The reel teacher
RAKESH MEHAR
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The Nai Taleem film festival provided new perspectives on the idea of basic education
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As our world gets increasingly globalised, educators everywhere have begun to realise the need for a paradigm shift in the field of education. With greater information access in every part of the world, isolated experiments in alternative modes of teaching and learning are gradually beginning to gather greater acceptance, and ideas that were once radical and niche are slowly beginning to enter the mainstream.
However, there is still much that needs to be done by way of educating educators and opening their minds to the greater possibilities in pedagogy.
And so there was the Nai Taleem Film Festival, organised by The Teacher's Foundation last week.
Spread over four days, the festival provided new perspectives on the idea of Nai Taleem or basic education, examining the different spaces, processes and experiments in the field of learning.
Targeted at teachers in the city, the festival of short films and documentaries aimed at nudging them towards breaking out of the mould of employment-oriented education, encouraging them to aim for a mode of education that is relevant and applicable to children instead. A majority of films in the festival looked specifically at the question of alternative schools around the world, exploring various innovative ideas on how the process of learning can occur.
Alternate nation
To The Dream Mountain by M.G. Sasi, for instance, describes Kanavu, a learning centre in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, whose ethos is based strongly in experiential learning, and true all-round development.
In a similar vein is Democratic Schools by Jan Gabbert, which chronicles the Democratic School movement occurring around the world, where students get a chance to decide for themselves what they learn and how they learn it.
Others turned the mirror instead on existing structures of education, asking if what we are doing now is achieving what it's supposed to. In The Eye Of The Fish by J. Bagchi, S. Sengupta and Monica Narula, for instance, follows the lives of some of the most privileged children in the country and asks if the model of education they currently receive is worth the price it exacts. Similarly Abhayam (Mein Phir Ayonga) by Sivam, tells the tale of a boy who, frustrated by the pressures placed on him by his mother and by the educational system that feeds her insecurity, tries to break out of it all.
Most fascinating, however, were the films that chose to study the process of cultural homogenisation that modern education brings and ways and means to combat that. Rabbit-Proof Fence by Phillip Noyce, for instance, is a dramatised retelling of a young half-aborigine girl's attempts to escape the forced Western education she is subjected to as part of a "rehabilitation" programme.
Claustrophobic focus
With a tight, almost claustrophobic focus on the girl and her two cousins as they try to return to their home and their way of life, it questions the age-old assumption of the Western world that those in the "third world" need their help whether they realise it or not.
Similarly, Paradise With Side Effects examines a programme of unlearning in Ladakh where Ladakhi women are taken on a reality tour to London to take stock of the way development has affected social life. And Children of Heaven movingly examines the effects of subtle anxieties on children that we as adults tend to neglect.
Of course, there were the few films that tended to take a far-too simplistic view of the subject of education. Mera Atma Shikshak, Mera Karma for instance, in its enthusiasm for the Gandhian way of life tends to disregard the many obstacles that prevent that philosophy from being applied to our times. And Children Being In The World, while paying an ode to the innate imagination and learning ability of children also tends to disregard the need for structure and framework to all learning.
Perhaps the only real downside of the Nai Taleem festival was the disparate locations it took place in. Spread over locations on Airport Road, Miller's Road and in Koramangala on each of the four days, the festival's interests may have been hampered by the fact that commuting to the festival was difficult, thus ensuring that not much of a repeat audience was present on all four days.
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