Abstract
Dr Dhir Jhingran is the Founder & Executive Director of Language and Learning Foundation (LLF), a nonprofit focused on improving foundational learning of students through early literacy and multilingual education programs. LLF works closely with state governments in India to catalyse reform of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) at scale. Dhir has worked in the primary education sector for 30 years, within and outside the Indian Government. He has authored three books in primary education based on empirical research and has contributed to several books and journals. Dhir holds a master’s in Economics and a PhD in Education.
In this conversation, Prof. Shailaja Menon and Dhir Jhingran explore the complex territory of FLN reform in India, as shaped by policy changes over the past several years. FLN reform is very salient in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which has been followed by a guidelines document, NIPUN Bharat and the National Curricular Framework (NCF) 2022 for the Foundational Stage of Education. These policy changes have been guided by multiple influences, including internal reports of the distressing status of children’s reading and writing across the country; and contemporary global discourses on education that direct attention to a narrow focus on improving children’s learning outcomes. LLF has been navigating this complex terrain, with its promises and pitfalls for the past 8 years, even prior to the release of the NEP.
The intent of bringing this conversation to readers of CED is to alert them to the swiftly unfolding scenario of educational reform, in which state governments partner with organisations such as LLF to implement broad-based reforms in curriculum, in-service teacher education, materials development and learning outcomes. There are now multiple corporate players and NGOs involved in the field with differing perspectives and newer (and complex) ways of funding. How should we understand this space as it is unfolding across the country? We hope that this interview with one of the most experienced voices in the field will be of interest to our readers and will pique their curiosity to learn more.
But there are many challenges to this work, of trying to achieve so many things in a short time. For example, what do you do with children who are in the 3–6-year age group? While NIPUN Bharat and NEP include this age group in the ‘foundational stage’, in effect, the education of 3–6- and 6–8-year age groups are supported by very different kinds of administrative structures and educational discourses. As you know, the 3–6-year age group is supported by the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) system, while the 6–8-year age group is within the formal school system. But overall, I would say that there is a much stronger awareness and climate for supporting FLN in the country now. And, I think organisations working on foundational learning have found it easier to do bigger things with state governments over the past few years.
We began with a focus on continuous professional development courses and started by developing ‘blended’ courses (with online plus face-to-face sessions built-in). We found professional development programs to be a non-threatening way of entering into the public education space and working with governments. We knew that there is a dearth of good, high-quality professional development programs for teachers and teacher educators around FLN. So, we began with an 8-month course first, with teachers and teacher educators enrolling on a voluntary basis. Over time, the people who do these courses are able to support state governments as ‘resource group members’, who have the capacity to support their states with curricular material development, training other teachers and so on.
Later, state governments asked us to implement demonstration programs where all the concepts and practices for FLN that are being talked about in the courses could actually be grounded in a set of schools. And, that’s how our demonstration programs began, where we started with about 175 schools in Kurukshetra, Haryana, and 150 schools in Durg in Chattisgarh. The intent of these programmes is to be able to show how the government itself could implement FLN in a very efficient and effective manner at the district level.
Later, we added one more layer—what we call state-level technical support. We put together a team at the state level who could help in supporting development of new curricular materials, training programs, academic support for block and cluster people, good assessment practices and so on.
So, to summarise, LLF has three broad strategies. The first, continuous professional development continues to be an important pillar for us through a variety of short-term and longer-term courses, ranging from, as little as a 5-hour course, to a 1-year-long course for administrators, academic support people, teachers, District Institutes of Education & Training (DIETs) and so on. The second is the demonstration programs, which we are now doing in about 30 districts in the country. And the third is academic reform at the state level, where curriculum, training and assessment practices can get reformed over a period of time.
You had asked how the broader forces are shaping our interventions. It is true, as I mentioned earlier, that NEP and NIPUN Bharat have made it easier to negotiate a state-level partnership. But, there is often an exclusive focus on improving learning outcomes quickly because the NIPUN Lakshyas (goals) are being used to set targets for learning outcomes of children for the next 2–3 years. And we, as partners of state governments, do get sucked into this. So, for us, it’s an internal struggle to try and see how we could meet the expectations of programs like NIPUN Bharat, knowing fully well that changes come slowly, and deep-rooted teaching practices will take time to change. We have decided to bite the bullet and be there and support the governments. But, we are doing this with our eyes wide open, and there could be a mismatch between expectations and what the reality is. And, we’ve got to straddle both for some time.
And that is a big challenge for us. If we’re starting something new, and we want transformation in practices—‘transformation’ is a big word, but let’s say that we want some major shifts in classroom practices, then the training really has to be effective. Some states are telling us that the answer is to just have an online program for teachers so that all teachers get the same ‘content’. But there are a lot of the changes that we are trying to bring about in beliefs, attitudes and long traditions of practices—and a purely online program is not going to help with those. Perhaps online programs can be a supplement for some aspects of teacher education, but will not be the only answer.
We also struggle with the number of days of in-service training available per year. There is a push to have shorter training programs, but we know that that’s not going to be enough to bring about meaningful change.
We try always not to make ‘perfect’ the enemy of ‘good’, and therefore try to live with solutions that are probably not the best, but they are the best that we could make happen in those circumstances.
Also, even if we add classroom visits, monthly meetings and other kinds of academic support, even then, the time available for dialogue is very limited.
So, I think pre-service teacher education is a big gap area. It’s not that people haven’t tried, we ourselves have tried to work in two states (Chattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh) and some good curricular material has been developed by LLF for working with pre-service teachers. I think the challenge is that only about 10% to 15% of pre-service teacher education happens within the government system. Therefore, even if we prioritised working with DIETs for pre-service teacher education, the outcomes will still be very limited. It is true that State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) could influence the curriculum and resource materials even for private institutions; they do have that mandate. But somehow, we haven’t had too much traction with working with SCERTs on that. So that’s a big gap area!
Another aspect to this that we are witnessing in some states is that there are too many NGOs working with the state, with sometimes incompatible approaches! For example, we just started working in a district that I won’t name, and when we entered into an agreement with the state, we thought that there was no other NGO working there. But we found three organisations already there with some local district-level agreements, and our work wasn’t at all convergent with theirs. So, I think there is a risk of this NGO participation not being harnessed properly.
The other challenge is that while states and NGOs are collaborating, there is a limitation on the state system’s capability to actually implement the transformative models, which some of the organisations working there want.
So, some of these collaborations may not bring about the most effective results. That’s a risk we take in entering into these partnerships.
I think the state governments have a big role in deciding and guiding NGOs—about what their roles should be, rather than allowing them a free run to do what they want. I think this kind of guiding, harnessing, channelising and convening role of the state governments has been a little weak in some states. So that’s one risk.
And, the other risk is that many of these organisations, even us, we come with funding from different sources, which may have a short-term horizon. Therefore, some organisations may be interested in showing quick results because your corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding is for a year (here, I should say that LLF never accepts 1-year funds, we always ask for three- to 5-year funding). But, we are all under pressure for showing quick results to our funders. And, it sometimes also suits the state governments because they’re also in a hurry to show results. And, the focus, as I mentioned earlier, is just on improving learning outcomes. That’s what the funders require. That’s what the NIPUN Bharat program, for example, aspires to do. This is important, of course, but we also know that sustainable change will come about only if classroom practices begin to change and change in ways that sustain. Sustainability is a core issue.
Also, there could be a risk for organisations that are working too closely with the government to get co-opted and do whatever the government requires to be done, even if the organisation knows it’s not the best way to go about doing things. I think it’s up to organisations about how they balance these risks, where they compromise, where they take a stand and say, ‘No, this is not acceptable’.
Then, of course, there are organisations like UNICEF and foundations like Tata Trusts, or the Gates Foundation. They’re able to look at a broader time horizon and support system change kind of initiatives.
There’s a new kind of innovative financing mechanism that’s come up in recent years, which is the ‘pay for results’ or ‘Impact Bond’ model. Their focus is exclusively on improving student learning outcomes. The funders are not concerned about classroom processes as long as learning outcomes are improved. But, in LLF’s discussions with some of these funders or impact bond investors, we’ve been able to negotiate and suggest that it is important to include some system-strengthening outcomes. Key performance indicators (KPIs) related to system-level changes will be included in such funding to see how the system is adopting some of these practices and getting strengthened.
And, then the other player is The World Bank. Recently the requests for proposals (RFP) which were issued by the World Bank for Andhra Pradesh, Tripura, Chhattisgarh and Nagaland seemed to be a little prescriptive to us, adding another dimension to how FLN and teacher professional development is rolling out.
So, it’s a situation where there are many sources of funding, not all talking to each other, not all talking to what are longer-term requirements of the FLN space. But, I think if the organisations are strong enough, then it’s a great opportunity to channelise these sources of funds towards objectives that are not just short-term. It goes without saying that organisations and state governments should take stand about what they would like to see happening over the next few years.
Now, on the other matter of sustainability of education, we believe that two things are very crucial. One, that institutions are involved from the very beginning because they are the ones which continue on, and many of these institutions, as we know, SCERTs and DIETs are currently not strong, but they have institutional memory. Of course, many of them also tend to forget what’s happened earlier. But, it is important to work with institutions, that’s very crucial.
And, the other essential component for sustainable change is to focus on change in classroom learning and teaching practices that can get internalised deeply. Rather than focus on the specifics of what is on a given page of this teacher handbook, or what are the exact steps to be followed in a lesson plan, our interventions in training workshops should be about how do you change the way you work with children? In language, for example, we could focus on how to have extended conversations with children, or on how to ask higher-order questions. What we have seen in our limited experience, for example, in Haryana, is that if we try and promote some of these deeper practices, they tend to get adopted and become, almost, norms over a period of three to 4 years. Teachers are beginning to have slightly higher expectations of children, they ask questions that encourage children to voice their opinions, wait patiently for them to express themselves, or respond in a manner that allows for some kind of a conversation. So, I think what’s very important is to understand what sustainable change could look like in the classroom, which will obviously result in improved learning, but also in a more well-rounded development of the child. This is something that we’ve tried to pursue, but I think we also are not doing it too well.
We follow what’s known as the ‘simple view of reading’, which suggests that there are two big strands that we need to attend to in early literacy development—language comprehension and word recognition.
And, our focus is on two or three different things. One, to promote children’s orality as they come into school, and to ensure that children are able to express themselves. We wanted a lot of oral language and comprehension work that was rooted in children’s contexts and experiences to happen in our classrooms, discussions and so on. And, we did that by actually assigning a time for it every day. That’s not the best way to do it, but we knew that if there is a kind of 30-minute slot where the focus will be almost exclusively on oral language, and if that slot is mandated by the state, then it’s going to happen.
We also wanted that children should get adequate scope for emergent literacy in the initial years at school, at least, where they’re able to sort of pretend-read and draw and scribble and write in the manner they want to.
The other aspect that we dealt with was the systematic teaching of decoding skills. The idea is that you follow a set of activities to introduce children to fixing symbol-sound associations, and blending them into words, so that children can read words fluently through a set of sequenced systematic activities.
And then, of course, we were surprised to see how little ‘reading by children’ actually happens in Indian classrooms! When we say ‘reading is happening’, typically it is the teacher reading the textbook aloud to the children. So, just trying to ensure that children get opportunities for reading using simple texts, which may not be there in the textbooks, was a focus. We created very simple graded ‘decodable’ texts, which children could practice reading at their own levels and by moving on from one level to the other over time, improve their decoding skills while reading texts.
The fourth area that we emphasised was that all reading is associated with comprehension work. So, there is no reading that can happen without a discussion that builds higher-order comprehension.
The last aspect of our programme is a focus on writing. Most writing in Indian classrooms, as your research has also pointed out, is around copywriting. Therefore, we focused on introducing at least some composition elements, from the beginning, so that writing is not seen as just copywriting.
So, these are the four or five elements that we say are important elements of ‘balanced literacy’ that need to be emphasised in early language and literacy classrooms.
We’ve tried to formalise our programme into what we call a ‘Four Block Approach’. There are other Four Block approaches around the world, but in our version, we try to ensure that there is oral language work happening every day; some systematic decoding practice; some work around different kinds of reading (read-aloud, shared reading, independent reading); and writing, which must include some compositional efforts, including emergent writing by the children.
All of us know that the gold standard is that of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTBMLE), which recommends that the child’s language be used as the MoI for a minimum of 5–7 years. And, it’s true that once you build a strong foundation in one language, the transfer of many of these capabilities can happen to other languages. We’ve all learned about the research on this, of course. But, MTBMLE programs have remained ‘boutique’ programs across the world, and also in this country. Odisha has the one surviving MTBMLE programme in our country, which has run for over 20 years now. This is a government-led program in 21 languages, but it covers only 1,500 schools.
At LLF, we’re looking at, how do you address the issue of inclusion of children’s familiar languages formally in teaching and learning at scale, which is most important. And, for that, it’s important to understand that in India, as in most other countries in the region, there are very complex sociolinguistic situations and also speech patterns that are very fluid and change over short distances. It’s even difficult to provide a language label to what children speak in an area! Someone would call it Garasia, someone will say it’s a dialect of Wagdi, and so on. So, we don’t even have clarity on the language label to attribute to a child’s speech!
And then, in a classroom, there could be children with multiple first language backgrounds—so there are varied and complex situations.
Therefore, this kind of clean solution of, ‘Let’s make this language as the MoI for 5 or 7 years’—is practically very difficult to do. Also, often there is little acceptance in the community and the government for introducing local languages as MoI.
So, at LLF, we’ve taken a more pragmatic approach. And, I know that language purists (and that includes me!) believe in MTBMLE. Advocates of multilingual education would not be happy with this. But I think our focus is on figuring out: how do you help a large number of children to get away from a very alien environment of a completely unfamiliar language at the beginning of school? So, we follow a kind of ‘transition’ approach. Initially, a lot of development of the child’s first language (L1) happens. We work on storytelling, use of poems and big books in conversations, higher-order comprehension tasks and expression work by children in L1. This is because we know that if the children’s L1 is not used, then the classrooms are either going to be silent, or children would respond in one-word answers to literal questions. We tell teachers that they should encourage children to use the local language, the familiar language and if children have to express themselves, or if a new concept is being taught, it must be initiated first at L1. Initial decoding is also started with familiar words from the child’s language.
Now, the question of which script to use for languages that do not traditionally have a script always comes up. So, what we advocate and we’ve managed to do is to use the script of the regional language that is being used as the official MoI.
Alongside that, we slowly start developing simple vocabulary of the less familiar language, let’s say Hindi in this case, in a systematic way. We use big books, the same stories that were initially read aloud and discussed in the child’s L1 are also used in Hindi. So, children start establishing equivalence, and the teacher supports the children in picking up, say, 100 or 200 words of Hindi. These words can then become the basis for basic conversations and storytelling and understanding simple story texts.
Unfortunately, the textbooks (in the regional language, say Hindi) are still much more difficult for children who have started to pick up some conversational Hindi. So, this has to be mediated with some texts that are simpler for children to understand in the unfamiliar language.
So, in most cases, we’re not advocating for changing the official MoI where we work. But, we bring in L1 formally and as a part of the curriculum, design for a lot of oral language work and also initial decoding. And, L1 continues to remain in the classroom for all higher-order work, expression by children, new concept introduction, and of course, as a scaffold, to negotiate the unfamiliar or less familiar school language.
We supplement this with extensive use of local contexts and children’s experiences—because if the context and content is familiar to children, then it’s easier to pick up an unfamiliar language.
And the last part is that we encourage the use of mixed language in the classroom. We don’t call it ‘translanguaging’, we don’t call it any big names, but both teacher and children are encouraged to mix languages in order to comfortably communicate. This has been a difficult thing for us to convince teachers and the education system about because everyone wants ‘pure’ language use in classrooms. But this is something that is core to our model, our belief that a mixed language use is not harmful. Children’s languages do not get corrupted, they’re able to distinguish, and as they learn and grow, the teacher is going to encourage more use of the standard language.
Then, of course, the principles of balanced literacy instruction will continue even in such scenarios.
And the last thing we do is to delay certain assessments in the unfamiliar language—for example, oral reading fluency (ORF). The expectation that children by the end of Grade 3 will read 45 words correctly per minute needs to get delayed. So, this is an ongoing negotiation that we try and have with the districts and the state governments, that getting the ORF up will obviously take time, because children don’t even have basic language comprehension initially. So, yes, it’s difficult, but this is the approach that we have adopted for dealing with multilingual scenarios.
On parental aspirations—we did not find it too difficult in Baster and South Rajasthan to convince the community that children will learn better if they begin with their own home language at school. Of course, as I said earlier, we are not saying that we’re going to change the MoI, we’ve not even attempted that. It’s easier to tell parents and the community that if your language will be used in the classroom, children will understand better and do well at school. Right now, when you look at their workbooks, you’ll see that they’re not writing anything, they’re not understanding anything. This helps parents understand the rationale for the use of home language in the classroom.
But, because the aspiration is for English and in all the states, English teaching begins in Grade 1, I think we need to launch a very good program throughout the country for helping teachers and children learn English—without having to start English literacy that early, that is! Parents are really happy if the child is able to pick up some English vocabulary and speak a few sentences. A good way of learning a second, really unfamiliar language, is to use a lot of simple words, simple commands and conversations. This requires, of course, that teachers also build some proficiency in English. At present, teachers teach ‘A for Apple, B for Ball’, because they cannot really provide a language-rich environment in English.
Therefore, in addition to the balance between the use of children’s familiar language and the official MoI, a good multilingual strategy would include a good English teaching program with sound practices of second language teaching that helps children with an oral understanding of English and oral fluency but delays literacy in English at least until Grade 3.
In terms of LLF’s work, we have focused on the inclusion of children’s L1 in the early grades and in transitioning them to the language in which the textbooks are written, the language in which children are going to learn everything in future. And, in the midst of figuring out those parts of the puzzle, we have not done any work on English until now.
But, I think there are two or three things that are problems as far as looking at 3–8 years as a continuum goes. As you know, there is a structural and administrative issue that separates these age groups because they are administered by entirely different governmental departments. So, to call it a seamless continuum is not making any sense to anyone at the state level or even, at the district level or the school and Anganwadi level. For example, the Ministry of Women and Child Development has an ECE curriculum; and NCERT has prepared a different curriculum for the same age group. The curriculum for the 3–6-year age group is likely to now flow from the NCF for the Foundational Stage. It looks like the education departments believe that they have the responsibility of creating a curriculum for the 3–8-year age group—but, without having the experience of having worked on ECE for any extended period of time.
States are trying to create a ‘Balvatika’ program at least for the 5–6-year-olds within the education department’s schools and also in places where there are co-located Anganwadis on the same campus. They are trying some different ways through which the school teacher teaching Grades 1 and 2 can also work with children who are in the Balvatika age group. They can either bring those children to the Grade 1 classroom for a couple of hours or provide some guidance to the Anganwadi teacher to support these older children.
All this is very complex because in many states, 5-year-olds are already in Grade 1! A few states, like Haryana, are slowly trying to make the age of entry into first grade as 6 years.
You asked about downward extension of the Grade 1 curriculum into Anganwadi. But, the flip side of it would be if Grades 1 and 2 change to include free, guided and structured play, ensuring active engagement and so on. Balvatika classes should not reproduce the same formal instruction practices that teachers use in Grades 1 and 2. Teachers who begin to teach in this pre-primary class need to get a separate orientation. In fact, the very same early childhood education practices should be adopted by teachers in Grades 1 and 2. This ‘deformalisation’ of early primary grades is an urgent need.
I’m not very hopeful about the two departments and systems coming together. I was in the Ministry of Education in 1996. The same things were being discussed then, as today. There are limitations with working with the Anganwadi system because the Anganwadi worker is not a teacher. She gets an honorarium, and she has to provide six different services, of which ECE is just one. We are not agreeing to provide an additional teacher or a worker to Anganwadis. So, I don’t know how much can come out of that system. But, I think in the school system, if we use this as an opportunity for real transformation of early grades and by adding a Balvatika for the 5–6-year-olds, with teachers who from pre-service education itself are required to get a separate certification to work with young children—that is something that I would definitely want to happen.
Many NGOs, including ours, get into doing things very quickly, trying to get quick results. Also, some of us may not be very sound on some of the principles that underlie what we are trying to promote, and on what must not be compromised. We also tend to give teachers fairly prescriptive practices to work with. Is this what we should be doing? Is what we are doing adequate? What more should be done, or what could be done differently?
To take an example, there is some funding that’s available at present for creating and revising textbooks and workbooks in many states. I’m sure we could really gain from the understanding of academics who work on curriculum theory, or those who work in teacher education. People working in NGOs could do with a much deeper understanding, brainstorming and reflection with people who have studied these areas formally.
While it is important that NGOs reach out to academia, it is equally important that it happens the other way around.
I think, today, there is greater awareness of the importance of FLN and a big focus on learning outcomes. I think some good children’s materials are being developed, better workbooks and graded reading material are in classrooms today, print-rich environments, as compared to what existed, say 5 years ago. So, these are the initial gains that are happening.
Even in states where some comprehensive work on FLN is happening in all the dimensions—on developing better materials, training of teachers, providing academic support to teachers, better assessment practices, reviews by administrators and so on—what we’ve seen is that at most 60% of the teachers tend to adopt some good practices that are more appropriate for FLN. My hope is that in every state, there could be blocks or areas where comprehensive FLN practices start to get more entrenched, and a larger proportion of teachers adopt them. Perhaps the number of schools, and the number of locations where this is happening, could multiply in the next few years.
In terms of problems, there are several. A few we have discussed already. I feel over time the focus on FLN could get diffused or reduced, as compared to the present momentum we have. Teachers’ involvement in non-teaching tasks or tasks that are not core to teaching has not reduced…and that is a worry! Also, the teachers’ burden of reporting information has actually increased after the new FLN initiatives. So how do we get a teacher to focus on improving their teaching?
Everyone wants to accomplish 100% target set by documents like NIPUN Bharat. I look at dashboards from several state governments—and every cluster and block is being asked to attain 100% targets, 99% is not good enough. So that’s a very worrying trend.
One of the fallouts of the focus on assessments under FLN has been the large number of census-style assessments that are centralised. They are becoming more common now. I don’t know how collecting and tracking learning data of all children at the state level can really help improve what happens in individual classrooms. On the contrary, this is undermining the use of classroom formative assessments.
Funding from philanthropy is focused on improving learning outcomes and these are reported mostly as mean scores. My worry is that this mean-score-reporting will gloss over disparities and take the focus away from promoting more equitable learning.
There are many more problems, but I do think that some good results will come from all this—as long as we don’t see it as something to be completed, done and dusted in 3 years’ time!
I think a focus on children’s learning is very important. But, it’s also very important to realise that children will not learn unless several other things change. This shortcut to improving learning outcomes through continually assessing children and hoping that their learning will improve is a big challenge out there. Today, there are states and districts that are saying that we will declare schools as having already achieved NIPUN Bharat outcomes! So, while a focus on learning is important, quickly saying that we have reached there and that all children have achieved target learning outcomes, that’s a big risk.
I think it’s all of us, the ecosystem, who should consistently signal that it’s a long road, and it’s important to look at how teaching and learning happens in classrooms. NCF encourages us to focus on the active engagement of children in the classroom, so that they are not just achieving academic learning outcomes, but also developing holistically. And therefore, to your question, I think it’s important that there is a very clear agenda of how classrooms change, a very clear vision for change in terms of behaviours and practices, alongside a focus on learning outcomes. It can’t be just one without the other!