Parents, Partnerships and the Pandemic: How we moved from ‘What now?’ to ‘Together, we can’!
Building strong partnerships with parents
Editor’s Note: This piece is a thought piece on the state of early childhood as a result of Covid-19 which accompanies the launch of Early Insights’ report by the author. We thank Shruti for a reflection on the topic and how she is seeing the sector through one of the most significant upheavals in a generation. You can access the Early Insights report here.
For over 30 years, The Akanksha Foundation (https://www.akanksha.org) has worked with diverse communities. In partnership with local government, using schools as centres of innovation, Akanksha schools strive to create constructive partnerships between students, parents, schools, and community to ensure children are in a supportive and nurturing environment at school and at home.
Akanksha is known for powering consistent improvements in learning outcomes, attendance and engagement. Parents as Partners has been a core pillar of all schools run by the foundation. At the same time, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to reimagine the role of parents and build their capacity to co-design learning for children in Early Years. This is the story of how we rode the pandemic wave by strengthening the parent-educator bond through our schools on cloud.
As the pandemic tore through Pune and Mumbai in 2020 we had to focus our attention to ensure continued learning in Early Years.
First the central team focused on key shifts needed to meet the emerging needs. They mobilised task-forces that worked on helping parents with employment options.The team and provided ration kits with basic nutritional items. This also ensured continuity between families and the school teams.
As that task was in progress we realised we needed to
- Reimagine channels of communication and capacity to suit a virtual school model
- Convince parents to be agents of play and focus on the five areas of holistic development: socio-emotional well being, foundational literacy & numeracy, motor skill development and creativity
- Leverage home as the enabling environment to ensure parents could partner with teachers and get children to apply their learning in a real-world context
“In online Parent Class, I have learnt different ways to keep my child engaged through play, different strategies to teach story narration, English listening/speaking and Math concepts. I am confident to teach her at home now and I can see my child learning and growing.” — Santosh Thakur, Grade 1 Parent, Akanksha School in Pimpri, Pune
Parents were handicapped by limited exposure to educational opportunities themselves and financial constraints, being daily-wage workers who further struggled to make ends meet due to a drop in employment opportunities during the pandemic.
The team deliberated on providing solutions to ongoing challenges of digital access and building parent capacity. Two initiatives took shape which would not only complement the core principles of the Akanksha design, but also help the team sustain efforts of educators and parents in continuing learning at home.
The Radio Program:
The Akanksha Foundation, in collaboration with The Kshamtalya Foundation (https://www.kshamtalaya.org), Vidya Vani (a local radio channel) and Rising On Air (https://www.risingacademies.com/onair), ran a 30 minute radio program 5 days a week from Jun ’20 to Mar ’21 as an adaptive response to the COVID-19 scenario. Through radio, we hoped to overcome the digital divide as we engaged students and parents in meaningful learning experiences through the approach of play, songs and stories. The program spearheaded by Akanksha Parents in Pune was organised by school teams. WhatsApp was used as the tech platform to share student responses and close the loop of learning. The joy, enthusiasm and excitement of stakeholders involved in this program was evident from the 659 student responses that we received over the span of a year.
‘Students and parents are very eager and excited to do radio activities. Students are keen on listening to radio episodes everyday. Even parents love to listen to their child’s voice on apki awaj (Friday episodes that highlight student voice). As a facilitator I feel very proud when I get several responses from them.’ -Early Years Teacher, The Akanksha Foundation
The E-Pathshaala Program:
Akanksha partnered with Rocket Learning (https://www.rocketlearning.org) to provide a simple tech-enabled, home-based learning solution to continue holistic development for the youngest members of the community. This program across 17 schools in Pune and Mumbai aimed to impact child learning outcomes as well as parental engagement and knowledge about the importance of ECE. Combined efforts of this structured tech program and a supportive educator, allowed us to meaningfully engage 60+% parents and children in their first year of school life.
A research study conducted on this program (which was open to multiple school types) showed that 53% of Akanksha households engaged in the E-Paathshaala content regularly, as against 35% of the Balwadi (local government run schools) households participating in the program and 28% of the households not participating in the program.
Both these initiatives have helped to strengthen the sense of community and partnership between key stakeholders.
As schools reopen, and after seeing parents and educators collaborate our thoughts are turning to where we can go from here. Please access the research summary on the E-Pathshala program here. We would love to hear how you are thinking about parental engagement in 2022.
Shruti Manerker is an Instructional Specialist, Early Childhood Education at The Akanksha Foundation, India. Experienced educator with a demonstrated history of working in non-profit organisation management, you can reach her @shrutimanerker on Twitter for a chat on education in low resource communities.
