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For many reasons, it is essential that we get education right:
- Children spend a large percentage of their most impressionable years in school. Not only are their opinions about themselves, their friends and their place in the world shaped here, but their experience in the classroom forms the bulk of their childhood on a day to day level. Are they happy going to school? Are they learning as much and as well as they can?
- Children learn what they live. Are we teaching them to be creative and loving? Are we showing them by our actions how to be kind? How to accept others as they are?
- We are depending upon children who are in school today to run the world tomorrow. Are we preparing them for the task? Are we teaching them to think? Will they be ready for the challenges of the 21st century?
The Foundation runs a number of educational outreach projects including:
- Modules for B.Ed students: because the next generation of teachers have to be able to teach ALL the children in their classrooms
- Training for classroom assistants: because any class with 45 - 60 children in it needs more than one person to keep it all running smoothly
- In-service training for mainstream teachers and special educators because activity-based learning and non-violent behavior management have to be part of every teacher’s philosophy and skill package.
- Workshops for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan coordinators because they need to understand that integrating children with disabilities requires a special approach
- Intensive training for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan resource teachers: because they need to be equipped to serve as advocates for children with special needs in district primary schools
- Small, interactive seminars for school principals/boards of governors: because important opinion-makers need informed opinions.
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Outreach to students is one of our favorite activities. Beginning in pre-school and moving right up to college, we enjoy working with young people just starting to explore the world and their place in it.
In the early years, we do workshops which look at and celebrate differences – helping kids to see that it’s ok not to be just the same as everyone else, that variety is what makes life exciting and fun.
As kids get older and more able to consider issues of acceptance and exclusion, we do workshops designed to help them experience disability from the inside – to see what it might be like to have a visual handicap or a hearing deficit; to know what it feels like not to understand what everyone else can grasp without difficulty. And finally, we do career workshops – to encourage youngsters to consider working in the field of rehabilitation. Because this world we inhabit is too wonderful to keep to ourselves!
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