Pre-Texts in India
In the 2018-19 academic year, Cultural Agents trained middle school educators at the CSI Girls Higher Secondary School, Coimbatore, India, in Pre-Texts to cultivate literacy, innovation and citizenship in their classrooms.
Role: Project Manager, Learning Experience Designer, Training Facilitator
Client: CSI Girls Higher Secondary School, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Lead Organisation: Cultural Agents Inc.
Learners: Educators teaching classes 6, 7, 8, and 9
Sector: K-12 Learning, Culture
The Brief
CSI Bishop Appasamy College of Arts & Science (BACAS) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, manages a number of primary and secondary schools in the city for children of low-income families to provide education for free (if studying in Tamil, the state language) or at subsidised fees (if studying in English, the language of all governmental and out-of-state job opportunities).
Over the years, the school management had noticed that students seemed distracted and unmotivated to learn in their classrooms. Even though they were regularly attending government teacher trainings programmes, teachers were not being able to engage with the students. In January 2018, BACAS approached Prof. Doris Sommer and Cultural Agents to bring Pre-Texts*- an arts-focused pedagogical protocol that has been implemented across the world, to their schools in Coimbatore.
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The brief given to us, was to help teachers make the curriculum more engaging, and to equip them with the skills to make their students happy and confident learners.
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*About Pre-Texts: Children and youth thrive when they read closely; the skill is basic to all forms of human development (social, cognitive, economic, health). Pre-Texts offers a means to do this. It’s simple, it’s flexible, it’s a protocol. Adaptable to any subject, Pre-Texts is an approach to crack open boring and intimidating content through art making and activities using local practices, like drawing, sculpting, singing, dancing, fashion, you name it. Teaching becomes easier, and learning, a delight. The classroom culture is democratised as students become accountable for each other, taking interest in one another’s creations, perspectives, and reflections. We’ve seen its success around the globe from Harvard to Latin America to Africa to China, in museums, law enforcement, and public health. And now we want to introduce Pre-Texts to India, where the ed space is quickly opening to alternative pedagogies.
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Read more about Pre-Texts on the website: https://www.pre-texts.org/
My Design Process
I joined Prof. Sommer's Cultural Agents team at Harvard University, MA, USA, as the Project Manager. Our first task was to procure funding that would enable us to travel to and manage the project in Tamil Nadu, India. We applied for and won financial support from the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard through their Seed For Change Competition.
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We then facilitated remote interviews with BACAS management, school leaders, and senior teachers at the schools to assess their needs in order to adapt the Pre-Texts protocol to their unique context.
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Up until now, Pre-Texts had run as a 5-day training programme, with the trainee group's Pre-Texts implementation being monitored by a Weaver- a trainee elected by everyone to coordinate with the group. The previous trainings were also with teachers who were already, to some degree, open to ideas and practices of learner agency and teacher autonomy to make curricular decisions. With the India project, we had to design around new challenges, including a teacher cohort that was more used to teaching from textbooks using rote-learning (memorisation), were burdened with teaching and administrative duties at the same time, and taught in an environment where power distance between students, teachers, and the administration were extremely high (making teaching to increase learner agency and democratic learning a challenge).
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We adapted our pedagogical approach to address these challenges, and designed an implementation plan in line with Indian cultural and education contexts. This included a pre-training informal tea with teachers to introduce ourselves and co-create training goals, complementing the five-day training with structured written resources, and a comprehensive post-training guidance and assessment model that would allow me to help teachers keep track of their growth and overcome any implementation challenges they may face. Deviating from the norm, we also pre-selected the Weaver. BACAS helped us select a retired teacher from the same community as the teachers to ensure they would look up to her, and be comfortable reaching out to her individually and collectively.
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We also designed strategic reading and arithmetic tests and a qualitative survey for students to assess Pre-Text's impact on student learning and agency in the classroom. BACAS helped us select the CSI Girls Higher Secondary School as the key school we would pilot the project with, along with another academically comparable control school that we could compare our assessments against.
Outcome
In June 2018, I travelled to Coimbatore, India, to implement the Pre-Texts training. 17 teachers enjoyed “playing” Pre-Texts, reading an excerpt from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (a complex text for the Tamil-speaking teachers to emulate the challenge students face when reading their textbooks). Encouraged to design activities based on the subjects they teach, the teachers employed math games, vocabulary hunts, and local songs to guide their peers in reading the text. On the final day, teachers designed prototype lesson plans to implement Pre-Texts in their classrooms. After an editing session, when they offered comments and suggestions on one another’s lesson plans, each teacher demonstrated a customised version of their Pre-Texts activities to the group to gain more feedback.​
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Here is a short report on our training in June 2018.
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Following the training, we spent another week to work with the Weaver to use our assessment material in observing and giving feedback to teachers implementing their prototype Pre-Texts activities with students in their classrooms.
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After returning to Boston, I had weekly calls with the Weaver for the next 3 months to answer teacher questions, and work with them to develop a lesson design framework that they could add information to.
Impact
The Pre-Texts in India project was met with its fair share of challenges. The participating teachers' administrative duties always took precedence over teaching, and the school's management offered the classrooms to local Teacher Training Colleges for trainee teachers to get in-class experience. With no consistent time with learners the teachers found it hard to implement Pre-Texts.
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However, seeing the students thoroughly enjoying themselves and learning more when Pre-Texts lessons were implemented, our Weaver adapted our programme and trained students to implement the pedagogy amongst themselves so they could help each other prepare for the upcoming exams. As our student baseline and end-line surveys and observation of school results demonstrated, students were not only enjoying themselves, but they also found themselves performing better in the school examinations. While in normal circumstances, it would have been quite challenging for teachers to transfer agency to learners, it was amazing to see how direct facilitation with learners hastened the democratisation process.
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Over the year, the Weaver also reported that the teacher cohort of the CSI Girls' Higher Secondary School had started collaborating with each other much more, helping each other take pedagogical decisions, and were more open to working with students to create peer-learning mini projects through the academic year.
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3 of the 17 teachers who attended our training are now certified by Cultural Agents to lead their own trainings with other teachers in BACAS' network of schools.
Our training was covered by the Deccan Chronicle newspaper.
A participating teacher presents her artistic representation of a character from the text.
Miming a metaphor from the text for others to guess.
Teachers solve a word puzzle from the English faculty's prototype Pre-Texts lesson plan to help her test its successes and challenges.
Teachers passed on their Pre-Texts training to students by asking them to create their own games to understand the textbook better.