NEW DELHI: K Subrahmanyam, a physical education teacher in a government high school from Vizianagaram district in Andhra Pradesh, has been teaching for over a decade. But when he returns to his school after a short visit to the national capital this week, his outlook on teaching will most certainly have changed.
Subrahmanyam, like 81 other school teachers across the country — mostly working in government schools - attended the first ‘South Asia Science Education Programme’ organised by CERN, the European organisation for nuclear research. “The teaching in the country is largely about delivering lectures and demonstrating in classrooms. But here we realised the importance of igniting minds of students and making the process of teaching, learning much more participatory,” said Subrahmanyam.
“Every year, 1-2 teachers from India are invited to CERN for short training courses but our idea is to bring the programme to the country itself so that a significant number could participate,” said Archana Sharma, principal scientist at CERN. “Our aim is to get these teachers to train their peers and try to provoke the minds of students in different ways so that education system improves for the better,” she said.
Sharma, who is the founder of Life Lab, said, “Our students do well in exams but are not good at actually applying their knowledge practically or taking it forward,” she said.
For Gulfam Ahmed from VidyaGyan school in Bulandshahar in UP, the key takeaway was that while students in the country are largely encouraged to memorise lessons from text books and reproduce them, the system needed to change.