Learning is ...

At the core of IEC is its focus on
how learning should be understood.

Learning to Learn

Learning is an integral part of living, a natural process, that begins much before children enter school. However, when a child walks into school, their existing knowledge and capabilities are often ignored.

The emphasis on developing early literacy and numeracy without simultaneously strengthening children’s core abilities to learn and develop multiple abilities, often results in struggles for both teachers and students.

The outcomes from schooling certainly shouldn’t be focused on transmission of facts but rather on “learning to learn.”

All children learn. All children deserve schools where learning can be enhanced, where they can discover and co-create knowledge.

The need to review our priorities and expectations from education as a society is long overdue. We need to question the fundamental beliefs underpinning schooling system.

Personalized Learning

Learning is a creative, dynamic and complex process. Each learner interacts with their environment and society to construct meaning through one’s own lived experiences.

Every child entering school brings along questions, observations, imagination, perspective and varied capabilities. To facilitate learning opportunities then requires a holistic understanding of a child.

Breaking away from the ‘one size fits all’ model, necessitates change in classroom processes that enable every student to learn at her own pace and do not equate speed with intelligence. Rather offering every student varied opportunities to strengthen their innate capabilities to learn.

This calls for a metamorphosis of the assessments, which need to be repurposed to understanding how students learn.

The social interactions and environment around a child are a part of her everyday learning process and when included as part of schooling , create a wholistic learning experience.

Interconnectedness between life and learning

The environment surrounding us offers multitudes of experiences to enrich our knowledge and understanding. The everyday sky, visible to all, gets painted in different hues throughout the day. A child colouring the sky will not paint it only blue if offered the opportunity to use her imagination and observation of nature.

Nature has been the source of both knowledge and innovation, from mapping of the sun’s travel in the sky to tell time, to prediction of monsoon, to finding new routes across the globe. The discovery of knowledge has been led by human ability to explore, imagine, and problem solve.

Even the various cultural traditions invented by the different civilisations were created from the need to code knowledge and pass it to generations through stories and rituals. A celebration of a festival is an opportunity to learn about history, art, science and math through engaging with the food, clothing, and storytelling ceremonies.

A young child engages with their social and natural world to absorb the spoken languages, rhythm of trees, sounds of animals, and aroma of adventure and games.

Their engagement is guided by their curiosity, empathy and needs. They seek to know the world around them.

Inside a learning-centered classroom

Learning activities are planned by the teachers in a manner where every student can participate and understand the inter-relationships between subjects. Learning to count, add, write is developed as students explore the concept of trees in a holistic manner. They learn to speak and write their observations about trees in their environment, integrate their cultural perspective on nature during open discussions. They learn to categorize by comparing trees based on size, strength, production value etc. They practice counting, addition, measurement to do a quantitative analysis of trees around them. When the classroom opens to include the children’s immediate environment, every experience is imbued with purpose and meaning.

At the core of IEC is its focus on how learning should be understood.