Jaipur based educator and researcher, Dr Lalit Kishore, has received Commonwealth Award 2023 instituted by Findel-Castme for his contribution in the area of STEM Education. He has been felicitated by the Senior Secondary Adarsh Balika Vidya Mandir (Jai Jawan Colony-III), KVS Retired Employees Society (Rajasthan) and Bhavi Nirman Society, Chaksu.
The CASTME Award Scheme, run by the Commonwealth Association of Science, Technology and Mathematics Educators, has been highlighting educational projects from across the world addressing the social or human context of STEM. Three to five awards are presently offered for educational projects, which address the social or human context of STEM by a group or an individual involved in education in formal or informal, within societies right from pre-school to tertiary education levels. Currently, CASTME partners with Findel International Education Resources and Philip Harris for offering awards.
The abstract of the award winning entry is as follows
Abstract
An intervention in mathematics instruction was designed and transacted with urban Hindi medium grade ten girls after the school reopened, which was shut down for about two years owning to COVID-19 pandemic and on-line instruction were carried out with promotions without holding examinations. From the session of 2022-23, the regular public exams for grades ten and twelve have been resumed to be held in the first quarter of 2023. An in-house discussion was held and it was decided to undertake an intervention to build the confidence of the girls in mathematics who had received relatively low quality on-line instruction for grades 8 and 9 and had come back to the school to study grade ten with the class strength of 9 girls one fourth of the class strength when they in school in grade eight. Also, a diagnostic testing of the mathematics learning for students was done to make the intervention relevant, inclusive and accommodating. The designed intervention consisted of preparing 15 readiness sheets, one for each of the chapters of mathematics textbook of grade ten. Initially, three readiness sheets were prepared, tried out to create standardised sheets for rest of the 12 chapters as a package. A fifteen-hour intervention with one-hour daily as zero-session before the school begins academics after the morning assembly. Each sheet had slant-rhyme mini poems to musicalise the main concepts of chapters; vocabulary building through word search puzzle; reading of equations and formulas; reading of tables and graphs; and reading of visuals with emphasis on language of mathematics. The revision and reinforcement of the learning material was done in pairs or small groups as a part of social pedagogy of cooperative learning. Use of verbal, musical and visual intelligences, incorporated as elements of feminization of the courseware, made the intervention girl-friendly and right-hemispheric. The students who were part of the try-out of innovation reacted positively and were able to feel the benefits of the intervention and could articulate them. Looking at the benefits of the intervention, and its self-confidence building strength for girls, it has been decided to use the multiple copies of the material for each of the grade ten batches from 2023-24 academic-years onward in a bid to institutionalise the intervention.
Keywords: COVID crisis, feminist pedagogy, feminization, gender equity, math instruction, multiple intelligences, readiness activity
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