Empowering the Village to Raise the Child:

Meet Rama Aachhami.  Rama is a gifted young primary teacher at the Choina School.  She is in charge of the Class 1 room at Choina—the equivalent of first grade in the United States.  Rama has over twenty students at all times, but there is frequent turnover in her class roster, since her students come from poor families who often migrate to find work.  As the school can’t afford to hire additional staff, Rama works all day by herself and isn’t able to take any breaks.

Despite the many demands of her job, Rama is deeply committed to her students and to the school.  She is a frequent attendee of the National Center for Learning Resources trainings hosted by ICRI Nepal.  She is always looking for new ideas and approaches to engage the minds of her young students.

In the last post, I told you about the incredible transformation of the early childhood classroom at Choina School, which ICRI Nepal revamped from a storage closet into a vibrant classroom filled with stimulating learning materials.

Rama’s Class 1 space was originally built to serve as a classroom, but when she began teaching there she had no child-friendly learning materials.  She worked hard to craft and source her own materials, most made from recycled items and found objects.  It is exciting to see that the children at Choina School move from the early childhood classroom to Rama’s classroom, and continue to enjoy new and developmentally-appropriate materials as they learn and grow.

ICRI Nepal helped Rama make her classroom child-friendly and stocked with stimulating materials.  ICRI Nepal also provided Rama with extensive training and mentoring in early childhood education.  Rama told me, speaking via a translator, that she now thinks of her role as a teacher very differently thanks to her involvement with ICRI Nepal.

One of the absolute highlights of my visit was getting the chance to watch Rama and several other teachers play students themselves, acting out creative curriculum ideas at a National Center for Learning Resources training led by ICRI Nepal.  Then, just a few days later while visiting Rama’s classroom, I had the chance to watch Rama teach this very same lesson plan to her own students.

Rama gently led the children through a dramatic play exercise in which they acted out an elaborate role play about health and sickness.  The children were a bit tentative at first, but with Rama’s gentle urging, they grew more and more involved in the exercise—brainstorming new ideas, thinking through the possible consequences, and by the end nearly bursting with excitement.

The smiles on their faces said it all.

The Choina School is located in Lalitpur, not far from Kathmandu.  It is a public school serving several hundred children, many of whom are from low-caste families.  Because many parents are poor laborers who must continually migrate to find work, there is a great deal of turnover in the student population.  And because these parents often have no resources to provide for child care, the students at the school often wind up bringing their younger siblings to class with them.

In 2005, the Principal of Choina School, Mr. Sarbash Lal Chaudhary, began working with ICRI Nepal’s National Center for Learning Resources.  The school had no early childhood classroom, but wanted to create a learning environment that was appropriate and stimulating for the young children who continued to accompany their older siblings to school each day.

Despite the dedication of Principal Chaudhary and an incredible staff of committed teachers, there were many roadblocks ahead.  The school faced a severe lack of resources and materials, and had no room to spare.  Moreover, the very idea of child-centered early childhood education was a new one to this school and community.  There was considerable resistance from parents who wanted even very young children to be in a more traditional classroom environment—seated at desks all day, focused on rote memorization and academic exercises.

ICRI Nepal’s staff conducted extensive outreach work with the parents to understand and address these concerns and to incorporate their feedback into the early childhood plans.  ICRI Nepal also worked with the teachers and staff to creatively address the resource challenges.  A former storage closet was transformed into a beautiful and stimulating early childhood classroom, full of learning materials that have been locally made or crafted from found objects.

Most importantly, ICRI Nepal spent countless hours on-site at Choina School—making as many as 19 visits in one month!—to work side by side with the teachers in the new early childhood classroom.  The early childhood classroom has been such a success that ICRI Nepal has since been invited to work in the primary school classrooms at Choina School, where teachers have been eager to adopt the child-centered and creative education techniques they have seen in use with the younger children.

The early childhood classroom is a joy to behold– during my visit the children were completely absorbed in art and music activities led by their teacher.  The staff paid a great deal of individual attention to each child, and had seamlessly integrated disabled children and children who were new to the school into the classroom community.  Nearly every item in the classroom had been creatively recycled from elsewhere– mud and twigs repurposed as art materials, discarded bottlecaps strung on a wire to make musical instruments, beans and legumes revisioned as tools for teaching basic math concepts.

Through nearly five years of collaboration, ICRI Nepal and Choina School have worked together to change the lives of hundreds of poor children in Lalitpur who have no other opportunity to access high quality early childhood care and education.  In the school courtyard, a statue of Saraswati (goddess of knowledge and education) presides over this beautiful place where every child is nurtured and encouraged to fulfill their deepest potential.