International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, proclaimed by the UN in 1994, is being observed today on August 9 to raise awareness about the plight of and protect the rights of the world's indigenous population.
The theme of this year's observance is 'the role of indigenous women in the preservation and transmission of traditional knowledge.'
According to the UN, indigenous women are the backbone of indigenous peoples’ communities and play a crucial role in the preservation and transmission of traditional ancestral knowledge and as carers of natural resources. "However, despite the crucial role indigenous women play in their communities as breadwinners, caretakers, knowledge keepers, leaders and human rights defenders, they often suffer from intersecting levels of discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity and socioeconomic status," it adds.
In India, special projects to teach tribal children have been launched but there if gender gap and a good majority of tribal girls are still out of net of the net of primary education. Also, the training and education of teachers teaching tribal children based on indedigeous psychology and sociology. Further more, the intial teaching should be in the home language.
In a discussion on the development of rural and tribal primary teachers’ training module in Banswara of Rajasthan, the suggestions that came up, the following concept note for training framework, module development and training transaction was proposed.
The emergent needs for training of teachers in the government-sector education projects are that they should be as per the prescribed content but the classroom strategies should be pedagogically sound. Also, the cultural and dialect linkage to learning should be done for grade one for both Hindi and Maths learning.
The vocabulary building part and pre-number concepts needs to taken seriously and dedicated 30-hour courses need to be developed with activity-sheets and worksheets for it so that it could to taken up systematically and completely.
Pre-language courseware of 30-odd pages with day-wise classroom activity and pre-writing worksheets should be developed for one day of the training the teachers need to practice the implementation of the course ware.
For primary grades, there are three critical skills that are advocated by educators.
• Verbal and non-verbal communication skills to promote active listening and speaking
• Visual skills for creating mental images before introducing abstract symbols and analysis of experience
• Musical skills for active memory and emotional development
Three hours are needed for each skill training which should pass through three phases , namely, demonstration with text-book based exemplar material; guided skill practice by the participants; and developing relevant learning material to go with the skill.
The resource person who could develop the courseware and module would be required to be engaged. It should be followed by development of key trainers by the resource person. Lastly, for field level teacher training, master trainers should be developed.
If any theorising is to be done, it should be done through analysis of the instructional skills or learning material developed during training.
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