A Dream for a Cause – Project Kanavu
“The name of my project is “Kanavu”, which means “dream” in Tamil. This is a project I hope will achieve a dream of mine, which is to see students across India having a basic level of education and life skills which they can use to move forward in life.”
– Adhavan S Kumar, Grade 10, Neev Academy
During his schooling, Adhavan has noticed that the Indian education system is outdated and far too rigid. He found the subjects to be merely taught from textbooks and that no attempts are made to help students understand or apply knowledge. 90% of academic material is theoretical knowledge and practical application finds little space in curriculums. According to the ACERS 2018 standardized test only half of all grade 5 students could read a grade 2 text fluently even before COVID. In the National achievement survey of 2017 only 45.2% of students were able to achieve the targeted performance levels across subjects and classes. After this observation, he understood that a new approach that improves student interest and learning capacity must be adopted in pedagogy. On top of this, important life skills like critical thinking or problem solving are not reinforced in school, depriving them of crucial information they need for their futures and maybe even making the process of learning more boring. This is creating a vicious cycle of poverty and a lack of proper education/learning.
It is in order to tackle this problem that Adhavan started his personal project, Project Kanavu. He aims to team students with STEM subjects in a comprehensive manner that emphasizes understanding a topic rather than memorizing it.
He started the project by mentoring through sessions with the Champions of Change program with TribesforGOOD and Inqui-lab Foundation. Here, Adhavan got to take lessons about communication and helping students when it comes to conveying one’s thoughts efficiently and effectively. Some of the takeaways from this experience allowed him to shape his own class were the interactive sessions that depended on the students answering questions. He learned that oftentimes it’s easier to finish the session while the students remain quiet, however this does not guarantee attention from the students therefore motivating and checking in with them constantly is crucial especially on an online medium.
He then began his Project Kanavu by tutoring Tamil – speaking students online. The project offers tuition classes for math, science and english to children anywhere between 6th and 9th grade. The lesson plans incorporate visual aids, questions and real life problems/explanations in order to develop a more wholesome understanding of topics. As of right now Adhavan has taken a total of 5 classes online with 4 students, under the Project Kanavu. Classes on math and biology are being taken once a week every monday in preparation for the students’ coming exams and is being organized by a partner NGO, Sevalay. The topics will be taken from the textbook and modified to be taught according to the students prior knowledge and learning capability.
In the future, Project Kanavu will be further extended to create small workshops about critical thinking, the ability to identify and solve a problem using existing knowledge while making connections between concepts and information. Using his classes as a foundation Adhavan will build a workshop and eventually present it to a large enough audience of underprivileged Tamil children who are unknowingly deprived of future opportunities because of a lacking system of education and improper teaching methods.
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