‘Majhya Gavcha Dhada' ignites young minds in Sangli ZP schools
Kolhapur: The
Sangli Zilla Parishad
's initiative to introduce contents of local importance in history, geography, finance and art textbooks for schoolchildren has not only helped ignite the young minds but also paid rich dividends in their learning process.
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The impact has been such that the ZP has now requested Balbharti (Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research) to consider adding blank pages in the textbooks so that locally relevant contents can be added by teachers in different districts of the state.
The Sangli Zilla Parishad has implemented '
Majhya Gavcha Dhada
' (Chapter On My Village) concept in its 700 primary schools. In a geography book, teachers included two Maharashtra-specific chapters and assessed the children's understanding.
The chapters included information on Lonar crater in Buldhana district, around 500km from Sangli. It was formed after a meteorite fell on Earth. The chapter also included information on the famous waterfall from Siddhewadi village.
An internal assessment of five questions showed that all students from Siddhewadi school could answer all the questions related to their local waterfall. But they could answer only a few questions related to the Lonar crater.
Sangli ZP chief executive officer Trupti Dhodmise, who had floated the idea a year ago and got all teachers to contribute, collected around 2,263 chapters, including poems, to activity-based descriptions.
"During my interactions with ZP schoolstudents, I found that children could not relate to things distant or something that they had not seen or felt. The outcome of the learning was not up to the mark. We then decided to run a small project, through which we made the students know about local things, their village and its history, local banks and famous personalities.
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They could easily understand and relate to the concept. This led to the idea of including relevant local information in textbooks," she said.
An example of the impact of this learning came from a chapter written by Vandana Sharad Kadam, a teacher from Kavathe Ekand village in Tasgaon tehsil, on the Quit India Movement of 1942. She included part of a historic march on Sept 3, 1942, that started from Tasgaon to support the movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.
Kadam said, "The students were thrilled to know the historic importance of the place they live in. They got inspired and wanted to know more about the freedom movement."
Similarly, a teacher wrote about a local numismatist. Eventually, the students met the coin collector to know about the hobby.
The ZP has prepared a model booklet on such lessons. An editorial board was constituted to guide the teachers in Sangli to prepare a model booklet.
The chapters are similar to the lessons in regular textbooks provided by govt. It has an author introduction, to-do activity, questions at the end, maps and pictures wherever required.
"We will request Balbharti to print four to five pages at the end of each textbook, where we can introduce chapters on local things written by our teachers," Dhodmise said.
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