Muktangan Education Trust

District

Mumbai

States

Maharashtra

The need for systemic change, in both school and teacher education, has been universally recognized. Therefore, Muktangan’s Founder in 2003, drawing on her, then, 50 years of experience, at every level and in domain of education, in both urban and rural contexts, decided to create a model to demonstrate the feasibility of such a change. This led to the development, in partnership with the MCGM, of Muktangan’s integrated model of inclusive teacher and, school education. Muktangan has set up and runs teacher education, both pre-service and in –service, along with 7 municipal schools, teachers for which mainly ladies and a few men are developed from the local marginalized communities in the Worli, Prabhadevi and Parel areas of Mumbai. It is truly,” Education by the Community for the Community”. These schools, now led by teams of highly skilled community members, not only provide holistic, quality English medium education to 4,000 students (age 4 to 16 years), but have also become Muktangan’s’ Laboratories of Change.” Since they clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of a more child- friendly pedagogy, supported by inclusive leadership processes, they are crucial to its advocacy programme. These processes are constantly being further developed and researched both internally and by external researchers from, national and international universities.

States

Maharashtra

We aim at impacting not only the educationally underserved communities but the larger education system. Being a demonstration model, we believe in collaborating and liaisoning with the government and partner organizations in urban and rural areas, enabling them to contextualize their education philosophy into a holistic, inclusive and child-friendly practice. This is done through the Muktangan Education Resource Centre (MERC), a hub where all our teaching-learning approaches are researched. Once these approaches are successfully tried and tested, the learnings are incorporated into the teacher education programme. Our ultimate goal is advocating the best practices of our programme which can further be replicated and contextualized to facilitate more universally applicable learnings. We regularly participate in discussion panels, consultation forums and “think-tanks” as well as present papers at the local, state, national and international forums to advocate our learnings and processes. We have fostered effective relationships with local, State and National Government officials to further our goal.

Our model focuses on developing members, mostly women from underserved educational communities into confident and skilled teachers and teacher educators. The fact that our teachers belong to the same socio-cultural background as students makes it easier to contextualize our education programmes to address the real needs of the community. This has enabled us to propagate holistic education by merging community experience with formal knowledge. Our programme has empowered and provided livelihood opportunities to many women who have bloomed into compassionate teachers and teacher educators.