Minutes of EPTAF meeting: 8th Nov'08

For today’s meeting there were two of us: Baljeet and Nidhi. We were expecting more people but nobody turned up except Jitendra, M.C.D school teacher. So three of us discussed the issues.
Issues we discussed:
1. Jitendra came with the issue of discrimination of children on the bases of their religion and caste since his school is in a very backward area. Teachers are biased against the children who are Muslims and those who are STs and SCs. He and some new teachers tried to break this shackle but were discoursed by the senior staff. Nidhi said that such biases are prevalent in any government school whether its in the highly urban Gol Market or rural Alipor. On individual level we can tackle these issues in our classrooms by sensitising our children so that the biasness in the other teachers of the school does not affect our children.
2. Another issue that we talked about was regarding the textbooks. Jitendra find the current SCERT textbooks very boring for children. They do not have sufficient activities. Nidhi suggested why we can’t ask authorities switch from SCERT to NCERT textbooks. But this is an administrative decision where teachers have no say. I suggested that we can use NCERT textbooks along with SCERT textbooks. We can use the stories, poems and activities from NCERT.
3. Towards the end of our meeting we discussed about the themes that we want to pursue in the next few months. Since I’m working on developing reading-writing skills, so suggested this topic. What we have decided for the action research in our classrooms:
Baljeet: reading –writing skills with 2nd graders.
Nidhi: appreciating literature with neo-literate women.
Jitendra: yet to decide.