it's school time !

School in Napaser

School in Lunkhransar

In the past few weeks we have visited two of rangsutra’s schools (in  napaser & lunkhransar ) and we spent time in understanding the women  , their culture and their learning capabilities .It was crucial  for us to create a bond with these women first and that is what we aimed at doing the first time round . After visiting the schools and understanding it’s curriculum and functioning   ,we narrowed down on some activities that we think would help the students understand and interpret colour  & colour variations. We also planned on introducing some team building activities to make them understand the importance of working in a group. We spent the whole of Monday planning and finalising the activities for the women and making arrangements for all our requirements for the next two days .

On Tuesday (25^th of april) we went to the school in napaser .  we had informed them in advance that we would be coming  and were hoping for a good response from the students but sadly not that many women showed up. We waited for a while as we were told that most of the girls & women were busy making papad’s and would be late. Meanwhile we handed over last time’s pictures to the teacher so that they could display it in their class .  we make sure that we send back pictures to all the people that we visit here in the villages . it makes them very happy .

With three women and four girls , we started our class. We showed them pictures that depicted different moods and we asked the women to tell us what they felt on seeing these pictures. This activity was done for them to understand the relation between colour and mood. It took us a while  for them to understand the whole concept as language was a huge barrier. Thank god for Anjuman ji’s presence … she was able to easily grasp what we were trying to teach them and she managed to explain it to them in Maarvadi (language spoken in rajasthan ) it was interesting to see how the women related to each colour. They would relate it to their festivals, weddings and practices that were specific to their culture . This was something that we anticipated but could have been better prepared for it .  By the end of the day , we had taught ( at least hope to have taught ) the women how to associate colour with moods and categorize colours into dark , bright , light  and warm and cool . still unsure of how much of it they understood , we left them with a small assignment and promised them that we would spend a night in their village if they completed the activity. It seemed to be the only agreement that would get them to do the assignment .

The next day we set out to go to lunkhransar . I guess we were a lot more excited about this school as the women here come to the school because they always want to learn something new and grasp concepts easily as well. Language doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem here because a lot more women understand hindi or broken hindi.  They were extremely excited to see what we had in store for them. After a quick mehendi   session , the women gathered around and we started with the class. Things seemed to be going at a good pace , and we were sure that they were able to understand what we were teaching them . within minutes they got the hang of it and  could easily  identify warm and cool colours and dark , light and bright colours.  One thing we found very interesting was when we showed the first school a picture that indicated freedom and happiness , they said that the girl in the picture feels this way because she just got married. The same picture when shown to the women in the second school said that the girl in the picture was happy and free because she was unmarried .hmmm strange .   Now to put our teaching to test we had a small activity organized for the women which turned out to be a huge success . This was a relief because now we know what to improvise on and how to change the curriculum to make it easier for the students to understand .  Next week we hope to take the inputs given it to the next level and teach them colour variations and importance of having more colour options .