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July 16, 2007
About fractals and mountain-climbing
It’s now the beginning of my fourth week at Akshara. It seemed impossible at first, but I feel I’m starting to find a place for myself here. Reviewing literature on libraries worldwide gave me a chance to do what I feel comfortable doing – reading and synthesizing information – while following people to meetings and talking to them about their work, and leading an activity at the librarians’ training gave me the chance to do something a bit further out of my comfort zone. The result was a healthy balance of flexing old muscles and toning new ones.
Spending time with Akshara staff this week gave me a stronger sense of the supportive nature of their relationships, something I was not fully conscious of at the outset. Particularly on our trip to Ramnagar, it was clear that the group has an easy, nonjudgmental camaraderie about it that welcomes difference. Passion and thoughtfulness underly all of their work. In the U.S., there’s a separation between work and life, and I’m often surprised at people’s lackluster levels of efficiency. Here, as far as I’ve seen, people do an incredible amount of work with dedication and sincerity.
Outside of academia, there’s also a diversity of skillsets that’s entirely refreshing. In university environments, I find that I’m often drawing on a limited, one-dimensional set of competencies – problem identification, nuanced speech, reading, synthesizing, analyzing, writing. These, fortunately for me, are the things I’m good at, but there are other things I know I lack. Watching the easy eloquence of N’s training, the command D had over her audience, the effortless combination of sincere but dry information and lighthearted interludes, showed me how broad is the set of experiences and abilities that people at Akshara draw on in their everyday work. I got the sense that the organization gives people the opportunity to offer their whole selves, to be unique contributors, in an unusual and inspiring way.
I visited two libraries last week, one a tiny space with books hidden away in a closed cabinet, a row of computers, a few children playing carrom, and a quiet, somewhat aloof librarian; the other a warm and welcoming space. In the second library, the librarian, AU, showed me around the library and pulled out the projects her students had done. There was an astonishing creativity in the kinds of learning activities the librarians here had offered their students. I thought again about the incredible individual variation inherent in any educational program. Because teaching requires a spark of individuality, there’s a way in which it can’t be assessed according to a uniform standard. And yet it’s often clear, on the ground, when it’s working and when it isn’t.
It’s that wild card, that element of mystery in the filtering process of any supervisory structure, that presented a challenge to the math program this past week. The intuitive ingeniousness of the math curriculum, as A explained it to me, inspired me deeply – I wonder, in fact, if its style of teaching will have benefits for children far beyond the sphere of the results on their math tests. Yet the frightening part was that it was so difficult to know whether the program was really “remedial.” Multiple students who had, block coordinators suggested, simply copied answers from the board, scored perfectly on the baseline assessments, disqualifying them from the remedial program, even though retesting would show that they were only able to answer one or two questions. It suggested that teachers might not want the programme in schools. If teachers are the ones who bring life to this curriculum, and teachers are the ones who don’t feel invested in its purpose, I have trouble imagining that any results from this program will be reliable.
I’ve found myself thinking often about my friend Santiago, a Buddhist mathematician turned educationist, and his frequent reference to fractals over the year I studied with him at Harvard. Santiago spoke of the alienation that Marx talks about, the process by which super-specialization separates decision-making from ground realities, reflection and action become separate. Fractal structures for him represented an alternative way of organizing communication. Each level of the fractal is an exact replica of the whole; each individual understands the society just as each society understands the individual. Hierarchies are collapsed, and there is communication and inquiry across all levels. What this requires is skill-building and dogged communication.
What would teachers in Bangalore need in order to be invested in the math program such that they see the whole as well as their role within it? And how can Akshara mobilize teachers (and ultimately, communities) around educational improvement so that they are contributing their ideas with the same passion that Akshara ignites at the leadership level? It seems to me that this is the crux of the philosophy behind KLP, the leap of faith that distinguishes it from other programs, its biggest challenge but its biggest promise.
Posted by gowriv at 12:07 PM