26th August 2021 Gurgaon: Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises, partnered with KATHA India to promote story based learning in Grades 1 to 5, increasing reading and comprehension competency in the formative years.
This initiative addresses one of the urgent national mission under NEP 2020 - attainment of ‘Universal Foundational Literacy’ as well as ‘ART Integrated Pedagogy’.
The first phase of 300 Million Alliance (KATHA’s objective to reach out to 300 million underprivileged children in India) was initiated this year in April. The collaboration aims to use Story Pedagogy, eBooks, activities and Teaching-Learning materials through the 300M Portal: tadaa.katha.org / learn.katha.org.
More than 33,000 students from underprivileged background (Grades I to V) of 173 Satya Bharti Primary schools spread across five states of India will benefit from this partnership. Over 100 stories both in audio and video format in English, Hindi and Tamil will be used by the language teachers of Satya Bharti Schools. Learning from these stories will be supplemented by various group activities and worksheets to develop the students’ critical and creative thinking, comprehension proficiency and decision making. Further on, all teachers will be trained to take forward ‘ART Integrated Pedagogy’ by using KATHA Resources in their respective subjects.
Emphasizing on the importance of reading, Mr. Antony Nellissery, Chief School Excellence, Bharti Foundation said, “Children are the future, we at Satya Bharti Schools have been working towards providing the best of education to our students. These new resources will add-on to our existing innovative teaching-learning tools. The formative years of a child is very important and story-telling complimented with activities will further enhance the process.”
Bharti Foundation is committed to ensure that learning remains a continued process for our students and teachers. These resources will augment are existing curriculum and compliment the language teaching-learning. It will also help our teachers’ enrich their integrated pedagogical techniques which will further percolate down to our student’s overall growth.
Rajesh Soundararajan, Chief Sustainability Officer, Katha-300M says, "We strongly believe that the Bharti Foundation-Katha partnership is a significant milestone in the 300M Citizen's Challenge journey. Together, we plan to educate and empower over 33,000 children and 100s of facilitators through storytelling with an anytime, anywhere 300M learning portal. This is yet another step in our mission to create a nation of reader-leaders and empower and uplift women and communities at large with the Bharti Team."
About KATHA INDIA
Started in 1988 with a magazine for children from the underserved communities, Katha’s work spans the literacy to literature continuum. By seamlessly connecting grassroots work in education and urban resurgence, Katha brings children living in poverty into reading and quality education. Over the past three decades, through its many programmes, Katha has helped over one million children help themselves out of poverty.
Katha has several programmes in place to help check poverty across the country. Katha Lab School, Katha’s Slum Resurgence Initiative (SRI), Katha English Academy (KENGA), Katha School of Entrepreneurship (KSE), etc. are some of the many programmes Katha runs to ensure the child receives holistic learning. Katha’s I Love Reading campaign is another initiative undertaken to achieve this. ILR.
About Bharti Foundation
Bharti Foundation was set up in the year 2000 as the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises. It implements and supports programs in primary, secondary and higher education as well as sanitation. Since 2006, the flagship Satya Bharti School Program has been providing free quality education to thousands of underprivileged children in 183 schools in rural areas across six states, with a focus on the girl child. The impact of quality education has been scaled-up by transferring the learning and good practices of this program to 2,45,556 students studying in 791 partner government schools across 13 states and union territories, through the Satya Bharti Quality Support Program, since 2013. Satya Bharti Abhiyan, the sanitation initiative started in 2014, has benefitted 2,17,129 beneficiaries by improving sanitation conditions in the districts of Punjab, providing access to toilets and by fostering behavioral change in communities. Together, these programs have cumulatively impacted over 2 million community members.
https://bhartifoundation.org/
