THE OTHER CLASS STRUGGLE

HERE does teaching end and learning begin? Or should that be the other way around? I asked myself these profound questions last week as news arrived from Kerala of a small step with revolutionary intent.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

Ramavilasom Vocational Higher Secondary School at Valakom decided to remove the concept of 'backbenchers' by introducing a circular seating arrangement in classrooms.

Human beings are quite inertial—it takes some fresh inspiration to turn things around. As it happens, the south Kerala school was jolted by a Malayalam movie, Sthanarthi Sreekuttan, to do away with traditional rows of benches and bring in single rows along the four walls of a classroom where every kid looks like a side-bencher.

The movie's ideas have also crossed borders. While a Punjab school jumped eagerly on the idea, a circular from the education department in Tamil Nadu ran into rough weather. Tamil Nadu has insisted on implementing a somewhat semi-circular arrangement resembling the Tamil letter pa as a symbol of open minds after some social media protests on the ground that it was impractical.

However, the idea of innovative seating is not new to Tamil Nadu, which introduced circular seating on the floor for activity-based learning two decades ago. The ideas were inspired by experiments at the Krishnamurti Foundation (which runs the Rishi Valley School, among others) and the Montessori method that emphasizes peer learning and collaboration to help children grow on their own. Tamil Nadu had then enforced circular floor seating in more than 38,000 primary schools and swapped large blackboards for teachers to smaller ones for kids with six-student teams seated in circles overseen by teachers-turned-mentors.