Marpha Foundation offers Creative Lessons for government school students between the ages of eight and fifteen. These classes are held daily at our Rosehips Center for an hour and a half before the school day starts, as well as during a two-week art camp over the Dashain holiday.
Creative Lessons are emergent and experimental in nature and respond to the interests of the participants. Most of our students come from low-income families whose social mobility is further restricted by inadequate access to quality education. Creative lessons foster curiosity and motivation by exploring content relevant to our specific group of learners and providing an environment where they feel confident to take on challenges and be co-creators in their learning process.
Teaching Fellows take an emergent and interdisciplinary approach. Creative Lessons are filled with experiments, workshops, and projects that explore the arts, natural sciences, physical education, and really anything that students are curious about.
Take the story of Ghooma, for example. The narrative of the young wandering cloud that falls in love with a village is the starting point to explore the water cycle, illustration, puppetry and the art of storytelling. Students first learn concepts and reflect on friendship and the environment. By illustrating the narrative as a comic, they deepen their comprehension and make the story their own. Simple experiments allow them to explore how clouds are formed. A culminating play with handmade puppets synthesizes weeks of learning and reveals confident learners made stronger by accomplishing so much together.
Following national trends, many government schools in lower Mustang have adopted school-wide English medium instruction, even though few teachers speak English fluently. As a result, teachers continue to teach in Nepali, which remains the most effective method for communicating content to students. Yet, all textbooks and exams are in English, which makes understanding content outside of class and passing assessments a daunting task that exclusively rewards memorization.
Since 2014, Marpha Foundation’s Rosehips Center has offered experiential English classes at Shree Janakalyan Lower Secondary School in Syang village. While English language acquisition was the initial objective, the Rosehips team quickly realized that the students also needed opportunities for expression, creative problem solving, and self-guided inquiry, which the emphasis on rote learning effectively cuts from the classroom.
Our teaching approach evolved to foster an emergent curriculum that responds to students’ interests and builds off of their existing knowledge by relating English words to what they experience in their daily lives, both real and imaginary! This yields active sessions where English language learning takes place through storytelling, live-action role-play, making things, playing games, and singing and dancing.
