@Me
Brief profile
Having founded the nonprofit organization Samidha Bahuddeshiya Santha (Samidha) in 2009, I designed projects based on Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy which gave children the opportunity to identify their social concerns and participate in solving those. It also gave the opportunity to work with Dr. Sugata Mitra and Dr. Suneeta Kulkarni undergoing two interesting research projects, namely Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) and The Granny Cloud. Children at Samidha centers interact with Grannies all over the world. At this point, I felt the need to widen theoretical understanding about the Education sector and specifically my ideas of Active Citizenship, Civic Engagement, Social Participation, and Citizenship Education. A Masters in Education at the Azim Premji University Bangalore exposed me to the mammoth government education system. I graduated in 2016 with a specialization in ‘School, Organization, Leadership, and Management’.
I studied the time-on-task during the Alternative Pedagogies in the primary grade classrooms through empirical quantitative research. This included over 8000 snapshots from 200 classroom observations. This research paper got published in the European Journal of Education Studies (https://oapub.org/edu/index.php/ejes/article/view/901), and was presented at the prestigious Hawaii International Conference on Education, Hawaii, USA in 2017.
I am currently working for Mulyavardhan (translates to Nurturing Values) program concentrating on the constitutional values. It is focused on the skills, attitudes, dispositions, and behavior, required for becoming a democratic citizen. It is being implemented in all government schools of Maharashtra, Goa and Jharkhand states in India, spreading to more than 10,00,00 schools. I single-handedly drove one of the state level baseline studies for this program with the help of 30 researchers.