FULL MARKS - Special KIDS, extra-special GURU

Archana Rodrigues is the only academic from Maharashtra to have won a Guruvar award for her commitment to inclusive education

Sharmila Ganesan-Ram | TNN

Kids don’t have to tell a carrot from a radish in order to be able to join this small school tucked away in a leafy residential colony of Dombivli. Unlike those institutions, which grill teething infants and nervous parents alike in the hope of a hundred per cent SSC success rate, St Joseph’s does not subject its toddler applicants to interviews before admissions. “After all, everyone has the right to education,’’ says Archana Rodrigues, the principal, who calls the hype around SSC an “overplayed aura’’ and given a choice, would rather encourage the weak, slow learners—the kind who score 37 per cent with grace marks and then grow up to perhaps shine in unexpected ways.

It’s this instinct that, years ago, made Rodrigues opt for the arts stream despite scoring well in her tenth-standard exams and also induced her to replace her longstanding dream of ‘being a magistrate and changing the world’ with that of ‘being a teacher and changing a classroom’, instead. “It’s child’s play to teach an intelligent student; the true challenge of the educator is to teach the kid who cannot easily follow what you want him to learn,’’ discovered this champion of inclusive education in the course of her career. Last month, for her decade-long efforts in this field, Rodrigues received a surprise call summoning her to Delhi, where she was directed to a premium Club suite at the Taj. After all, she had been chosen from among 15,728 candidates as the Outstanding Teacher for children with special needs, at the Guruvar awards, recently instituted to recognise the critical role of teachers in shaping the community. Rodrigues is the only teacher from Maharashtra to have won the award, for which the nominations came from students, ex-students, parents and colleagues all over India.

The trophy, which was handed over by Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, stands tall on her office table. For the past few days, in the glow of this trophy, Rodrigues has been attending incessant calls. She’s also been contemplating ways to invest her cash prize of Rs 10 lakh in the revamp of the school, perhaps another new yellow school bus. But the most important reassurance that she finds in the award is that “more and more teachers will be motivated to join the profession which is otherwise associated with bad payscales and poor working conditions’’.

“A teacher has to emit positive energy, harbour love for kids and believe in oneself,’’ says Rodrigues, who, during her post-graduation in counselling, realised the need for counselling kids with special needs. As there were very few professionals working in this field, she decided to enroll for SNDT’s Master’s degree in special education. Here, as part of her research thesis she developed a training module to impart sex education to mentally challenged children, which was selected for presentation at the National Conference at Dehradun.

Sensitising the special kids’ parents (who tend to be in denial mode) and society towards their needs ranks high in her list of priorities. Rodrigues cites the instance of one woman who was extremely unhappy with the treatment meted out to her Down’s syndrome-affected, hyperactive son by his special school—the teacher would lock him up and beat him. So the woman decided to enrol herself in a teachers’ training session and now confidently takes care of her son, who studies in St Joseph’s. “She even donated part of her first paycheck to our school,’’ recalls Rodrigues, who has always championed the cause of “breaking down institutions for special kids and going in for an inclusive set-up where both regular and special kids can mingle and learn from each other’’.

But turning a regular school into one that advocates an inclusive education system in 2006 was not without its share of teething troubles. When her school started enrolling special kids, many of the regular students dropped out. Parents of ‘regular’ kids raised apprehensions, the most popular one (“and the most irrational one’’) being that this inclusion would be detrimental to the progress of their wards. During a PTA meeting when parents raised the usual fears, Rodrigues recalls a parent of a regular child challenging the argument by citing the example of her own ward. “The mother said that the kind of understanding and maturity her child had developed over the past few years in the company of special kids was exemplary,’’ recalls Rodrigues.

Within the school, which banks chiefly on parental references to get more students, Rodrigues has observed a very healthy mutual learning relationship between both the groups. “During picnics the special kids, who are slightly older than regular students of their batch, are very protective of them. Also, they volunteer at various sports events and this interaction boosts their confidence,’’ she says. The special kids are acquainted with the ways of the outside world through weekly visits to public places; they are even taught cooking and elementary finance. Special kids, Rodrigues concludes, are “non-judgmental’’ unlike the regular ones who “expect you to go out of your way.’’

The 36-year-old teacher sounds a bit like Aamir Khan of Taare Zameen Par when she says the need is not to evolve the curriculum but to evolve better teaching methods. When the movie was released, she received a lot of calls from students telling her that it reminded them of her. Rodrigues takes it as a compliment. “In fact, I want to invite Aamir to my school and share his suggestions,’’ she says. That, for now, qualifies as the school’s own special need.

CLASS ACT Rodrigues is planning to invest her cash prize in a new yellow school bus