The pedagogical expeimentation in urban marginalised neighborhoods is linked with the larger aim of impacting the wider arena of education practices and interventions for the marginalised. Ankur disseminates the learnings from its practice to promote child-centred pedagogy in varied contexts. This includes collaborations and interactions with government schools, university departments, educational bodies and institutions, organisations and networks.Contribution to Critical Pedagogy

Collaboration with government school
The aim of the collaboration is to demonstrate how school can become a nurturing space for children and how classrooms can become spaces that invite and value children’s expression. Together with the teachers, we build a pedagogical practice that makes classroom interactions interesting and collaborative and engages children in co-construction of knowledge.  The intervention involves rethinking concepts of text, space and neighbourhood in school education. The collaboration underlines the infinite potential of children, locality as an educational resource, and the possibilities in teachers and school.  Read more

Bachelor of elementary education department, Delhi University
Ankur takes the colloquia on ‘Story telling and children’s literature’ with students of Bachelor of Elementary Education. The sessions aim to communicate that the role of storytelling and children’s literature is not just to develop reading-listening skills but to promote agency within the learner while they are listening and reading. Active listening and active reading involves encouraging learners to make meaning. To help learners go through such a process, the teacher trainees go through the processes themselves.  Some of the themes include what is children’s literature, children as authors, drawing upon children’s literature as a resource in class-room.

Collaboration with department of social work
The collaboration with departments of social work seeks to engage with the thinking of a professional in the making. It presents alternative perspectives and practices of working with children, young people and the communities in working class settlements. Interventions that do not view these settlements and their inhabitants in terms of lack, and engage them in creative process and knowledge building. The multi-level engagements with departments of social work include – resource inputs in orientation programs, field work placements, research guidance, interactions with faculty and presentations at seminars.

Linkages with initiatives
All opportunities are taken up for learning and exchange  with other educational and development initiatives working in varied contexts on child-rights, education, child labor, gender justice, youth empowerment and community development. This is done through participation meetings and consultations, presentations at seminars, capacity building workshops, and providing resource inputs in events.

The Right to Creativity initiative has been launched to inject the recognition of children’s creativity in the discourse on child rights and pedagogy. Creativity needs to be seen as an inalienable right of the child. There is a need for learning spaces that nurture children’s creativity and challenge them to explore and express their potential. The creative expressions in different media forms, emerging from right to creativity workshops and events are taken to wider audiences in neighborhoods, schools, organizations and various other platforms. Learnings from these processes feed into the dialogue with  collaborators, child rights organizations, academic institutions and others.