The Evolution of Children’s Literature as Learning Materials – A Personal Journey

Subir Shukla

In the beginning

In 1986, I began working in Eklavya to develop and field test a primary stage curriculum appropriate for children in government schools. It naturally led to exploring the children’s literature that existed at the time (in English and Hindi) and looking for ways in which it could be used best with children. It soon became clear that:

• Despite having a very rich collection, there was very little material (other than books from NBT, CBT and a few ‘classic’ publishers) that could be considered child-friendly – that is, created and designed keeping in mind children’s ages, developmental stages and context. Many had very poor print quality too, with the ink rubbing off on to your hands (and hence actually toxic for children). 

• There was a plethora of myth and religious stories, or ‘moral’ literature whose purpose was to edify and ‘mould’ children into desired moral beings. Often stories would begin with what they were going to teach: ‘Children, greed is a really bad quality, and to explain that I’m going to tell you this story of….’

• There were plenty of ABCD type of books or garishly produced fairy tales, ripped off from some source that was never mentioned.

• Other than NBT and CBT books, none of the other publishers paid much attention to illustration and design. Font sizes were desperately small, with little relief for the eye.

• The few children’s magazines that existed were mainly full of stereotypes, anthropomorphic versions of animal tales, again with the morality that was often acquired through some violent consequence of giving in to one’s desires.

Overall, it was a grim and depressing scenario. What was missing in much of the literature was to see the world from the child’s perspective, or the effort to enable her to see things differently by engaging her in a process that encouraged reflection. Certain forms were generally absent or much less in evidence – whimsy, fantasy, nonsense or sound-based texts, and drama. Creative non-fiction, too, was comparatively rare. The situation was better in Bengali and Marathi (in which some of the great writers of literature for adults also wrote for children) but as I needed to work mainly with Hindi (and to some extent English), it was disheartening.

One aspect that seemed to be completely missing was that of trying out draft material with children. That is, field testing or getting children’s feedback in order to re-work and refine emerging material for children, including stories, poems or other forms. It thus fell to me to test the literature that existed, for suitability for its use in the textbooks we would create. Within the first few weeks it was apparent that there was a very limited number of works that could be effectively used with children. An overwhelming amount of dull and didactic material dominated the few that made and effort to connect with children.

While the NBT and CBT books were useful in generating oracy, they did pose a problem in that children from the poorest sections of society, including those in the tribal area where I was located, could not always connect with the visuals or the contexts presented. When it came to introducing literacy, it was worse – most available literature did not lend itself to use in our emerging curriculum and textbooks that would be field tested. Texts that tried to be ‘simple and easy’, usually by not using ‘matras’ ended up sounding distorted or extraordinarily insipid and off-putting, making it more difficult to teach children. E.g. – अमर उठ, घर चल, पानी पी, मत रो....  One of the keys to generating literacy is that if the material you struggle with is promising – that is, it arouses curiosity or holds relevance or feels like it is going to be interesting, fun or worthwhile – then the effort is worth it. Instead, we had material that was actually deterring children by being boring, disconnected and irrelevant, thus defeating the very purpose of trying to introduce literacy.

Creating the new

This then led to the situation where, over the next six years, I ended up creating or adapting – and field-testing – hundreds of texts across various genres for different age groups. Of these, around 200 emerged as ‘successful’ with children – that is, they loved (and demanded) listening to these again and again, or would happily engage with their written form or try to extend their own efforts into the exercises included and, most satisfyingly, even be heard singing or narrating these on their own, after school hours. A great deal of such material found its way into our textbook, Khushi-Khushi, for classes 1-5.  Despite the fact that it was printed in black and white and had only line drawings as illustration, children loved to carry these books around with them, in the fields or sitting on a buffalo’s back.

Some lessons I learnt from these years of creating and field-testing material are as follows.

• Children love sound based materials or pieces that involve word play, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. (For instance, the poem एक था खटखट, बहुत ही नटखट, or the rhyming story छोटा सा मोटा सा लोटा, now in its 20th edition as an NBT publication. Surprisingly, there was not enough of this, and much of it needed to be created.

• While adults may not be able to relate with ‘nonsense’, children do. They seem to understand it intuitively and connect with it quite well. 

• Children love it if they are able to participate in a story by responding or adding something. In poems that they can easily extend, their excitement and participation is really high. For example, the poem क्या है काला, क्या है सफेद or पांव अगर पंखे के होते.

• It is important that children and their lives are represented in the literature. Tribal children or children who ‘don’t wear shoes’ – their world and their perspectives must find place. Thus a story about a child who’s gone with a bullock cart across a forest to buy fodder, or about looking for root vegetables in the hot period after the monsoon (when the earlier crop has been consumed and the next one is not yet available), or not having clothes to wear to school because there’s only one dress and it’s not yet dried – would foreground the world children knew, but would also prepare them with the literacy skills to unpack other worlds that were less familiar.

• Action matters, in poems and stories. It was incredible how much literature spent far too much space on description and not enough on action. Thus a poem about a हरे रंग का तोता would focus on what the parrot was like, instead of what it did. This made it difficult to visualise or communicate through actions and gestures in a class full of children whose first language was not Hindi. And it was also difficult for illustrators to show!

• Children can think and debate on what stories contain. Grey works better to generate moral-ethical understanding than black and white, especially when children themselves have to figure out which options are the right ones to take. For instance, in a story on बन्नो का चांद, about a little girl who laughs at the moon, hurting it so much that he goes away to the night (and is still there!), children were able to argue that it’s OK for friends to tease each other and the moon need not have run off in a huff.

• Coincidences are unsatisfactory ways of characters attaining their goals, and make the lessons learnt seem even more random. This tends to communicate a fatalist perspective, wherein you wait for your kismet to rescue you from whatever dire straits you find yourself in.

• Fiction and poetry work very well in subjects other than languages too. Stories involving aspects of science or maths or social science are quite successful, as long as they respect the requirement of being good children’s literature first and not message-dominant.

• Non-fiction is where children’s own fund of experience, environmental knowledge,  and the community’s knowledge heritage is best tapped. This works well if there are openings in the material where children can add from their own environment.

At the National Centre for Children’s Literature, NBT-India

This experience was of great help as I joined the National Centre for Children’s Literature (NCCL) at the National Book Trust, India in 1993, as Editor (Training and Promotion), under the amazing Mala Dayal. The Nehru Bal Pustakalaya series flourished and we were able to make significant improvements in what was published. The NCCL brought out a magazine for its Readers’ Clubs, with a country-wide appeal, deceptively called the Readers’ Club Bulletin – but actually containing high quality children’s literature in a variety of genres, again illustrated in black and white. The basic tenet was that it would speak with children rather than at them. Some of India’s biggest writers wrote for this, including Mahasweta Devi, Arup Dutta, Khushwant Singh, Pushpesh Pant and many others. However, even they were asked to revise or refine what they had written in keeping with guidelines for what made for age-appropriate, context-appropriate and child-friendly literature. A new benchmark was set for the kind of non-fiction made available to children. With some of India’s best illustrators chipping in, the black and white format was again very popular with children, as the large number of post-cards received from them showed. These learnings also carried through into writers’ workshops we organised in Odisha or the North-East or Punjab.

On the largest possible scale, across states

During this time (1994), when DPEP was being conceptualised, the MHRD would occasionally ask me to review research designs developed by the NCERT, e.g. for examining the readability of Indian textbooks. I was also asked to do a gender analysis of textbook contents (which showed appalling discrimination against girls, in the texts, exercises and illustrations). By this time, we had also put together in the NCCL’s library a collection of award-winning children’s books from across the world, many of which included material designed specifically for learning. This served to set the framework against which the textbooks could be seen, especially the children’s literature they contained.

What these exercises brought out was that:

• In a way, the ‘real’ children’s literature could be considered to be that which existed in textbooks. The stories, poems and non-fiction that these contained were the only children’s literature that an overwhelming majority of our children accessed, especially in rural areas. In fact, the largest print runs of children’s literature was (and still is) actually in the form of textbooks – often in lakhs of copies over several years whereas ‘best-selling’ children’s literature remains in thousands.

• The material that textbooks contained then was uniformly disappointing – age inappropriate, didactic, usually information dense, focused more on the needs of the subject than children, and representing only a middle-class universe.

• Stereotypes and prejudices abounded. Not only against girls but also the poor (e.g., ‘he was poor but honest’).

By the time I got the opportunity to work as Chief Consultant (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Textbook Development) in DPEP, it was clear that those creating materials for children needed not only inputs towards understanding the craft and the subject, but required an understanding of children and their world view, how they engaged with their environment and with learning, and the role of material in the process of their overall development. It was for this reason that textbook writers, who would also be creating or collating stories, poems and non-fiction texts were required to go through:

• A Visioning Workshop where they understood how children learnt, their contexts, and envisioned the qualities they would generate in them.

• Discussions on the beliefs and assumptions that inform our understanding of children and learning, and the implications of these for the materials we create.

• Exposure to some of the best children’s literature from across the world (here we got help from the embassies of many countries) and draw from these the kind of benchmarks they would set themselves.

• And finally, agree on and implement a process of testing what they created by spending time with children, narrating or reading out or giving the drafts to children to observe their responses and getting feedback from them.

This process would yield detailed guidelines and specifications for different kinds of texts for various age groups. Combined with inputs on the actual writing process, these efforts led to a dramatic impact on the kinds of texts that the textbooks developed in DPEP contained.

Implemented across more than 10 states, this process led to the development of some of the most interesting, child-friendly, best illustrated and well-designed textbooks. The field-testing experience provided authors a deep understanding of what was needed. For instance, after a number of stories were tried out with Class 1 and 2 children, it emerged that ‘high emotional content’ of relevance to children led to them asking to hear the story again and again, which then acted as a trigger to engage them in making drawings, doing role play, trying to read the text or identify words/letters, and even use ‘pretend writing’ to create their own stories emerging from this input.

Very often, it turned out that the ‘classic’ children’s literature of a state tended to contain stereotypes or discrimination, and violated other key principles. In comparison, ‘folk’ material, especially with its repetitive elements, was liked more by children and generated greater learning. Some states found that ‘tweaking’ existing (non-copyrighted) material was a good option, considering that writing new texts at the desired level of quality was not always easy. At the same time, for specific purposes such as generating literacy or an environmental understanding, it was better to create new material.

An important theme across states was to develop ‘contextualisable’ or ‘localisable’ material. Thus, Kerala’s EVS textbooks (1998-99) had exercises leading children to record information such that by the end of the year, each child developed a book about her own environment. In UP (2001-02), the class 3 Hindi textbook used a blank page as a lesson, where children could fill in any song they like and answer the questions on this ‘text’ given in the facing page (e.g. which are the rhyming words or verbs, when/where is this song sung, etc.). Gujarat (2012-13) made 'shell' books that could be completed only with district-specific material developed by local DIETs. All this was not always without its controversy. In Kerala, the introduction of a single line containing words from a tribal language led to an uproar in the state assembly. 

An aspect that often gets missed out is that these processes had an enormous impact on production. In many states local illustrators were selected and trained over months – and many of them still continue to contribute to material for children and have even won awards. The work with production personnel, including the staff of the state textbook presses (where they had them) created not only the ground for timely supply of material but also laid the grounds for India to be able to provide free textbooks. 

However, the best feedback came from Haryana after its new, integrated textbook Hanste-Gaatey had been implemented for a year in DPEP schools. Teachers working with the poorest children in reported: 'Earlier, when it rained, children would cover their heads with textbooks, but since these have come in, now they hug them instead.'

Why Digital Content May Be Its Own Enemy

Many of us are feeling gratified that we have now provided a great deal of digital ‘content’ to students of various levels. Apart from issues of access (who has a smart phone, whether the network speed is OK, etc), it is also important to realise that much of this content is about explanations, examples, depictions and assessment. In other words, not necessarily very different from what a fair number of teachers already do in class – and find students not paying attention, not learning and, if learning, not applying that learning when the situation demands. 

This is because the overall assumption is that it is a student’s duty or compulsion to pay attention to what the teacher is presenting. Shift this to digital content and it becomes even more apparent that an overwhelming amount of content just assumes that students need it. 

Well, they don’t.

Because the same or similar thing is in many sources and most of it fails to arouse the student’s interest. In fact, this is an extension of the problem that ed tech faces, that it is a solution in search of a problem. (The other word we have for unwanted solutions being thrust on us is ‘spam’).

So, if we want our content to be used because students want to rather than have to engage with it, here are a few things we could do:

1.     Try to make the question interesting rather than presenting answers (that is something students have to work towards, and use the hints and supports your material provides to come out with their own answers). (E.g., What is a good way to know how many times we blink our eyes? And incidentally, why do we need to blink?)

2.     Help students discover a world that appears to be different and interesting because the new things they are learning are applied to it. (E.g. Why does the marigold leaf help prevent a cut or abrasion on our skin from getting infected? / Did you know that there are more than 20 different kinds of bread that are baked in our tandoors, and that some of them cannot be baked without a specific kind of yeast? / This story happened to an individual who is completely different from all of us - yet we always feel that it could easily be our own story. How do you think the writer does this? // These are then followed by possible areas of information to be explored by the student and fill in a framework that adds up to an understanding of the learning objective at hand.)

3.     Create a reason for students to return to every instalment of your offering. (Tomorrow, we will talk about how these shapes were combined and used to make one of the most unique towers in the world.)

4.     Be humble. Know that the student can switch you off, look away, stop paying attention or look at something else even as you are presenting what you think is the most important thing for your student to know. You have to earn that attention. One way to do that is to stop trying to set the agenda and instead let the student decide what she wants to learn, how much and how quickly. In the days when schools ran ‘normally’, teachers noted students who had access to technology both in school and at home would be far more animated when using their own devices outside the classroom – because on those, they were setting the agenda. Can you design your offering in such a way that the student ‘invests’ in it by taking certain decisions about her own path and progress, which then makes her a committed stakeholder who wants to use your material? 

Coming out with engaging digital material is not rocket science – but giving up our general notions and buy-in into the mythical powers of ed tech is!

Do we even know what we assess when we assess learning?

‘It took me quite some time to get the little girl to let me know what was bothering her,’ said Prof. A. K. Sharma, the former Director of NCERT. The year was 2000 and he was telling me about an incident from a class 2 maths period in the model school in the NCERT campus. The teacher had just completed teaching children subtraction of two-digit numbers with ‘borrowing’, and he had found two children hesitating over the problems they had been given to solve.

The first, a girl, had made a ‘mistake’ as she had failed to borrow from the tens side. Being a grandfatherly and kindly figure, he was able to cajole the girl to speak up. Very softly, looking down and away from him all the while, she said, ‘We learnt in the moral science class that borrowing is bad.’

Reeling from this, he approached the other child, a boy, and discussed why he had not completed his work on the problem. After much exchange, the boy said, ‘But why should I borrow 1? I want to borrow 2.’

Taking part in a recent session on ‘error analysis’, I was reminded of Prof. Sharma’s advice to engage with children to understand their ‘errors’ rather than rely on their work on paper. In numerous assessment experiences since, I’ve seen children who are otherwise very competent falter because of an issue at home or a fight with a friend or because they are being bullied. In open-ended questions in language, teachers are hard put to identify if there really is an ‘error’ or if the child’s view is a valid, logical interpretation. (And asking only close-ended questions is hardly sufficient to understand children’s abilities.) It becomes even more difficult when it comes to children from marginalized backgrounds – as they encounter discrimination and even denigration (of their background, language or culture), they often resist by ‘not-learning’ or do not answer out of fear of being ‘disciplined’.

As the evaluation industry expands in the Indian context with more and more professionals taking in rigorous analysis of children’s responses and analyses of their ‘errors’, the tendency is to interpret these within the framework of the subject for which the test was conducted. But do we know what we really assess when we look closely at children’s responses? What if it’s not a maths or language issue but something else altogether?

What happens when you seriously try to empower children, teachers and community through large scale education initiatives?

The pervasive notion that 'nothing has been done in education in India' could not be further from the truth. In fact not only has a great deal been done, but its consequences have been faced over decades. In particular, what follows applies to introducing educational designs based on local context, using the experiences and strengths of the stakeholders, creating a situation where they play an active role in determining and implementing processes.

Though obviously much must have been done over the decades till the 80s, my experience ranges from mid-80s, when I was part of a team working on such classroom practices, textbooks and educational designs from 1986 onwards. Implementation of the programme called Prashika (Prathamik Shiksha Karyakram) focused on marginalised groups, with the team living in a tribal area as well as in a rural, deprived pocket and introducing the innovation in government primary schools. The work in Prashika was pathbreaking in many, many ways (integration of 5 subjects at the primary level, incorporation of multiple local languages, a hugely localised textbook/workbook that could only be completed with each child contributing, called Khushi-Khushi - still not matched anywhere, I believe). It provided hope that much was possible despite the difficulties faced and informed many of the later efforts that followed, both in the government and the NGO sector.

Later in DPEP - particularly Kerala, Assam, Karnataka, Haryana, UP, Bihar, TN, Nagaland and later with SSA Gujarat further work was done. Localised training, contexualisable textbooks (some really brilliant stuff still not matched anywhere - and that's a professional opinion), teacher determined assessment system, involvement of community knowledge, children constructing local histories / local environment books, peer learning and assessments, textbooks that would be 'complete' only along with a set of 50 district-specific books kept in the school library.... many, many innovative and large scale measures were conceived and actually implemented using a strategically developed implementation plan. 

In each first five states we were able to see 2-3 years of implementation, development of hundreds / thousands of teachers who implemented contextualised learning, a high degree of in-class practice backed by supportive, localisable material. These states changed their position in the national achievement surveys too, with Kerala rising to the top (it had been fairly close to the bottom before this, below Bihar in the first national survey). In the case of Gujarat, field testing was done in 630 schools, researched by MSU Baroda with very encouraging findings. 

However, as long as we were not visibly successful there were no problems. When change began to be visible on some scale and a palpable sense of energy was witnessed among teachers and communities, alarm bells began to ring. in each of these states, the powers that be - especially at state level, state institutions, administrations, political parties - found that this went against the command-and-control structures conducive to them being able to assert their authority. Schools didn't want to be told what to teach when and how - they had their own plans. Empowered teachers / school heads / even some VECs refused to kowtow to mediocre ideas or corruption oriented bosses - leading to huge conflicts all over the place. Unfortunately these never got reported, recorded or researched. The results were mass scale transfers, cases against state project directors who encouraged this (Kerala SPD was charge sheeted, Karnataka SPD given punishment posting in North Karnataka, Assam SPD sent to conflict zone during worst riots, Bihar SPD transferred to PHED and later kept without posting), the re-casting of State Resource Groups from those selected for tested capabilities to those stocked with ex-officio positions, the emasculation of the BRC-CRC structures from genuine teacher support institutions into data collection centres (believe it or not, we did have functional BRCs CRCs at one time!), the centralisation of powers away from the VECs and re-casting into SMCs with a different function, and major shift in recruitments away from districts to states (in one state the Education Minister held a Recruitment Mela in a stadium to personally appoint 3000 para-teachers). 

Interestingly, Prashika in MP faced a similar adminstrative backlash and was closed down.

Yes, like it or not, this is what ideas of empowerment through education come up against - and they fall short not because of lack of any purity in the idea itself or absence of rigour, but because after a point when it goes into implementation an idea is something else, and not its original pure self. You might look at the actual work and find it is not 'up to the standard' - yet when trying to create it for those who need education the most, other aspects need to be taken into account. Basically, empowering the weak is clearly seen by the strong as disempowering them - and the empire strikes back! One of the outcomes is that a few years later, it appears as if nothing has been done, and people gear themselves up to again come up with 'innovative' ideas, often weaker than might already have been tried, uninformed by the past.

HOW TO DISCUSS NATIONALISM WITH YOUR STUDENTS

Why do it

Whether on the TV or in newspapers or on social media sites – we are today surrounded everywhere by strong views on nationalism. Groups of people are getting angry and upset, calling each other names, being violent. Your students too are caught in this, though they may not fully be aware of it. They will be absorbing views from different sources, all of which may not be reliable. And they may end up adopting strong opinions (or even what you consider misguided ones) without giving them sufficient thoughts. For this reason, we have prepared a discussion guide. It is important that at this crucial time, when they might be making a choice, you, their teacher, reach out to them and help them think things through.

So here are some hints. Use them in the way they work best for you. Drop them or change them or add to them according to your need and situation.

Preliminary – setting the ground

For such a discussion, it would be best to prepare the ground gently rather than rush into it. Here are some questions you could ask.

1. Have you been hearing or seeing the news or reading the newspapers?
2. What are some of the big issues being discussed?
3. What have you read or hear about the ‘nationalism debate’?

Provide background

Briefly give a background to the issue. It is possible many may not have heard it or may not have a clear idea of what happened.

Discuss the  issue

As students the following questions. Make sure you get everyone’s views, especially those who often don’t speak up. [Some hints are given in the brackets.]

1. So what do you think it means to love your country? [taking care of the environment? Looking after those who are not able to take care of themselves? Singing patriotic songs? Joining the army? Being polite to others? What else? Especially in our daily lives, what do we do (or can do) to show our patriotism?]
2. What are the best ways to show your love for your country? [you can use the list from the previous question to identify 2-3 of the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ ways and discuss why students think they are the best.]
3. What are some of the things you would not do if you love your country? [e.g. spitting everywhere as it spreads disease, not dirtying or vandalizing the environment, not jumping a queue or try to take an undue advantage…]
4. Even in a family everyone is not able to agree on everything? Have you seen any example of this? What happens in such a case?
5. So if someone does no agree with you, is it a good idea to beat him or her up? Why?
6. What do you think are the best ways to deal with disagreement?
7. And what if on the issue of loving your country, someone says something you don’t find pleasant? What should you do?
8. What are the best ways of finding out more deeply why people think the way they think? And how can you use that to help them see things differently?

Afterwards

Of course, this discussion will not end here. Give students some materials to read. Organize one or two follow up events. Suggest that the students have their own discussion group and contact you for help if needed.

All the best!

Detention For Adults?

To all those who are convinced that the non-detention policy is harming education…

Children’s apparent lack of learning becomes an issue mainly because it is easy to see that they have missed out on something. The fact that at a younger age learning is very fast and that clear milestones are available helps us perceive this – and therefore apply all kinds of expectations, tactics, at times even coercion to ‘ensure’ learning – one such being the detention system which, many believe, is needed in order to maintain ‘quality’. By making children lose a year because we couldn’t ensure their learning (and blaming them for it), we feel we can generate the fear required to make them ‘serious’ and learn.

If we are convinced about this, why should it apply only to school education? What if we could lay out clear benchmarks for adults to learn and grow – in general as well as in the work they do. Certainly it is possible to have a life-long ‘curriculum’ with two-year benchmarks (over their entire careers, and even post retirement) for educationists and curriculum developers, teachers, HMs, government officials, managers, businessmen, fathers and mothers (and grandparents), journalists, artists, municipal staff, auditors, accountants, administrators, intelligence agents and politicians. What if there was a ‘detention system’ (in terms of not being allowed to be promoted or get a pay increase or being sent back to some lower ‘grade’)? Yes, in some government jobs there is an ‘efficiency bar’ and the supposed HR policies and internal competition are expected to sort this out. But do they?

Can we as a nation claim that we have, every year, demonstrated the improvement required to declare ourselves ‘promoted’ to the next level (whatever that is)?

And what happens when police are unable to reduce crimes, leaders are unable to ensure the welfare of the poor, systems are unable to deliver basics such as electricity / water / education / health, or societies are unable to get men to have basic respect for women?

Who should be ‘detained’?