Early Childhood Education in Anganwadis of Chhatarpur District
Chhatarpur in Madhya Pradesh, India is known for the famous Khajuraho Temples and attracts a large tourist population each year. As an Early Childhood educator however, my association with Chhatarpur began as a result of the Aspirational District Program.
The Aspirational Districts Program (ADP) aims to ensure localised solutions to achieve sustainable development goals for underdeveloped districts in India. Chhatarpur is one of the 112 chosen Aspiration Districts in the country. The Chhatarpur district identified & prioritised working on Early Childhood Education [ECE] as a key area of focus. The district has partnered with Key Education Foundation to ensure improvement in ECE over the next three years. To initiate the work, I planned my visit to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment that will help us understand the different stakeholders involved in Early Childhood Education and ensure that our program is relevant to the context and delivers meaningful impact.
The visit was planned to get a deeper understanding of the public early childhood and care education [ECCE] in the district delivered via the Anganwadis. Chhatarpur has 2000+ Anganwadis that serve more than forty thousand children between the ages of 3–6.
I visited 5 Anganwadis and had the opportunity to have conversations with the Anganwadi workers, parent communities and key government officials over the course of three days. The insights that emerged leave me feeling humbled , overwhelmed and motivated in equal parts as we set out on a journey to improve early education in the district.
Children are a sign. They are a sign of hope, a sign of life, but also a ‘diagnostic’ sign, a marker indicating the health of families, society and the entire world. Wherever children are accepted, loved, cared for and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy and the world is more human. — Pope Francis
Key Insights:
1.What are the Anganwadis focused on?
The widespread belief that the Anganwadis are centres of health and nutrition for the villages and communities stands true even in the case of Chhatarpur. The Anganwadi Workers time and efforts are predominantly focussed on multiple schemes towards ensuring delivery of nutrition supplements, serving hot meals, distributing rations etc. the district is working relentlessly to tackle malnourishment and stunting and we saw the workers tracking and updating growth indicators towards this. The NFHS-5 has been an eye opener for governments to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and tackle this on war-footing.
Anganwadi workers are also engaged in community awareness programs, referral programs for children with disabilities and many other community services . Ensuring children’s exposure to enriching early learning experiences remains at the bottom of the list of priorities.
2. How is the Anganwadi Infrastructure?
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Anganwadis had considerable space with two rooms, a covered area and a little courtyard which is very different from the urban Anganwadis I have visited in cities in the past.
Most of the ‘learning’ and ‘activities’ take place in the outdoor covered area as the rooms are often crowded with stored resources and/or used for delivery of health services by the ASHA workers.
The courtyard space is used to create a ‘Poshan Vatika’ — Kitchen garden. The Anganwadi workers plant vegetables, fruit trees etc. in this space so children can experience and consume home-grown nutritious foods.
The Anganwadis however continue to struggle with access to water , electricity etc. due to which provision of hand washing facilities, functional toilets etc. remain a struggle in most cases.
3. What curriculum and pedagogy are the Anganwadis following?
While the district has a state curriculum available for early education that includes a handbook and workbooks for children , this remains unused in the Anganwadis. The books were available in only 1 out of 5 Anganwadis that I visited.
The curriculum is a well thought out set of activities that are very relevant to the context but unfortunately the Anganwadi Workers that I met are unable to put this into practice. The workers currently conduct some short play activities, get children to sing and repeat rhymes, alphabets or numbers sporadically but a structured routine for play and learning seems to be missing.
Mirror Mirror on the wall
The most prominent fixture in all the Anganwadis was a large mirror given by the department. The purpose of this mirror and the aligned activity was clearly articulated by each worker as follows:
“Every morning, we pick two children — one good and one bad, and have them stand in front of the mirror. We point out how nice and neat the good child looks. We ask all the other children who they want to be like. This inspires the bad child also to look neat. The helper then cleans up the child — Baal kangi karo, muh dholo etc. [Comb hair, wash face etc.]. We then show the bad child the mirror and from then on, the bad child will also come to the Anganwadi dressed neatly.”
While this activity stems from the intention of ensuring practices of good hygiene, it fails to ensure that every child is feeling safe and valued and can be detrimental to the social and emotional well being of the children. This left me wondering about its place in the curriculum and the failure of communicating pedagogy more effectively to the teacher during training or the lack of training all together.
At the same time, a key insight was that defined activities attached to a Teaching and Learning material [like the mirror here], that can be implemented flexibly in short durations, have a high rate of adoption in Anganwadis as opposed to day-long hour routines.
Given the time constraints of the worker ,I believe it may be more practical to view early education as a fluid process with only about 60–90 minutes of ‘instructional time’ in a day.
4. Who is the Anganwadi worker?
Many of the workers have been in their respective Anganwadis for more than a decade. They are highly overburdened with the multitude of services they have to offer and data that they need to track [no surprises there!].
They are, however, motivated to ensure that the young children in their Anganwadis are learning. In terms of capacity and training, most workers have not had training specific to ECE [Early Childhood Education] in 5+ years and while they have a rudimentary understanding of young children, they are unaware of the nuances of creating early learning experiences , defining a routine or even implementing the curriculum that is available.
This is evident in some of the things they shared:
When asked about how she teaches — ”Bacchon ko Batana hai sabkuch, woh sunthe hain , khel khel mein seekhte hain aur jo smart hain, woh dohrate hain. Gaane se bhi bahut kuch sikha sakhthe hain.” [We need to tell the children everything they listen, and learn through play and those who are smart are able to repeat it. We can also teach through songs.]
When asked about how she does assessment / reports progress — “Report waise nahi hai. Bachhe lekin bol dete hain jo unko aata hai. School mein jaake, tution mein jaake bol denge aur parents ko dikh jaata hai.” [Reports aren’t there as such. But children say what they know when they join schools or tuition and parents can see it.]
Classroom observations also indicate that all activities are completely teacher led with ‘listen and repeat’ being the default mode of teaching and learning.
5. How involved are parents?
Parents make informal visits to the Anganwadis regularly because it is situated in the village and the worker is a familiar face. All Anganwadi Workers are ‘daughter-in’laws’ of the village and are respected/loved within their communities. The worker also conducts sporadic meetings with parents called — Bal Choupal. These meetings are attended by about 10 parents each time and topics like mosquito control, nutrition, available govt. schemes etc. are discussed in these spaces. We are yet to understand the quality and frequency of these meetings.
There is much to learn and much to do!
This visit and the conversations have really helped paint a picture for me in terms of the culture, family dynamics, sense of community in the villages of Chhatarpur. The poverty, the nuances in terms of the role that language , gender, caste etc. play in defining early education were all very different from my own understanding from other states that I have worked in / observed.
Most heartening for me was to see that every Anganwadi worker truly believed in the ‘sense of freedom’ that we must foster for young children. While they did not express this in as many words, their expression of how children should be often involves — ‘let them play’ , ‘let them grow and have fun’ , ‘they need to be physically active’ , ‘they need to be safe and with their families’ , ‘let them choose what they want to learn’ etc. This is starkly different from the every expanding private pre-schools that are keen to bring ABCs, writing, uniforms and ID cards to the children. Clearly social pressures and market demand are yet to catch up here.
The struggles and burdens of the Anganwadi Worker however remain starkly similar to those that I have observed. It leaves me wondering how our work can enable and not burden, while at the same time ensuring that every child in the Anganwadis has an enriching and safe environment.
As we begin our journey in Chhatarpur , I remind myself that we have as much to learn as we have to teach.
