'The results are amazing,' Nirmala says of using innovative ways of teaching. Credit:Damakant Jayshi

By Damakant Jayshi

KAVRE, Nepal – Nirmala Timilsina does not want to deprive her students of what she missed as a child — the joy of learning and discovering.

“We were very afraid of our teachers,” recalls Timilsina, a Grade 2 teacher Saraswati Secondary School at Badalgaon in Kavre district. “As such we were too timid to ask questions and would nod our head as sign of having understood what our teacher had said.”

But unlike Timilsina in the past, Laxmi Biswakarma, a fifth grader from the disadvantaged Dalit community, feels at home today in a school where most students and teachers are from “upper caste”. “I am not afraid of my teachers,” says the 11-year old. “They are wonderful and very helpful.”

Timilsina says when she started teaching, she used the traditional method of standing in front of the blackboard, facing the students and teaching, an approach that elicited hardly any response from those under her charge.

But an 11-day teacher training programme conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) with the help of district education office opened her eyes to new ways of engaging young minds. “Frankly, I was embarrassed over what I had been doing,” Timilsina recalls.

Her colleague Saraswati Sharma, a Grade 3 teacher, concurs. “The training opened avenues for us,” she adds. “Now my students do almost everything, I just provide an idea.”

For instance, students take turns in teaching their classmates or sharing anecdotes. This, both teachers believe, makes a student not only remember what they are taught but also gives them a sense of responsibility.

Both the Grade 2 and Grade 3 classrooms — as indeed other classrooms — are decorated with posters, charts and drawings. The posters and charts teach the virtues of being on time and cleanliness, lists duties of students, as well as features stories and poems written by them.

Timilsina, who had undergone yet another teacher training programme of two and half months, says she has explored more participatory approaches to teaching.
“I use fruits in a container to teach my students how to add and subtract,” she explains. This was not something she experienced as a primary school student. Even today, a number of government, and private, teachers still teach subjects in traditional “lecture” method.

Timilsina was pleasantly taken aback by the overwhelming response of her students to one of the exercises she had introduced: writing stories in groups after discussion.

“The results are amazing,” the teacher enthuses. The students in each group discuss the topic or idea given by the teacher, then the one with the best spelling capability writes it down and the rest in the group copy it on their exercise books.

Both Sharma and Timilsina say that many schools in the district have started to realise the importance of giving students a freer hand in charting out their course.

Other teachers have a bit of hesitation about the ‘new’ methods though, saying it can present challenges in how to effectively discipline students.

One “drawback of being child-friendly is enforcing discipline among students,” says teacher Upendra Koirala. Because corporal punishment is frowned upon and its use rare, some students take advantage of the “friendly atmosphere” in the school, he adds.

But any shortcomings – perceived or real – far outweigh the benefits that creative, engaged learning venues provide. With a smile, the school headmaster, Ramesh Kaji Shrestha says: “We will stick to the new approach.”