Unnati Institute For Social And Educational Change

Unnati ISEC, a registered organization, having valid legal certificates for accepting domestic and foreign funds. Unnati ISEC works for the promotion Read moreof literacy and language development of the children from primary grades in the tribal area, where the language of the community is different from the state’s official language. The focus is on the development of the pedagogy for literacy and language development, which includes teaching-learning methods and material, creating spaces and culture where children’s language and culture has a dignified place in school processes, which include textbooks, storybooks and student-teacher interactions.  Our work of literacy and language development is based on the approach of Mother-tongue based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) which stresses using a child’s mother tongue as a rich resource for language development in primary schools which is a foundation of all the education. We are doing this work in the Akola district of Maharashtra, India for the last 6 years for the Korku tribe, a population of which is more than two lakhs in Melghat, which consists of the Amravati and Akola district. The aim of the work is to guide and help the government and non-government agencies in its effort to provide meaningful education to thousands of children from tribal and nomadic communities having a different language than Marathi and who are at a high risk of dropping out of school. More details available at http://unnati-isec.org/ Components of our work are as follows: 4 Learning centres in 4 tribal villages as an experimental space where we develop and implement the pedagogy for Mother-tongue based literacy and language development which could be used with children anywhere in the Korku speaking geography. Creation of text material in Korku language featuring in it the tribal people’s culture, daily life events. Creating children's literature in their Mother Tongue Library programme for advanced learner children who have developed minimum reading skills in the earlier classes of the learning centre For the development of our own understanding of multilingualism and learning, we have a Language Study group, members of which reads articles on the language and learning followed by discussion. In collaboration with the linguistics department of Mumbai University, we offered a course “Language in schools” on the University’s Kalina campus. Development of this course as a regular part is underway.