Our group is doing an inquiry into access to education around the world.
Morah Sackson set up a Skype session with Bushan. He is a person in India with a more advanced education (university degree). He told us about what education was like and what it still is like in India. we asked him about what education looked like in India, how boys and girls were treated in education, disadvandaged and advantaged education and what people have done about lack of education.
He told us about how a classroom was set out. He told us that the boys and the girls were seperated from eachother. The boys normally didn’t talk to the girls. Some schools in India were only boys, and some were only girls.
He described what his classroom looked like when he was at school. The tables were in rows, not groups like us. Boys and girls were seperated, not like us, boys and girls in our class get mixed. Everyone was facing the blackboard where the teacher wrote things down, we take a fun approach to learning and we ask questions, inquire and get to understand what it is.
He also told us about what he did. Him and a group of friends read a book which really inspired them to do something. They worked in a computer company so what they did was they got some old computers, put them in places where kids hadn’t ever seen computers, set them up and showed them how to use a computer!
In the end, it was a very interesting because we always made generalisations that all people in the developing world didn’t have an education. When he told us that poor people can get an education, I was amazed. He told us that if those poor people have a talent, they can get a scholarship for schools in India.
I think my group really got something worthy out of that Skype session with Bushan, I really hope we can do it again with somebody else.
Thank you for all your blog posts. It is a gift for someone like me in Brooklyn, to be able to watch students think “out loud.”
I found one of your comments so important to think about.
You said “In the end, it was a very interesting because we always made generalisations that all people in the developing world didn’t have an education. When he told us that poor people can get an education, I was amazed.”
Same kind of thing happens in America. We tend to forget that poor people so often have rich productive lives. Important to keep in mind, I think.