Imagine you are tasked with delivering a speech or business plan in front of an audience, but you fail to communicate your ideas, often speaking fillers in your sentences. Back in school, you were afraid to ask questions to teachers or participate in debates and discussions. You were taught to learn the syllabus by heart and study with the aim of passing the exam, not with the aim of excelling.
“We have a culture of education where students are pressured and forced to sit quietly in school for 12 years, and then another five years in college. So on a good day, you expect them to be communicators and collaborators on projects. That’s where they fail,” observes Raynis Joseph, an educationist from Hyderabad.
“In schools, people make fun of students who cannot speak English well. Their natural curiosity and ability to communicate effectively is killed. Learning becomes a difficult task,” adds the 47-year-old.
In an effort to address the gap in life skills and English language learning at the school level, Rennis and his wife Emma Marie started Ignis Careers to teach students and train teachers through interactive curriculum and participatory learning methods. So far, they have taught English language and life skills to over 3.5 lakh students in nearly 1,000 low-cost schools in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Odisha, Mumbai, and Delhi and trained at least 10,000 teachers.
What is unique about Ignis is its use of ‘games’ to teach the curriculum and make learning fun for children, a philosophy enshrined by the National Education Policy, 2020. “We don’t talk about definitions at first. We ask them to talk about their parents, smart school or hospital. We let them engage in fun activities and help them learn grammar concepts in the process. Through this, they are able to retain the concepts,” Rennis explains.
Dropped PhD for ‘good cause’
While doing his PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2002, Reinis got an opportunity to be involved in a project with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Delhi. Born into a poor family of farmers, he immediately took up a job to cover his university fees. But it changed his aspirations.
“The project was very interesting. I had to teach English language to Afghan and Burmese refugees. I didn’t know where to start. One of my PhD guides suggested – ‘Don’t talk, let them talk’,” he recalls.
“When I started applying it, I realized it’s not just about English, it’s about life skills. Language is about expression, not just about the structures we have traditionally adopted,” he added.
Soon after, he left JNU to start teaching students life skills and grammar. “When I went to JNU, my parents expected me to become a professor somewhere but I realized that I could do much better and bigger by teaching students. For me, the best education started after I left college,” he says.
In 2004, he started teaching at a coaching institute in Bengaluru. As part of his visits to small towns in the state for promotional events, he will get a chance to interact with school students. “Here, I looked at our terrible system of education. I asked the students, ‘What is a cloud?’, ‘What is a window?’, and they looked at the sky. They had no idea.”
“Our education system is about robbing things and putting them down. Rote learning itself is dangerous, it does not impart any skills to the students. It is a very rigid architecture psychologically. As a teacher, your job is to manage a classroom of 100 students, it’s not to teach them, it’s to manage them,” he says.
“In our classroom, the person in the back row is expected to be the clown. Others do not cooperate with them. When a backbencher stands up, everyone laughs, that student starts thinking of himself as a ‘clown’ and loses confidence to do better,” he adds.
These experiences led Rennis and Imma (whom he met at JNU) to launch Ignis Career in 2014.
Make the classroom fun
Explaining how they work, Reinis says, “First, we form small groups of five students. We have them sit in a circle, not in a row, so that there is no difference between the front and back benches.”
“We form some groups of 4-5 students each. Then we ask one group to design a smart village with the best sustainable technology possible, we ask another group to redesign a hospital. They observe the limitations of the current system and come up with a design that they draw on a chart. In doing so, they build design thinking,” he explains.
“We try to promote positive interactions among peers. This helps them build critical awareness and dialogue among team members,” he adds.
Reinis and his team work at any given school for about four years, but stay in touch with the school to gauge impact. For example, his team worked in Banapuram village in Telangana in 2010. Five years after this intervention, he says, 90 percent of children attending village schools were enrolled in colleges for higher education. “In 2019, we conducted a study to examine what has happened in the last 10 years. We found all the girls were still in school,’ he smiles.
Apart from teaching students through interactive sessions, they work to create a pool of teachers who can think of innovative ways to teach children after they leave.
For this, Rainis says that a trainer is sent to the school once every week and the children are provided with a unit-wise printed textbook with creative ways of teaching. In conversation with best india “Teachers are trained to develop their skills so that they can train students accordingly,” says Sathi Narmada Samala, a rural teacher at a school in Telangana’s Khammam district.
Explaining what makes the teaching method unique, she says, “If I have to teach students about prepositions, I don’t start by teaching them the definition and preposition words on the board.”
“Here, the teacher hides an object in the classroom, and students are asked whether it is ‘under the table’ or ‘in the bag.’ , ‘behind’, or ‘side’, are called prepositions. So, they understand the concept. Similarly, it helps to engage all students and we students’ oral And we see a great improvement in writing skills. This kind of training is not being done anywhere else,” she added.
For this, Rainis charges up to Rs 700 per student from cheap private schools. For government schools, they do not charge any amount and manage the expenses through CSR grants. But in order to run the startup, he had to take a loan from his friends.
“After demonetisation in 2016, we were affected for two years like our partners. We didn’t get enough funds to run the startup. In 2017, I was so short of money that I had to drop my children from school because I couldn’t afford their fees, ” he says.
“In 2019, we did a study and found that 94 percent of parents in the various cities where we work have improved the quality of life of students. Our training methods make the youth confident. These experiences give us hope. In the end, it’s about the joy on our students’ faces and the freshness we can bring to the classroom.”
“I’m a person who wants a strong purpose for living, and when you have an impact, you’re motivated to do better,” Reinis says.
Edited by Divya Sethu; All photos: Rennis Joseph.