BHUBANESWAR: For children of tribal communities, teaching-learning will no longer be limited to books and blackboards. Walls in their classrooms will now serve as a learning aid.
In a new initiative - Building as Learning Aid (BaLA) - the classrooms in SSD schools, run by the ST and SC Development department, are being decorated with tribal art to improve the children’s language and mathematics skills besides knowledge of the environment. Initiated by the department, it is aimed at helping the primary graders learn new educational concepts in their mother tongue and through art forms, which are central to their communities.
The department has collaborated with an organisation Shiksharth to introduce BaLA in the schools.
“The concept is based on the idea that a school’s architecture can be a resource for teaching and learning, and it incorporates ideas like activity-based learning, inclusivity, and child-friendliness,” said Tribal Welfare Minister Nityananda Gond.
In the first phase, the project has been taken up in SSD schools of four districts - Rayagada, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Nabarangpur. It was piloted in Rayagada where more than 65,000 students are enrolled in SSD schools. Here, Soura art has been used to create literacy walls and numeracy walls in the classrooms.
While the numeracy walls are being designed to help students identify, connect objects, alphabets, and words, read, comprehend and speak better, the numeracy walls cover number systems, multiplication tables, measurement values, concept of time, among other things. Four local tribal artists were identified who incorporated concepts of language and maths using the art form as the design element.
“Tribal art is being used for BaLA so that children can relate to their learning environment easily and this could help them grasp the process which was not possible with other languages of learning,” said Minister Gond.
The department operates 1,736 schools and 5,841 hostels catering to more than five lakh students. These students hail from 64 different scheduled tribes, speaking 21 different languages.