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Aditi Mitra, Hamar Chinhari Welfare Society, IndiaAbstract
This paper is an attempt to explore, encourage and put to practice an inquiry-based learning methodology, in the rural and indigenous contexts of two villages in Chhattisgarh, in central India. Here, I, along with young women from the indigenous community work with young children in Open Learning Centers called “Srijan Shala” (translated as Abode of Creativity). The idea of birthing these mixed-age group learning spaces within the village was to place students in the womb of community “know-how.” However, the traditional and largely outdated methodology of delivering knowledge in a didactic form, has compromised the capacity to question and ask questions. Learning is still largely outcome driven and measured with the yardsticks of exams, assessments and marks. The child’s ability of constructing her own know-how and moves from sensory motor stage to concrete operational stage in a community-context – which has a rich repository of non-textualized know-how, to which the young of the community are active participants – is largely left out of the school context. As the rural schools in India, seek to replace this inherent inquiry based and cooperative know-how sharing in community-contexts with rote learning, memorization and overload of information, the urban elite schools are reverting to the pedagogy of inquiry. This necessitated us to reimagine the teaching learning methodology at Hamar Srijan Shala where curiosity and inquiry replace the predetermined content, shifting learning to the learners themselves. This paper attempts to bring forward a pedagogy where questions guide the imagination of what shall we learn today?
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Conference: PCE2026Stream: Teaching Experiences
This paper is part of the PCE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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