
- helps us go past an acknowledged road block to all children learning – that of encouraging interactive communication and independent practice.
- The boards remove a critical barrier to solving an important education related problem. There appears to be an ease in integrating the idea within existing school systems and within community spaces.
- With uptake from a variety of contexts being modest to high, the Boards have a potential for scalability.
- Similar to the challenges of infusing any teaching-learning materials into low-functioning school systems (e.g., flip charts, books for library), the Shabda Majaa Board needs to be supported with intensive training and sustained supervision.
- Finally, the programme is low in cost relative to supply of computer technology-dependent materials such as laptops and tablets.