Jharkhand is a multilingual state, home to more than thirty-two indigenous communities who use around nineteen indigenous and regional languages. Some of these prominent link languages work as bridges between different indigenous languages in the state. The state has nine Particularly Vulnerable Indigenous Groups (PVTGs) and some of their languages are extremely endangered.
A child’s mind is like that of a butterfly in the garden which gets attracted to flowers of different hues and their enchanting fragrance. Children minutely observe happenings and activities in their surroundings and react to the smallest of change. They try to understand an activity or change on the basis of their perception and prior knowledge and develop their ideas. From here, begins the role of a teacher.
As a teacher educator, I begin my class with a classroom experience, though my undergraduate students, learning to be teachers, find it ridiculous at first to participate in a set of concentration exercises. This is what I tell them:
Are certain individuals born to be teachers and can only those be truly competent? Or can people without such aspirations develop to become ‘great teachers’? Are there certain conditions, the presence of which foster such development?