Deepanjali completed internships at Bangalore Steiner School and Gubbachi Learning Community. At Bangalore Steiner School, she observed their philosophy of learning through hands, heart, and head. Students expressed themselves through art and worked on aesthetically pleasing projects. Gubbachi is a bridge school that prepares dropout children for mainstream education. Students come from migrant laborer families and face challenges like malnutrition and caring for siblings. Deepanjali assisted teachers, planned lessons, and studied the progress of two girls named Laxmi and Sharada for her case study.

1. Internship Report
Deepanjali

2. Internship Summary

3. BANGALORE STEINER
SCHOOL
Duration: 15-Feb-2016 to 15-June2016

4. Philosophy & Vision

5. Internship Highlights
• Observation of classes
• Participation, if interested in Handwork
(such as knitting)
• Discussion with the teachers
• A look into the children’s hand book
• A brief overview of the curriculum
• We were asked not to interact with
children.

6. Key Observations
• Daily Schedule for Teachers : Morning Circle
Discussion on the day’s proceedings
Co-ordination among Teachers,if any
• Daily Schedule for Children : First ½ hour free time.
Morning circle
Class hours
• Parent – Teacher Community : Most teachers are parents
• Classroom structure : Same teacher for a particular class throughout their
journey in school
• Commitment of Teachers : Teacher are required to commit minimum for 5
years ,incidentally most teachers are parents also.
• School Management : The school setup is mainly run by Student teacher
community and is organically managed, it could be because the school is
still in its early stage.

7. First principles
1. Anthropocentric learning : More emphasis on ‘learning ways’ of a
human being rather the ‘teaching techniques’
2. The 3 H’s form the main focus of the entire learning, i.e. Hand, Heart
and Head
They belief that the learning is more effective when it starts from hand
to heart and then to head.
3. Approach of learning is more of “Local to Global or Near to Far”

8. Other Observations
1. Most of the topic like Geography/History/Science is taught with this principle.’ Learn
which is around first and this go farther’
2. Though there is no mention of any teaching methods, the practice like ALM, thematic
learning for all intelligences is included.
3. Since the teacher travels with the class to higher grades he/she is also a learner.
4. Guided Hand book/text book bases on Rudolf Steiner's philosophy is available to the
teacher to prepare lesson plans and activity around each topics
5. Steiner Handbook/textbook also addresses the child’s state of mind, and how a child
sees things around him/her, which is helpful in preparing lesson for the class.
6. A great deal of attention is given to the aesthetics of any work, such as the board
work, child’s class work etc.

9. Teacher’s Board work

10. A Third Grader’s Class Book
• Here a child is expressing his understanding of the
season and the concept of time
• Children are free to express their understanding in
a form of drawing/painting, prose or poetry.

11. Children’s work

12. Learning process
• Precursor to subjects:
Interestingly the grades are planned in such a way that there is a
precursor to almost all subject e.g. Fairytales are precursor to History,
Form drawings are precursor to Geometry, Seasons to Time and so
on.
• Spiritual inclination :
There is an certain inclination to maintain a spiritual
relevance to whatever is done in the school.
• Green Inclination :
The infrastructure and the surrounding is intentionally
maintained by keeping the environment in mind.
Children also spend a great deal of time gardening and
each class has it own small little garden space.

13. The School premises

14. Other aspects
• Food & Nutrition
1. Children are served pure organic,hygienically cooked sathvic food,
there is a team of cooks and maids, who maintain the kitchen.
2. Children are allowed to bring only fruits from home to eat during
their 15 minutes morning break.
3. Children are also served freshly made snack before the day ends.
• Sports and Outdoor
1. There is dedicated sports teacher and the day’s routine one games
period every day.
2. There are lot of outdoor activity such as carpentery, gardening etc

15. Hand Work
1. Knitting, Stitching, Carpentery, Painting,
Carpentery and playing music are part of the
curriculum.
2. Every child and every teacher learns to play
flute, which they call recorder. This is a
compulsory activity and everyone is expected to
learn.
3. The above listed activity come under handwork
and a good ½ hrs daily is scheduled for this
activity.

16. Stuffed Elephants handmade
by Children

17. Aesthetics in Work Books
Below is a hand made textbook of a 6th
grader, the
subject is astronomy.
Most of the books have a lot of drawing, decoration and
colours. These are promptly punctuated by some text.

18. Some more of children’s work

19. Grading process
• Teacher, the third parent : As the teacher travels with
the child to higher grade, she is well aware as to where
the child is.
• No examination: There is no obvious assessment that
happens between classes. Rather children’s Handbook
and the activity the child engages in, gives the teacher
the insight as to what the child has achieved.
• The teachers are sure that the child is age
appropriately prepared for the state-board syllabus.

20. GUBBACHI LEARNING
COMMUNITY
Duration : 2 Months

21. GUBBACHI
Gubbachi is a NGO, started by a group of Azim Premji University
graduates. This organization runs a bridge school for children,
mainly the migrant labour kids, who have dropped out of school.
A bridge school is a school to prepare the school
dropouts/unschooled children and mainstream them age
appropriately in the govt school.
The NGO has signed a MOU with a Govt school of Kodathi
village. The organization is also taking part in helping this govt
school, to provide a better standards of Education apart from
running the Bridge school.
The NGO makes an effort to create a child-friendly
environment and is critical about the present system of education
in the Govt schools and aims to bring in necessary changes.

22. Highlights of the Gubbachi,
the Bridge school
• The school broadly has 4 stages

23. Early Child Care (ECC)
• The main cause of children not going to
school/dropping out, is because they are expected
to take care of the younger sibling. To address this
issue, the school has early child care centre to take
care of toddlers.

24. Bridge of Bridge, (BOB)
• As the children come from a background
where is no exposure to print, these
children need to sensitized to world of
print, that is done in BOB

25. Pre-literacy stage
• The basic of reading and writing,
recognizing letters/words w.r.t the pictures
happens in this stage

26. Literacy stage
• A child has gone to school for some
period and stopped OR has had a break
between an academic year, belongs to
this phase.

27. About the curriculum
• The school broadly follows the requirement of the government school and has a
curriculum in line to the state board.
• The state government has come up with a Nalli-kalli curriculum, which is been adopted
from Krishnamurthy school of education.
• There is an entire Nalli-kalli kit that the government provides to all the school in the
state and Gubbachi is also one of them.
• As one of the teachers in the school is from prakriya, they also follow the curriculum
developed by teachers in Prakriya.
• In fact, for Kannada the ‘whole to part’ principle is followed, that is the a new alphabet
is introduced through a poem.
• English language is introduce through a Montessori method, emphazing on the
phoenics
• The school prepares the children in 3 subjects i.e., English, Kannada and Maths.

28. Background of Students in
Gubbachi
• Children who come here are from the poorest strata of
the society, Children of farm labors from Raichur
District-Karnataka, Bihar, West Bengal.
• Most of the children have been to school at some
point in time, but had to drop out due to various
reasons such as
1. Frequent migration in search of work
2. Taking care of the household, as both
parents have physically straining work
3. Nursing the young and the elderly of the
family.
4. Illiterate parents and adults, not
understanding the need of regular
schooling.

29. • These children are deprived of their childhood massively.
• Most of the children conduct themselves as adults.
• They are highly protectively about their younger siblings
• They are steady-fast in doing any kind of work.
• Their exposure to print world is nil.
• They are fiercely independent.
• There is a certain rawness to their behavior.
• They are extremely innocent and simple in their thought process.
• They are highly vulnerable to the dark side of our society.
• They suffer from mal-nutrition and are mostly deprived physical form of
affection.
• In spite of all the deprivation and hardship, they are most joyful and
cheerful.
• Their capacity to respond to love and cherish the attention paid to them
is phenomenal.
Background of Students in
Gubbachi - Contd.

30. Living conditions of Gubbachi
students

31. Some moments in the school

32. Opportunity received in
Gubbachi
• Teaching a group of students
• Participation in Curriculum planning.
• Participation in lesson planning.
• Assisting teachers in the class related activities.
• Preparing case study on couple of kids.
• Filling in for other teachers in their absence.
• Managing the entire class for a day.
• Attending weekly hurdles in relation to the
progress of the students.
• Interaction with volunteers and fellow-interns.

33. My Learnings
• Every child is unique and wants to do his/her best in any given condition
and environment.
• It is fine to have a day that doesn’t go according to your plan.
• Learning still happens, even if you didn’t execute your lesson plan.
• It is best to sense the children’s mood and temperament for the day.
• The best practice is to propose than impose, sometime the other’s idea
turns out better than yours.
• One needs to have certain calmness within oneself and unconditional
love for children to enjoy the classroom.
• One has to invest time and effort to win the trust and confidence of the
children.
• Children are absolutely unpredictable and Emergent curriculum works.

34. My Case Study
• Laxmi and Sharada
I had the opportunity to interact and tutee these 2 lovely girls and
prepare a case study on the basis of my interaction.
They are named after Goddesses of Wealth and Education.
Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with either.
Both these girls are around 10-12 years old approximately. They
have lost the critical age of learning/grasping, that the Nali-kali
curriculum is designed for. Hence they don’t seem to follow a
instruction given to them in a group and are very much need
100% attention of the teacher.
Generally such kids are labelled as dull/disinterested/trouble
makers in the class.

35. Laxmi is first-born among 4 siblings to a seemingly young woman. The
mother doesn’t seem to be more than 25 years of age. As both parents
are daily wage workers, Laxmi has been carrying out the responsibility
of nursing her youngest brother, looking after her 2 younger sisters,
single-handedly taking care of the household. There have been
incidents of domestic violence in the family and as a result of which
Laxmi has been burdened with responsibility of cooking and feeding her
father and her siblings.
All of this has taken a toll on the little girl. She speaks very less, doesn’t
seem to share anything that happens back home in the morning circle.
She deals with everything as if she were a adult. In the beginning, she
seemed to have certain stiffness in her body too. She has been hugely
deprived physical form of affection.
I have seen this one girl change along the duration of 2 months. The
other teachers have witness, what looks like not less than a
transformation in the child ever since she joined Gubbachi 6 months
ago.
About Laxmi

36. Laxmi shows a sign of schooling before. She writes her
name in kannada and is pro in coping anything written on the board.
The rout learning system followed by the government school give
out such signs of mindlessly completion of chores and makes
distinct differentiation between a schooled child and a completely
out of school child.
Laxmi lacks math-logic completely, to an extent that her
math teacher had given up on her and concluded that she must be
having some learning difficulty. However her language learning
skills are quite in place, she can effortlessly write alphabets to point
of perfection and recognize them too. She also shows keen interest
in reading.
I interacted with Laxmi in math class first as I sat with her to
understand her level of knowing, I found that, the girl has difficulty in
counting numbers.
Her Academics

37. As I started spending time with her, I realized
that Laxmi doesn’t have a learning difficulty,
but fails compute or doesn’t understand math
language.
Her other talents like her drawing, patterns,
use of colours says her spatial intelligence is
phenomenal.
She understands maths in a different way, like
when she draws, it is in proper proportion.
Pictures she drew in one of the kannada class.
Please observe the proportion of the drawing
and use of paper effectively.
Her Academics – Contd.

38. I realized, with her I
cannot approach maths the way I
approach it for my understanding.
The unability to understand maths
made her totally disinterested in
the subject. It was difficult to make
her sit at one place and get her
involved in math related activity.
I used pebble game to
get her interested to sit in the
class, Soon she took liking to
it…..then we got along like house
on fire and there was no looking
back. I slowly introduced counting
numbers through pebble game.
She started counting up to 10
effortlessly. Then one fine day she
also started doing simple addition.
Laxmi doing her math using sticks
Her Academics – Contd.

39. Sharada
Sharada belongs to the Lambani tribe, like
most of the children she too hails from Raichur
district. She is the sixth child among her 7 siblings.
She has never been schooled before, Gubbachi is
her first experience of school. Her father passed
away 3 years ago and her mother has come to
Bangalore to earn some money. They have a
couple of acres of land back home. The mother is
very keen to go back home and start farming.
Sharada has spent most of her time herding cattle
back home.
She is quiet a cheerful happy child and has
the most beautiful laugh. As she is elder to most of
the children, she tends to bully others and has a
mind of her own.

40. I always had a curiosity to know, what a child woud be like he/she
is never schooled and she answered my question.
She has no fear of authority what so ever. She likes to decide what she
wants to do for the day. She bring down the whole class to a halt, if she
wishes to.
She is wild, raw, chirpy and also mal-nutritioned. She does a lot
of work back home, first half of the day. she is usually tried and mostly
just wants to lie down. She loves wilderness walks, she a naturalist.
She had problems coming to school regularly, she would turn up
on alternate days and it had impacted her learning hugely.
As a part of my case study, I visited her one of the day she didn’t
turn up to school and found her busy with household chores. We
expressed concern over her missing class and showed interest in talking
to her mother about it. She started coming to school regularly.
Her Academics

41. As she had lost the critical
window of learning, the way Nalli-kalli
curriculum is designed. She struggled
a lot in the beginning to write. It
seemed like her fine motor skills were
not fully developed. Her letters never
looked like, as though she wrote an
alphabet. Added to this challenge, her
irregularity was posing her problem in
her progress.
The picture shows some of
sharada’s work. The alphabet she did
with clay. Her pencil work was worse
than this.
Her Academics – Contd.

42. As she became regular to the
school. Her interest in participating in
the class activity became increased
and started showing interest in reading
and writing.
Though her progress is slow
and she is in preliteracy stage. The
picture shows her understanding of
letters.
Unfortunately she will be going
back to her village for this academic
year. I only hope that our interaction
with her mother regarding her
education will be fruitful and she will
join school.
Her Academics – Contd.