India is home to 1.4 billion people, 52% of whom are younger than 30 years of age and 27% are under 15! Clearly there are significant educational needs across the nation. India is also a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society with 22 officially recognized languages. Given this scale, complexity and diversity, one has to be careful in making claims  about Indian education, in the abstract or in broad generalizations.

We have had experts from India in the past (Episodes 43, 87 & 91) but we now want to provide a broader lens on India over a series of episodes. Over the next few weeks Silver Lining for Learning will focus three episodes on India (Episodes #123, #129 & #130), and we will meet with some amazing organizations and people working in educational contexts across the country.

This episode (#123) centers on two non-profit organizations working in rural India around teacher development and women’s empowerment: Ashvattha Learning Communities (represented by Arushi Mittal); and Sajhe Sapne (represented by Surabhi Yadav). More about the organizations and our guests below the video.

About Ashvattha Learning Communities
Ashvattha Learning Communities skills 21st century teachers through a combination of experiential and digital learning programs. At Ashvattha, we believe that 21st century classrooms should be learner centered, application oriented and technology integrated. And we believe that teachers can only create the classrooms they experience. Hence, we are creating an ecosystem of high quality, practice based, technology enabled learning experiences for pre-service teachers in Tier II, Tier III and rural India, incubating 21st century teachers.

Over the last 2 years, we have worked with 600+ pre-service teachers across 10 teacher training institutions in Rajasthan as well as with 100+ in-service teachers. Our programs include discussion forums (Shikshak Chaupal), internships, exposure, mentoring, online courses and communities of practice to build their professional and 21st century competencies. Additionally, we have established 3 learning centers through which we directly work with 170 primary school students to ground our curriculum and training firmly in practice.

About Arushi Mittal
Arushi is a feminist educator eternally fascinated by humans and humanity, and strives to create spaces for mutual learning and for collective evolution. Brought up in Rajasthan, and in love with this land of colorful mirages, she can be found deeply lost in thoughts or conversations, mostly with a cup of chai. Arushi is also an IIT Delhi and Harvard Graduate School of Education alumnus, who has founded Ashvattha Learning Communities, a Jaipur based social enterprise working to incubate 21st century teachers, and anchors the citizen collective Pink City Feminist. Earlier, she has been awarded the National Youth Award by the Government of India and represented India at United Nations Alliance of Civilizations for her work on educating young people on gender peace.

About Sapna Centers: Sajhe Sapne supports rural women in India to launch their careers in the modern workforce. They are designing a system of community colleges called Sapna Centers (a.k.a Dream Centers) in villages that truly work for rural women. With their “learning to earning” model they want to shift the development solutions focused on “livelihoods” to “growth pathways” for rural women. It is ensuring that rural women have a choice of a thriving aspirational career.

Whereas most rural women in India do not get paid for their work and have limited options for their personal and professional growth, this nonprofit is setting higher standards for education & employment opportunities that can be made available for rural women. Some of these career tracks for which they have designed curriculum and learning culture in regional languages include – coding, teaching, project management. Most of the students of Sajhe Sapne are the first ones in their entire village to have pursued education after 12th grade and to have a stable salary.  Sajhe Sapne’s focus is on reaching communities where the notion of professional careers or growth pathways do not exist yet. The mission is to make career dreams real in most difficult places by making all world-class professional training courses available in everyday spoken languages to women in villages.

Here’s some media coverage of their work – article 1, article 2, article 3.

About the founder: Surabhi Yadav is a gender and rural development practitioner working in India. She is on a mission to support women in rural India to live up to their full potential – of their creativity, free thinking and most importantly, their dreams. She wants to create a world where women, especially those living in villages are known to the world because of their potential and not pain. She has work experience in public policy research, advocacy to fight against gender-based abuse and skill development for low-income women. She has studied Masters in Development Practice at University of California Berkeley and B.Tech and M.Tech in Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi). She is also the creator of internationally praised project, Women at Leisure, which explores time as a feminist issue. It is a multimedia repository of videos and photos of women and girls taking out time for themselves.