What Is Foundational Literacy?
Remember writing pages after pages of this? Writing 26 alphabets and 100 numbers was the same goal for all of us who started learning. And it took all of us different time lengths to achieve it; different mediums of instruction and education followed —formal for some and informal for others.
Something that seems trivial and learned at a young age is undeniably a ‘skill’ that we take for granted. Yet, our entire learning progress relies on this. If you know the alphabet and can count, you can do pretty much everything.
This ability of a student or learner is called foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Therefore, a school’s curriculum is designed to train students to be able to identify and use these skills in their daily lives. This is most of what comprises early learning.
What Does NEP Say About Foundational Literacy?
The NEP 2020 strives to accord the highest priority to foundational literacy & numeracy for students by the time they are in grade 3. According to the new pedagogical hierarchy set, it includes a five year focus period on foundational studies for child development.
This base is named the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) which promises holistic development of the child. The ECCE framework would be regulated by a new pedagogical curriculum set by NCERT. Educators will be specially trained, and the framework will be helpful to parents as well.
A study investigating the literacy rate of India between 1987-2017 tells us how the gender gap in literacy varies in different age cohorts. India shows substantial development over these years to close the gender gap in literacy in age cohort 6-14 years. Thus, it’s seemingly on track to achieve universal literacy among children by 2030.
The progress is often shadowed by the wide gender disparity in adult literacy rates. However, the focus here is on literacy and not how well utilized foundational literacy acts as the backbone to create educated adults with no gender disparity in education.
“Accordingly, all State/UT governments will immediately prepare an implementation plan for attaining universal foundational literacy and numeracy in all primary schools, identifying stage-wise targets and goals to be achieved by 2025, and closely tracking and monitoring the progress of the same.” The pandemic may have been an unprecedented event. Yet foreseeing an education system achieve this mammoth task even without a pandemic by 2025 is utopian at best.
What’s The Ground Reality Of Foundational Literacy?
Talking to primary grade teachers of an all-girls school based in rural Jharkhand, I tried to understand the reality of foundational literacy for students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The challenge is not limited to the lack of resources for online learning but also to accommodate young girls in a virtual classroom. There are different learning needs in a classroom, a lack of support from an informally educated family, and no direct exposure to a safe or fun learning environment!
The teachers say it has been a challenge to keep students’ interest in learning alive. Only being able to reach out to them for two hours a day, six days a week, from behind the screen is not enough. Sometimes they doubt themselves when they aren’t able to deliver instructions adequately; it’s almost like putting up an improv show each time for an audience with an attention span of 8 seconds.
They are prioritizing keeping these skills alive rather than finishing the syllabus. They engage parents in the learning process by giving students activities that they need to involve their parents in. Learning about a family member and writing about them in English or budgeting the groceries that come to their home.
Learning with parents has become the norm for these students. Learning a new word in English is a joy for the student and their parents! Involving parents in stabilizing foundational literacy for young girls is a great way to show the immediate perks of learning other than convincing them of a brighter future.
Position Of Girls In The Foundational Literacy Scenario
Investing in children’s education throughout the pandemic is a burden for many parents. Keeping them at home and training them in labour that contributes to family income is easier. Especially for a girl child, whose education will bear lesser economic returns (because they would be asked to marry as soon as possible before they can even start planning a career), why should parents invest in early education?
They have designated their daughters’ fate to be a married woman bound with duties to her family. Parents do not imagine their daughters going to jobs and pay for the family, and this bias starts showing early. Girls’ education is a debate for the entire period of learning. Policy recommendations should focus on access to education, especially foundational literacy, to minority communities.
Limitations Of NEP
Besides, building an education system largely depends on how adept the learner is at reading, writing, and counting. While these terms are shoved under the carpet of ECCE, words like cognitive development and socio-emotional-ethical development come up. I strive to understand why a simpler language is deemed counterintuitive in a policy draft.
The promises of NEP 2020 sway the readers away with magnanimous promises but excludes a huge number of students from reaping benefits. It’s amazing that the document doesn’t focus on identifying learning and cognitive disabilities while talking about foundational literacy.
Instead, the NEP 2020 treats disability as a drawback that alienates students from the education system. Specially trained educators to teach disabled students but no universal training for educators to identify students with special needs.
A student may need extra attention for different causes— mental illness, physical impairment, delayed cognitive development and learning disability. The NEP only identifies blind and students who use wheelchairs to serve as a representative statistic for the document.
Girls often don’t feel comfortable and safe going to school premises where there is a lack of resources to aid healthy menstruation. Lack of sanitary napkins, clean toilets, and a safe environment to convey their discomfort or pain during menstruation. The policies should focus on infrastructural makeovers as well to be able to accommodate the most basic needs of students.
NEP wishes to remove language barriers between teachers and students by making use of digital aids. The approach is questionable on the grounds of recognition of language diversity in a country. A native Sadri speaker who is a 4th-grade student crying and being angry at learning or speaking in Hindi is only one of the countless examples ignored by the pedagogy curriculum.
What Can We Expect Post-Pandemic?
The pandemic ensuing virtual learning has reinforced the importance of a safe learning environment. Lack of time, lack of study space, lack of accessibility to resources, lack of internet, and lack of electricity are some of the stumbling blocks students have faced.
Young girls are expected to partake in domestic chores no matter their age. Despite the presence of a capable elder man in the house, it’s the job of a girl child to prioritize domestic responsibilities and later work with her studies as and when possible.
The pandemic would be over someday, schools would reopen, yet some students will continue to be deprived of prerequisites to efficient learning. In addition, studies have found girls are struggling to access digital devices owing to male ownership trends in families. This questions the possibility of girl children returning to school.
Some students will grow up with unidentified needs that will never find recognition in public spaces. Disabled students with needs different from an average student, especially from minority communities, continue to be sidelined in a pandemic and by the NEP.
All students by grade 3 should be able to read, write, and count. The lack of it is a problem for the education system to build itself. With the NEP’s highly ambitious multidisciplinary curriculum, lack of foundational literacy is a key problem!
There can’t be one solution to a problem that has multiple facets to it. Similarly, achieving foundational literacy is a goal the country’s government should invest in heavily, set a realistic goal, and have multiple strategies at work. Revision of guidelines, frameworks, and deadlines for a post-pandemic era of education is necessary.
The author is a Kaksha Correspondent as a part of writers’ training program under Kaksha Crisis.