"Balamitra Tribal Education programme is four years old and it has matured in its learnings and experiences with tribal children in the last four years. Created with the intention of enabling the children of remote tribal villages with primary education where they have no access to any, the Balamitra Education Programme under Samata has successfully progressed in its philosophy of providing a cultural and knowledge based education for tribal children. The Waldorf philosophy and method of teaching has the objective of integrating traditional nature based knowledge with pedagogic innovativeness and creativity for children. It also provides a platform for the tribal youth, who are introduced to the alternative method of teaching that brings forth creativity and joy, to gain experience to the joys of creative teaching as community teachers.

Balamitra programme has 40 community schools in some of the interior and hill-top villages of Visakhapatnam district. Our education programme is implemented in the scheduled area of Visakhapatnam district in north coastal Andhra Pradesh. The adivasi communities with whom we work belong to tribes like Bagata, Konda dora, Nookadora, Khond, Kutia, Porjah and Valmikis. They are single teacher schools where they handle children of different levels, although the number of children is less. The teacher is a young boy or girl from the same village or community or from neighbouring villages.

We are making a serious effort to bring more girls into our schools and ensure that they continue beyond our schools. From class III or IV, depending on the capacity of the teacher, we take the children to the nearest residential school and ensure that the children get admissions into government schools. We follow up with the families to ensure that the children do not drop out from these residential schools. Each school has a vidya committee from among the Gram Sabha members who take responsibility for facilitation of Balamitra Badis.

Resource Centre for Tribal Education:

Samata education programme started because we found that in many hill-top villages there were no schools and the community was demanding for this. Presently, we found that merely running a community school with barely any pedagogic inputs was not bringing much result. So the need to bring in a quality was felt. The search for the kind of a quality was what led to the adaptation of the waldorf methodology and philosophy. However, the discomfort in merely following an alien teaching and content further led us to start exploring a system of integrating waldorf education with local tribal knowledge.

In order to bridge the gap and to build our own team of teachers and trainers, we felt that the best way to do this was to set up a resource centre with a functioning school.

Our Resource Center at Sagar Nagar,which was the result of the thought that went into building an efficient teacher team, now houses a library with a collection of storybooks, reference books and tribal songs and stories in various languages. More than 100 books were purchased for the Resource center as well as the field school libraries.

Teacher Training:

As the teachers are tribal youth with barely any education qualifications or exposure, the effectiveness of our education programme based on the goals we set for ourselves, depends, to a large extent, on the training and field guidance to teachers. Since we expect quality and relevance to tribal culture being a strong focus in our Balamitra schools, we developed an in-house training team and methodology. The team consists of teacher-trainers who teach at the Visakhapatnam resource centre and the field coordination team of Samata and CBO’s. Initially in the first three years we devised a quarterly training for all the 40 schools at the resource centre followed by field visits by the Samata and CBO team. The training was also undertaken enthusiastically with several innovative inputs and ideas given to the teachers who were expected to devise their own creative lessons and supporting teaching material.

Teacher training programmes for the 40 Field schools run by Balamitra are conducted regularly by the volunteers and Samata staff. This equips the teachers with a better awareness towards the Waldorf method. The training programmes reiterate the methods by giving an insight into various exercises like rhythmic activities, blackboard art, drumming, pottery, carpentry and mental maths. Visits and inspections of the field schools, orientation programmes, Parents’ meetings, review and action plans for improvement are diligently carried out by teacher supervisors and, adequate measures taken to overcome the shortcomings of the schools, if any.

An important programme that has evolved spontaneously is the Volunteer Programme for students and teachers from India and other countries, although this has not been a planned activity. We have mainly had senior teachers from Germany, U.K and Italy in the last few years (mainly from Waldorf/Steiner schools), who have voluntarily worked with the Balamitra Badis, conducted workshops and training programmes for the teachers and took classes for children. This has been a great opportunity for our village teachers who have had no exposure and it has enabled them to get hands on experience in creative teaching. We also have a formal association with the Waldorf institutions in Germany where youth are placed with Samata for a one-year voluntary work. They mainly teach children, help in documenting songs, stories and developing the resource centre, and build an interface for Balamitra with the outside world. As all the Balamitra teachers are youth themselves, this has helped a great deal in exchange of skills and talents between teachers and volunteers.

During the academic session of 2007-08 a new set of teacher volunteers from Germany-Peter, Fabian, Gulia (from Italy), Maria and Sue came equipped with the Waldorf experience and their interaction with the children and teachers increased the input required by them. Balamitra Model School started with student strength of 34 (26 in Class 2 and 3, and 8 in Class 4). Clay modeling, Form Drawing, music, Art, Drama and English were proficiently handled by the German volunteers. The teachers at the school concentrated on Maths, Telugu and tribal languages of Kuyi, Konda and Oriya, Science and Social Studies. Songs and stories in tribal languages collected and recorded from the tribal villages made it more interesting for the children.

An interesting thing to note in this method of teaching is how each month’s curricular activities are centred on a particular subject (main block) whether it’s Farming, Maths or Science. Another fascinating as well as educative feature is the Season Table, which is kept in every classroom. This table, covered with a colour significant to the season displays samples of important crops and flowers specific to that season.

Curriculum Development:

With the basic philosophy of strengthening tribal knowledge through the medium of education, we started working on the curriculum that could be most relevant to tribal culture. While keeping in mind the basic literacy requirements at the elementary level, as prescribed by the government, we devised our own lessons and methodology that could be stimulating as well as close to tribal culture. With the primary philosophy that education for tribal children should have a close affinity to nature, we developed our lessons around the natural resources available in plenty in these villages and on the social life of these communities. We have been very conscious and emphatic on this aspect as we do not find any aspects of tribal life or culture reflected in the mainstream lessons of the state education board in the entire school education process. This, we feel, is one of the serious negative causes for tribal youth coming out of government residential schools, to have no affinity or identity to their cultures or knowledge and in fact be alienated from their unique cultures. We have experienced how children have enthusiastically responded to a stimulating and culturally contextual form of teaching learning. Using tribal music, knowledge of nature, social practices, festivals that are so linked to their biodiversity and food, have been the main components of our curriculum. We have drawn up a curriculum based on such components right upto the level of class V, although our Balamitra schools reach out to children mainly upto class III.

Yet, the main challenge in developing such a form of education is the lack of readily available literature, material or expertise as tribal knowledge is oral and multi-lingual. Therefore, part of curriculum development has been micro level research and documentation. We have been undertaking very grass-roots level documentation of tribal songs, music, folk-lore, histories, agriculture, forestry and other related subjects. In this endeavour our village teachers, our children and our volunteers have played a very important role.
One of the striking aspects of our Balamitra Badis is the celebration of the joys of nature and childhood through the many community and school events that we hold to bring together children and the elderly as well as the public into the experience of education. In the last two years we have had celebrations of several tribal and mainstream festivals and interweave these with artistic opportunities and activities. We also have school annual day celebrations where we not only perform activities learnt in the schools but also traditional skills and sports.

If Nagula Chavithi, Holi, Diwali, Sankranthi and Christmas were celebrated with equal fervour, the outdoor visits to the zoo and to the fishermen’s village opened their minds to a new experience. The school annual day celebrations in March –April this year throughout the village schools was an occasion where the children not only performed activities learnt in the schools but also traditional skills and sports. The school Bazaar for which the children had handcrafted bamboo baskets, knitted items, rainsticks marked a fitting beginning to the day. The wonderfully decorated classrooms (again with items made by the children), paintings on the walls and the photo exhibition depicting the various activities of all the schools under Balamitra were a crowd-puller.
Health and hygiene is of primary concern at all centers of Balamitra.Regular medical check-ups, health education and awareness programmes on hygiene and sanitation, maintenance of vaccination and statistical records, and periodic monitoring of the health of children were topmost in the agenda of the school year. Immunistaion camps were conducted at the field schools in consultation with experienced doctors. Besides this, the kitchen garden nurtured by the children at school, as part of their Farming lessons, provided a healthy supplement. This highlights the effort of Samata to maintain a harmony with nature and its resources that the children are accustomed to.

An important activity we started in one of the valleys is the Campaign for protection of traditional agriculture and livelihoods which brings children and adults together. Here we organise traditional seed festivals where all our Balamitra schools come together with the elders of their villages bringing with them a wide variety of traditional organic seeds of food crops being grown for generations.

The Seed Festival, called the Patha Vithanala Panduga, has turned into a movement to reiterate the importance of the conventional form of food production and to strengthen the tribal people’s traditional and scientific knowledge of organic food. This unique festival stands out due to the fact that the young generation of tribal children gets deeply involved in the farming processes, imbibing valuable lessons along with continuing to respect tribal rituals and the unadulterated way of life.

This year, the Seed Festival was organized at Karakavalasa under the aegis of Sanjeevini,on the 22nd of April, where more than fifty farmers from fifty villages participated and brought a wide variety of seeds grown by them over the past year. Around 105 different varieties of organically grown seeds were displayed.

Balamitra’s ongoing odyssey with the schools is a never-ending venture to cement the fact that they are truly friends of the children. More work, more children, more enthusiasm, more enterprise... That’s what the driving force behind Balamitra and Samata is!

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