VIDEOSHALA an Educational community video unit (ECVU)

Description

Prior studies on education in India showed that though providing teachers and school infrastructure can mitigate the issue of access to education, enormous rate of dropout and abysmally low learning levels are far more complex, difficult to understand and change. Content which is homogenized and not linked to the child reality, pedagogy, rote learnings and prejudices of teachers come across as some of the vital issues. Videoshala thus evolved as an attempt to demonstrate an alternate view and trigger change in some of the factors influencing education. Videoshala is a pioneering intervention with the vision of improving quality of education through community media, while simultaneously imbibing values of citizenship, democracy and diversity in the lives of students and teachers and ultimately in the wider communities they live in. Videoshala was initiated in response to the need for quality education geared towards the holistic development of the child, realized through research, observation and experience of working with children in the marginalised section of the society.

What do we deliver?

One of the clear deliverables through this initiative is – Movies produced by, for and off the communities, movies are produced on hard spots (hard subject areas) which are identified with a thorough base line research with students and teachers. Videos are refreshing as they are located in the lived realities of learners they show their own geographical areas, people (and children) who are similar to them and speak the same language. Through the film we have till date: 1) Been able to reach thousands of children in various schools 2) Provided alternative livelihood not only for young boys but also for women and young girls form the community. 3) Built local classroom facilitators to participate in their community educational process. 4) Strengthened local NGO working on education.

Whom we deliver?

1) Used by community students
2) Teachers
3) Community volunteers

How is the project unique?

Videoshala evolved as an attempt to demonstrate an alternate view and trigger change in some of the factors influencing education. Videoshala is a pioneering intervention with the vision of improving quality of education through community media, while simultaneously imbibing values of citizenship, democracy and diversity in the lives of students and teachers and ultimately in the wider communities they live in. Videoshala was initiated in response to the need for quality education geared towards the holistic development of the child, realized through research, observation and experience of working with children in the marginalised section of the society. Videoshala is a unique intervention where local communities are trained to produce contextually relevant curriculum based educational video kits for primary school children in their own communities. A total of 28 films on hard spots identified have been produced, integrated with the values of citizenship, democracy and diversity. The movies are screened at regular intervals in various schools, the activity sheets act as a cursor to gauge the learnings.

Roadmap

Our roadmap for the Videoshala programme (ECVU):- We are right now looking at expanding to 1200 schools in Gujarat, focusing on discrimination and diversity education in schools (as this has been an urgent need stemmed out from our evaluations and study). This effort will be coupled with monitoring and evaluation of the number of dropouts in these 1200 schools against the number of enrollments and conduct a thorough research and make the concerned authorities responsible for any slack in their duties. DRISHTI long term vision is to continue empowering community voices, by creating a platform for community expression within the framework of democratic principles to appropriate use of community media at the grassroots.

Contact

DRISHTI
Debarun Dutta
4th Floor, Mistry Chambers, Near Cama Hotel, Vidyaguri Neelkanth Marg, Khanpur Ahmedabad Gujarat – 380001
URL/Website – www.drishtimedia.org