Education during the pandemic: how schools are reaching their students after closures

Refashioning the certificate process at Future School

When classes came to a halt at Future School on 15th April, only two months remained before the British system high school examinations were scheduled to be administered at the school. However, with schools the world over facing the same school closures just before the examination period, the British government made an announcement that the Summer 2020 exams would be cancelled and that, instead, the teachers would be responsible for assigning “the grade that they believe the student would have received if exams had gone ahead”, based upon their performance in mock examinations and assignments before the closures in March. 

Exam results are extremely important for those students who envision going to university after graduating, especially for those who will be studying abroad and may need to qualify for financial aid, and it has been a challenge for Future School’s teachers to give final grades for the first time. Rolf, a coordinator and teacher at Future School, says that the teachers are not allowed to share those grades with their students. “The actual grades are given by the exam board after their adjustment, so there is a protective element for the teachers.”

But although the students’ receipt of their certificates may have been salvaged by this switch from exams to grades, the school closure has also highlighted the vulnerability of the student body to not having access to classroom sessions. While the Government of India has endorsed online learning as a solution to school closures, Future School’s own experience exposed the gaps. Immediately after the school closed, some teachers tried to continue their curriculum online through Google Classroom, the school’s free access to Google Hangouts, and even WhatsApp, but the major impediment was internet access. “A lot of students don’t have proper internet connections,” Rolf says.” There were some classes where more than 50% couldn’t participate.”

Rolf explains that whereas assignments were relatively easy to give remotely, holding classes online was nearly impossible. “The teachers were trying to do live classes, but the problem is that the important part of a class is the interaction and exchange between students. If this doesn’t happen, then it is only a lecture. And on YouTube, you can find much better lecturers than us.”

Future School’s students had mixed reactions to the school closure. While some students welcomed the early start to the holidays, many are concerned about how this may affect their academic progress. Eleventh and 12th graders are applying for university and need to get their certificates for this process. And the 12th graders had to finish their Auroville schooling careers without the highly anticipated experience of graduation and other end-of-school festivities. While these are important to graduating students around the world, they can be especially poignant for students at Future School, who have grown up together and now face the moment when many will depart from Auroville to pursue educational opportunities with their internationally-recognized high school qualifications.

Meanwhile, the next academic year is slated to begin three weeks earlier than usual to give extra time to cover the material that was missed.

Balancing exams and school closure at New Era Secondary School

New Era Secondary School (NESS) offers many Auroville youth the opportunity to receive a high school certificate from India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which can facilitate entry into universities across the country. For NESS students, the annual exams were already happening when the school was forced to close and not all were completed before the lockdown started. 

Students have been given a holiday and the CBSE announced that the two postponed 12th grade exams will be held at the beginning of July. Since then, the teachers in charge of the material covered in those remaining exams have begun online review sessions for the graduating students. For ongoing students, the NESS staff have created WhatsApp groups for the classes in the upcoming academic year and shared links to digital versions of the textbooks so that the students can begin preparing for the coming academic term. Students can work on assignments at home and share photos of their work on the groups.  

One NESS student, who has just completed 9th grade, has begun working through these new materials, but is doubtful about her ability to absorb the material from textbooks alone, especially since she has to read on her phone the ones she doesn’t have physical copies of. She has been managing with the books on social science and English, but says, “Unless the school starts online classes, it simply won’t help me to read science and maths texts. Usually it helps me when our teachers explain.” She looks ahead to when the school is able to reopen and provide an environment where she can concentrate and have ready access to guidance from teachers. 

As for when NESS will be able to reopen for classes, this will be determined by the CBSE. “We can’t predict the date as of now, we have to wait for the official announcement,” says a school administrator. 

Providing voluntary learning opportunities at Last School

While Last School serves the same age group as Future School and New Era Secondary School, it follows a free progress education model. Class sizes are small and some teachers had already established WhatsApp groups to communicate with their students. So when the school had to close, teachers were still able to reach out to their students, whether through WhatsApp or email, giving students the chance to progress with reading and writing assignments, daily art projects, and other learning activities.

Aurevan, who teaches English at Last School, mobilized her classes’ WhatsApp groups to work on independent writing assignments. Several students have been doing a three-month creative writing project, with Aurevan giving guidance on how to create a plot and develop the characters and setting. The students submit their writing weekly for feedback. As April was National Poetry Writing Month, other students engaged in writing poetry.  

For his math classes, Ashwin has given his students worksheets that they can fill out, photograph, and send back to him. He is then able to evaluate their work and give them feedback. He also started sending them fun logical reasoning math problems to solve together over the WhatsApp group. “It was an effective way to keep them occupied with math,” he says. 

And every two days, Jean-Yves has been sending new pages from Sri Aurobindo’s The Human Cycle to his students over WhatsApp to continue the reading they were doing in his class prior to the lockdown.

Still, there can be no comparison to the learning environment on the Last School campus. Internet connectivity has been a snag for Last School students as well, and not all of them have access to a reliable internet connection at home. Also, the level of discussion has gone down after the transition to distance learning, with students only coming forward when they have a major question. Nevertheless, the teachers have tried to keep in touch with their students and proposed learning opportunities. Because there are no examinations to work towards or mandatory units to cover, the Last School teachers have also made participation in the classwork voluntary for their students. And Aurevan further believes, “Let the students have a break, they will come back for classes when they are ready.” 

In the meantime, it is up to students to use their extended holiday as they see fit, whether watching movies, learning new cooking recipes, connecting with family, reading, playing music, or starting new exercise routines. Some have taken this time to engage with volunteer work in the community or to start new projects of their own. A host of young people have come forward during this public health crisis to deliver groceries, sanitize public spaces, help with the cashew harvesting, etc., and students from Auroville’s high schools, including Last School, have been well represented among them. One Last School student also began working with the Auroville Safety and Security Team, a commitment that will carry on into the coming school year, and two others continued involvement with the Auroville Ambulance. These diverse engagements can be also seen through an educational lens, as Last School’s philosophy emphasizes that life itself is an education rather than just schoolwork.

Aurevan has also been continuing an on-going exercise that her students have been doing since the beginning of the school year, where they have each listed the areas in which they would like to be making progress. Each Friday, the students go through their lists and rank on a scale of 1 to 10 how they are doing on realizing that progress. If an item is consistently ranking low, they have the opportunity to evaluate its importance and decide whether they want to drop it from the list or put more focus on it. Aurevan’s students have continued to do these weekly evaluations and she says, “Even if they are not doing other classwork, it is a way for me to keep the contact.” 

Supporting learning in the younger grades at Deepanam, Transition, and TLC

For primary schools in Auroville, the challenges in reaching students when the schools have closed are more complex, because younger students may not have the e-literacy to be autonomous and may need more parental assistance.

Deepanam School serves 1st through 8th grade students with a free progress curriculum that puts particular emphasis on the arts, in addition to other academic subjects. When the school had to close, several of the teachers continued to reach out to their students to offer them projects and assignments, ranging from poetry to science and foreign languages. Mahavir, who teaches students aged 12 to 14 at Deepanam, had been already using the online educational platform, Edmodo, for a couple of years to give his students personalized lesson plans and to collect assignments. When Deepanam closed its campus, he continued offering materials through Edmodo as well as through Google Classroom, providing video content for lessons on math and science. Though Internet and computer access was an issue for some, he reports that all his students made an effort to keep up with the new material. And for the National Poetry Writing Month daily poem writing challenge, 120 poems were written by a group of students and teachers.

Transition School, which caters to the same age group as Deepanam, has one of the largest student bodies in Auroville. The school administration was caught by surprise by the order for students to stay home. While only one person at the school had prior experience with online teaching, the teachers were able to quickly adopt WhatsApp and email and reach out to both parents and students with new material to study and assignments to work on. The 1st grade teacher at Transition said, “I sent the children videos on WhatsApp of me reading the week’s phonics story and explaining the phonics rules to them. On Earth Day, I encouraged them to write and draw something about why we should take care of the earth.” Independent work was progressively easier for the older grades, and the 5th grade teacher asked students to send her pictures of their work on a daily basis. On Fridays, she tried to recreate the social aspect of school by asking students to call one or two other classmates to work together on activities related to sports, art, poetry, and other topics. The 8th grade students, who were finishing their time at Transition and sadly had to forgo their graduation ceremony, were able to complete their last science, history, and literature lessons via email and WhatsApp, with vibrant discussions in their WhatsApp group. 

However, Anton, who assists with computer-based learning at Transition, also highlights the constraints of distance education. “Transition works with kids between six and fourteen, so primary and middle school. The youngest are just learning to read, the oldest are entering puberty. 

Most of them will need experienced assistance. Seventy percent of our students are second generation literates from nearby villages who do not necessarily have laptops with good internet at home.” He therefore does not see the distance format as a conducive option for continuing classroom learning over longer periods. 

The Learning Community (TLC) was perhaps most uniquely positioned to continue its educational activities after the closure of its “base camp”. Drawing upon the idea of free progress, it does not see itself as a school, but a space for learning where children and their parents are equally encouraged to participate. So, when the base camp had to close and TLC kids began to learn from home, parents were equipped to foster learning environments at home because of their pre-existing connection with their children’s education and shared experiences with TLC. 

Tamar, one of the parents behind TLC, describes what has been done to support this. “We have created a WhatsApp group where we offer and propose daily activities for the kids to engage in. These include creative writing assignments, mathematical problems to solve, research projects, music projects, suggestions for artistic expression, etc. We have encouraged the children to share their work in the group, so that they can inspire each other and share their inspiration. This has been a great success, and worked really well, both for the children who have been responsive and enthusiastic, as well as for the parents, some of whom needed some extra support in taking on this new role of facilitating their children. It has been a ‘real-life’ implementation of the approach that TLC has been encouraging for many years, a test of the independent learning approach, and we can see clearly how the children have been able to focus, self-motivate, self-manage and find joy in their learning.”

Looking to the coming academic year

Some Auroville schools have start dates for the new academic year, which normally begins in July. Others are still waiting on further information from the Indian government. But without a doubt, the nature of schooling in Auroville will be different when the classrooms reopen to students. The Indian news sources are abuzz with potential measures such as online classes, alternate day schedules, and elimination of campus sports, and some forms of social distancing will doubtless still be required as students return to school. Mary, who teaches at Transition, says, “We cannot allow our children to suffer academically, emotionally or socially and must prepare for all future eventualities.” Despite the academic disruptions and uncertain prospects, this generation of students will surely come out benefitting from the ingenuity that is keeping an unending flow of education happening in Auroville.