Patang

About the organization

Patang was started with a vision to create a society where young people take the initiative for positive social change, with a strong emphasis on developing the knowledge, skills, and confidence of these young people. Through our innovative programs, we combine both these aspects in a diverse range of activities. The successful implementation of various programs in the last 15 years has helped us redefine ourselves as a Regional Youth Support Center (RYSC). 

Education is also our core program where we have a goal to establish Patang as a resource agency in the field of education especially MLE through providing capacity building and technical support to the organization, institutions, and individuals. With this goal, we started the Multilingual Education Programme with the support of the Wipro Foundation, in 2016.

Location of work

Under this program, we run four learning centers in the school campus of Meghpal and Chhamunda schools under the Sambalpur district; and the Deogaon and Katapali schools in the Bargarh district of Odisha. 

Project update

During the COVID period, we have continued children’s learning by running learning centers in the community. But after the relaxation of COVID restrictions, all schools were open. We have again started our learning center in the campus of the respective schools in this financial year. Since last April, we have conducted many activities with children, community people, teachers, and partner organizations and institutions. 

Patang had conducted 2 meetings with teachers and discussed the Foundation of Literacy and Numeracy and the preparedness of the classroom environment for children before school reopened last April 2022. In this meeting, 40 teachers participated and shared how they prepared the school environment and tried to fulfill the aim of FLN and which kind of support we can provide them. During the meeting, we also discussed re-organizing the classroom with innovative ideas and TLM for the children. 

Besides that, in the Bargarh district, Patang has been invited as a resource organization to facilitate the making of Teaching Learning Material (TLM), as part of workshops organized by the district administration of the Katapali cluster. We also participated in a district-level planning meeting on FLN on 25th January 2023. This meeting mainly discussed the issues of the children in primary education, doing an FLN corner in the classroom, and regular monitoring visits and support to the teachers.  

Like teachers, the community also has an important role in the multilingual education of primary-level children. So involving community people in the children’s learning process we have organised Bahi Hata (Community-based mobile library) in different phases at 8 villages of Sambalpur and Bargarh districts. More than 750 children, community people, and youth participated in this process. 

On World Book Day on 23rd April, we facilitated Bahi Hata at Sakhipada (an urban slum area of Sambalpur). On this day we conducted book reading, storytelling, and many fun activities with children. 60 children, ASHA, Anganwadi workers, community people, and young people participated. Patang also involved and facilitated meetings with SMC members at Lehunipadar and Deogaon villages of Bargarh block. In these meetings, we have discussed the role of SMC members in the children’s learning process, especially in the Multilingual education process. 

Now the district education administration is also involved actively in our program. In collaboration with district administration, we have organized an awareness drive on MLE and the Right to Education from 26 to 30 December in 20 villages of Bargarh and Bhatli block.  In this drive, we run a “Sikhya Barta Ratha” that reached the villages and aware people through songs, theatre, village meetings, and film screenings on education. Close to 2,000 parents, teachers, children, and young people were reached out through this process. Mr. Saroj Bhue, BEO of Bhatli was involved and supported our team to facilitate the activities in the field. 

Patang has reached out and created awareness of MLE work by exhibiting a stall during the 19th district-level Pustak Mela organized by Gandhi Smruti Pathagar, Bargarh from 20 to 29 November 2022.  

We have also facilitated 4 language melas in the villages of Sambalpur and Bargarh districts. In these activities, we have demonstrated our TLM, facilitation process through stalls in front of the community. More than 700 children and 150 community people and teachers reached out through the process. These days teachers also facilitate some TLM with children, and community people facilitate storytelling activities with children. Children of the learning center also demonstrated their learning by exhibiting their writeups and drawings. 

During the Summer holiday, we conducted a summer camp with 95 children in the Deogaon Learning Center, where children from Chandipali, Dang, and Deogaon participated actively in different activities. The objective behind this is to continue the children’s learning during summer vacation through innovative, fun, and learning activities. 

Besides, we have conducted learning activities regularly to improve the language learning competencies of the children. Some examples of learning activities are – book reading, letter identification, word making, letter to a new word, picture card discussion, storytelling, sentence making, and in mathematics- number counting, addition, subtraction, etc. 

We also created self-learning and peer-learning opportunities for children in the centers.  Children also lead the library activities at centers and they also developed TLM for their self-learning. Under the activities of the learning center, we have provided exposure opportunities to children for their experiential learning to visit the nearest market, garden, historical places, and the Patang-organized events. 

More than 100 children from Chhamunda, Bhatli, Larabira, and Nuadahapara villages of Sambalpur want to visit the Indigenous Seed festival organized by Patang on 10th January 2023. 10 teachers and Cluster Resource Center Coordinator also participated in this festival and facilitated the language and cultural link of the organic farming process and the importance of nutritional food for children. 

To achieve our goal of establishing Patang as a resource agency in the field of education, especially MLE, Patang initiated an MLE Collective last March. Under this, we have conducted the following webinars, meetings, and other activities:

• Online webinar on “Language: Medium of Interaction and Schooling” on 19th August.
• Webinar on “Language teaching: Interaction between linguistic structure, Society and Cognition” on 10th of September. 
• Webinar on “Eco-System on MLE” on 3rd January 2023. In this webinar, we have involved teachers, educationalists, and our partners from Odisha and outside of Odisha. Besides it, Patang has organized online meetings of the collective members and discussed the work, and experiences of MLE. 
• 2nd phase MLE collective meeting from 1st December to 3rd December 2022 with 15 representatives from 5 organizations from Odisha, Maharastra, and Madhya Pradesh. The key point discussed in the meeting is the plan of the collective, the design of the fellowship model, the capacity building of partners on MLE, etc. 
• A convention on MLE in collaboration with Unnati Organisation at Wardha, Maharastra from 20th and 21st January 2023.
• On 28th March we conducted an online meeting of collective members. In this meeting, Dr. Rita Mishra (Managing trustee of Patang and convener of the MLE collective) introduced new partners, presented the one-year journey of the Collective, and discussed the six-month action plan. 

Two team members from the Zep organization, Akola, Maharashtra visited our education program from 1st July to 11th July 2022. During their visit, we oriented our program approach and methodology. They also visited our learning centers and community activities. We have visited Gramothhan in Sonepur and discussed with the Gramothhan team regarding the future partnership and collaboration in MLE works. We also visited their field and interacted with children. We also conducted a meeting with the Maee team, Uttarakhand through online mode. In this meeting, we discussed their work with children and how Patang will support them. 

Location of the programme

In this initiative, Patang works in Jujomura and Maneswar blocks of Sambalpur district and Bargarh block of Bargarh district. In total, we are working in 7 Panchayats from two districts. These panchayats have around 50 villages consisting of around 50 schools.

Learning and challenges

Plan for the next 1 to 3 years

As Patang evolves into a resource organization in the field of multilingual education, we have proposed to work on the following things in this proposed project period. We will set up an Education Resource hub to provide space for teachers, educationalists, young people, and community people to come and access resources on MLE. This center will design and ensure the availability of both online and offline resources to schools, teachers, parents, educationists, and other stakeholders. This center acts proactively in enabling the community of practice.

We also run 1 learning center to ensure the learning of the children from class 1 to class 3 directly. We will directly work to practice and demonstrate our process, and approach with children, teachers, the community, and other stakeholders in this center to ensure the language competencies of the primary-level children through Multilingual Education. In other centers, we will be ensured by involving the teachers. We will visit the field and support the teachers in implementing the MLE approach in their respective schools.  

Besides that, based on our learning from the various training and workshops and field experiences we will consolidate and re-look at our training process and plan to keep new education policy as well as present needs in the school system. The course modules will be on language development, multilingual education approach, pedagogy, learning theory, Language learning process and competencies of children, curriculum design and assessment, etc. This module will be run through an organized 10-day orientation program with teachers. 

We also created a structure/program to develop capacity and support partner organizations to implement the MLE approach in their field. In this project, we have continued the dialogue, and field visits to organizations like Gramothhan (Sonepur, Odisha), Maee (Haridwar, Uttrakhand), and LIFI (Delhi) for future partnership and collective work in the field of MLE.