Project for schooling of migrant children at a crossroads

When Muhammed Dilshad notched up full A+ in the SSLC examination back in 2019, its significance went far beyond being a mere personal achievement

When Muhammed Dilshad notched up full A+ in the SSLC examination back in 2019, its significance went far beyond being a mere personal achievement. 

Dilshad, whose family hails from Darbhanga in Bihar, was the first migrant student to achieve that after coming through a still nascent Project Roshni in Ernakulam district. The project aims at enabling migrant children to overcome linguistic barrier and enhance their academic performance through a discourse-oriented pedagogy (DOP) with code switching – a process of alternating between two or more languages, as an enabling tool. 

Dilshad was among the earliest beneficiaries when the project in its previous avatar was being tried out by a research team headed by his primary class teacher Jayasree Kulakkunnath at Government High School, Binanipuram, when he was in sixth standard. 

“Roshni helped me ace Malayalam exam without which I would not have been to secure full A+ in SSLC exams. It also helped me better integrate into the class improving my overall academic performance,” says Dilshad, who is now pursuing BTech at the IHRD College of Engineering in Cherthala. 

The Binanipuram school evolved the concept after the number of migrant students far exceeded local students thanks to the large concentration of migrant community in the industrial belt of Eloor. 

“We launched the project on a trial basis in November 2015 in the first standard where the teacher was accompanied by a multi-lingual educational volunteer (EV), who helped migrant children understand the lessons in their language and using imageries rooted in their culture. The impact was almost instant with migrant students displaying tremendous progress in as little as three months,” says Ms. Jayasree. 

As the experiment made significant headway, it captured the attention of the then Ernakulam Collector Mohammed Y. Safirullah, who was equally worried about the adverse impact of linguistic barrier on the education of migrant children and in creating an inclusive society.