Teacher Training- Day 2

Today’s teacher training was about classroom management. Of course, in this lesson, Professor Kumar took care to distinguish between NIRMAN’s style of classroom management of other schools, noting 4 essential types of management: physical, pedagogic, managerial, and spiritual. Physical management is dealing with the environment of the classroom, pedagogic is about time management in class, managerial is simply dealing with management of the children, and spiritual is the idea of the post-colonial. The spiritual is the most important for NIRMAN. Post-colonial, in their definition, is after independence, and is about easing the subject-other divide by accepting and educating everyone. Being in India, this definition adopts some of Gandhi’s philosophy, namely that all religions have basic similarities and share the same essential tenets. However, more interesting to me was the fact that NIRMAN takes such care to analyze itself as a post-colonial institution, and whether the emphasis that they place on the colonial past is truly helpful to advance the institution. However, we’ll see tomorrow when we discuss these things more.

The other part of teacher training was a theater workshop, which is interesting in part because I don’t think Americans have theater workshops for their teachers. As things are here though, it’s not what it seems, and instead theater transformed into yoga and very limited and very interesting kinds of acting. For example, “acting” can mean forms of movement as well as copying rhythms, both of which seem not to be part of acting at first glance. However, it’s all quite interesting to me, and, with luck, I will not be terrible at it.