Activities
Welcome to RACHANA - a resource centre and design lab at the centre of excellence in teacher education, TISS, Mumbai. RACHANA is visualised as a space for the professional development of teachers, student teachers and faculty of education. It is meant to create a common forum wherein practitioners take responsibility for their own professional development. We recognise that learning is socially constructed and takes place through interaction with others and the ERC aims to provide opportunities for such interactions.
On this virtual space of RACHANA we promote the use of educational resources (both digital and physical) in our classrooms. The virtual RACHANA would be useful for teachers, students, parents and whoever is interested in teaching and learning with educational resources. Here we share various digital resources, annotated lists of selected physical and digital resources, interesting short videos tutorials on some of the use of resources, useful literature around resources and announcements of our upcoming public events. We would also like to hear from you about your experiences and queries.
Events
We arrange various seminars, workshops, courses etc. for teachers, educational researchers and everyone interested in education. Look for this space for upcoming events.
School Synergy workshop series
School Synergy workshop series have been established since 2018, to build a platform for engagement and exchange of ideas between teacher educators and researchers engaged at University with the practitioners and teachers engaged in schools and other formal and informal learning spaces. The workshops are held every week on Saturday from 3 to 4 pm. The sessions are designed to be interactive in nature and includes engagement in some hands-on or group activity with the participants. The sessions usually revolve around some resources which may or may not be digital but the discussion is focused on how students can engage in meaningful and interactive activities using the resources and what aspects need to be considered in selecting the resources and the affordances and challenges in using a particular resource. While initially the focus was intended to be on the subject of language, Maths and Sciences, a variety of themes and topics have been explored beyond the subject including poetry, puppetry and inclusion.
Eventually, we hope to develop professional learning communities of teachers in the form of “Subject Forums”. The forums will support the in-service professional development of teachers by seeding networks and communities comprising teachers, teacher educators and researchers. These forums can take the shape of monthly meetings of subject teachers wherein they reflect on their teaching practices in the classroom, plan for their teaching, develop resources and benefit from collective readings and discussions around the year. This may be further supported by forming mobile-based chat groups using Whatsapp or Telegram App wherein teachers may share the challenges faced in classrooms, engage in deepening their knowledge of the subject matter and become aware of the various professional development events in which they can participate. TISS faculty members from different subject areas may visit the schools periodically for co-teaching, interacting with students to understand specific difficulties, organise short workshops on difficult topics, run summer/ winter camps for students in the specific subject topic which is co-designed by the school teachers. Participation in these subject forums will provide access to a range of resources, domain expertise and relevant research that is useful for practitioners.
Leveraging school synergy seminars, we plan to build close relationships with a few schools and institutions to support the teachers in selecting and using digital/non-digital resources, action research, professional development of teachers as well as internships and observations through the students enrolled in various programs at the centre. The schools agreeing to be a collaborative partner can seek advice and suggestions for grade-specific, lesson-specific digital resources mapped to the curriculum on request like videos, worksheets, interactive apps curated from repositories.
link for registration - http://bit.ly/SSWS-33-ii
PODCAST series on NEP 2020
Podcast Series based National Education Policy 2020 is created through the efforts of students of MA Education course at the Centre for Education Innovation and Action research. Different themes related to NEP 2020 have been discussed with renowned faculty in conversation with the MA education students. The aim of these podcasts is to analyse the affordances as well as the challenges in the implementation of NEP 2020 at the ground as well as analysing historically how these themes have emerged to be important and included in NEP 2020.
EdTech Weekly: Voices from the Ground
This is a multilingual podcast series of twelve episodes created and disseminated during the COVID-19 pandemic between April 2020 and July 2020. An important aim was to understand the needs arising from the ground in order to respond to the unprecedented situation in informed ways. Under this initiative, we gathered information from some of the key stakeholders in school education. The interviewees include seasoned school leaders, teachers, teacher educators and DIET faculty members from urban and rural contexts across India. Every week a practitioner was interviewed on educational challenges, innovations and interventions happening on the ground in response to school closure due to the pandemic. Interviews were conducted in English as well as in different Indian languages.
Teaching and Learning Consortium (TALC) 2020 - Webinar Series
CETE, TISS in partnership with Department of Education, University of Mumbai, provided online support to students of M.Ed, and teacher educators from affiliated colleges through weekly webinars on relevant topics from the MEd curriculum of University of Mumbai, over a period of 3 months from April to June 2020. Subsequently, a community of practice has been set up to further the discussions and to share ideas and practice. All the sessions conducted are available on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/CETEITISS/featured) and also on the NCTE website.
Public Talks
The centre arranges public talks on diverse themes around education from time to time. Here are the recordings of some selected talks.
Educational Design: We offer Educational Design course / workshop to teachers, educators, curriculum designers and introduce to “Design Thinking” methodology for creating meaningful, pedagogically valid teaching-learning resources. The workshop/course aims to help participants: (1) Challenge their assumptions and discover new ways of exploring, creating and curating tools and resources for addressing teaching-learning problems. There is focus on analysing their own context and identifying affordances and limitations of digital learning therein. (2) Engage in constructing and repurposing lesson plans that can be implemented/taught using constructivist pedagogies and pedagogy content knowledge (PCK)
Educational Design Workshop 2019
Educational resources or Teaching Learning Materials (TLMs) can provide a great way to engage students with difficult concepts in an interesting way. If students are given a chance to explore a well designed TLM they usually learn enough to understand the content in a much deeper way. Teachers need to ensure that students are learning the intended concept and then formalize the knowledge gained by students by providing terms and formulae and so on. Well designed resources lend themselves well to constructive pedagogies. Teachers can always prepare resources of their use but some resources are prepared by experts in the field and tried and tested over years. This page lists some of the physical resources along with their basic information. You are welcome to visit ERC to explore these resources or you can watch videos if such videos are available. You can buy some of the resources for your school if such budgets are available or you can make some of the resources yourself for your classroom. Here is a list of some of the most useful resources.
Books
The resource centre houses a diverse collection of books for teachers, teacher educators, student teachers and school students. The collection includes books across educational disciplines like philosophy of education, psychology, sociology, research methods as well as books on pedagogy of school subjects (mathematics, language, science, social studies, art). We hope the resource centre becomes a space that teachers and students from nearby communities can access for borrowing resources. A special highlight of this collection is a burgeoning number of books on literature and children’s literature from independent publishers curated with a lens of diversity and inclusion.
We hope to spotlight 5 books every month from our collection here:
Theme: Constitutional Values
Physical Resources for Teaching Languages
Physical Resources for Teaching Social Science
Physical Resources for Teaching Science
Physical Resources for Teaching Mathematics
With advancement in digital technology and increasing availability of computers and smartphones digital educational resources have become another key area which all teachers should be aware of to teach their subject. In fact knowledge about the digital educational resources, best way to use them and their advantages and limitations is known as ‘technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). TPCK is considered an essential aspect of teachers’ knowledge by some researchers. Here we are listing some of the main portals where you can find useful resources.
It is important to remember that not all digital resources lend themselves to constructivist pedagogies. Our own digital resources, developed at CETE, are designed by researchers in education where active learning is encouraged along with collaboration and authentic context for students.
If you are interested in research and reports on digital learning, educational technology or TPCK, here is some key literature on this topic.
Below are links of some educational magazines/periodicals.
For Teachers:
For Children:
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