Our Journey
OELP began as an exploratory search which was driven by our belief that a meaningful school experience can play a major role in transforming the lives of young children and is in fact the inalienable right of every child. We wanted to look for ways in which the experience of schooling can be made more meaningful, especially for children who come from homes in which they do not have support for school based learning. Our earlier experiences with schools, in various capacities, had generated a serious concern that schooling was in fact not translating into learning for many children that we had encountered inside classrooms across the country. This fact of non learning inside classrooms was supported by recently available documentation and large-scale studies. We therefore decided to engage with children and teachers inside the classroom to seek answers to some questions.
Our journey began in 2006, in a few Municipal Corporation (MCD) schools located in a semi-urban area on the outskirts of South West Delhi. Most children in these schools were children of migrant workers engaged in daily wage work, menial jobs or petty commercial activity. In 2008 OELP was relocated to rural Rajasthan, where we began work inside some State run primary schools, as well as with out of school children and village communities. Most of the young children in the locations that OELP currently works with grow up within oral traditions in low literate communities which are socially entrenched within highly stratified caste based and patriarchal kinship patterns.
