Our Learnings from Joy of Anubhava's Long-Term Program

By Poorvaja Prakash, Anand Srinivasan, Srilakshmi R, & Prerana Bhatnagar

Sunday, September 13th, 2020, was a hugely important date for the Joy of Anubhava team. This day marked the showcase and celebration of our first-ever long-term program! We began our long-term program with 16 excited participants on June 25th, 2020. Three months whizzed past us and we found ourselves reflecting on our learnings as a team which we would like to share with you– These are learnings from our experience, the program’s results, and most importantly, the biggest source of learning came from the participants themselves. So, here we go…..

1.       There is no such thing as ‘too young to reflect’:

When we first started Joy of Anubhava, we were fairly certain that self-reflection needed to be a core skill for us to focus on. However, were we expecting too much? Were we putting too much pressure on 8-year-olds to think too deeply? The long-term program gave us a resounding answer – absolutely not! We found that when we provided structure and support to the participants, they in fact, genuinely enjoyed sharing personal responses to the story. This took many forms – a reading reflection which they updated every week, response essays, response doodles, comparisons between their lives and the characters’ lives, and opinion essays. While they initially found it challenging to add depth to their responses, they soon practiced the art of including a ‘why’ to their responses in many different ways and in the process, learned about their personalities. 

 2.       Meeting different types of experts at regular intervals developed participants’ creative process. 

As part of the long-term program, participants met different experts – authors, writers, design thinking experts, illustrators, and even a dance choreographer to get guidance and a variety of perspectives. Meeting different individuals from different walks of life enabled our participants to internalize learnings from different sources. In fact, we didn’t have a specific structure to ensure follow up – the participants applied these learnings on their own! For e.g., after a session on creating their characters, participants applied this while writing their stories. Similarly, some of our younger participants redesigned their characters after attending a session on illustrating a character.

 3.       Providing choice matters

Joy of Anubhava’s pedagogy involves using different art forms to explore books. A significant principle here is ‘choice’. Having a variety of artforms and ensuring that participants have choices in their response ensured that they expressed themselves in a medium they were comfortable with and a medium they were not as comfortable with. In the name of standardization for convenience, we often do not take into account that each child is different and expresses himself/herself in different ways. Ensuring that participants created their long-term projects also delivered wonderful results. We had participants do a range of things including starting a blog, an Instagram channel for book reviews, writing a novel, writing a series of short stories, writing a picture book, and designing logos to represent a book.

 4.       Collaboration is vastly underrated and can be done online

We placed collaboration at the center of our curriculum design. Participants collaborated both online and offline. In our online sessions, participants collaborated in pairs, small groups, and larger groups in each session and, over a period of time, we automatically saw them question each other meaningfully and respectfully. We also created a structure, wherein, participants collaborated offline with a new person every alternate week on a home-activity. Yes, there were logistical and coordination struggles. Yes, children had many activities going on. Yes, collaborating across cities at a young age is challenging. HOWEVER, it is 100% possible and fruitful. This experience showed us that collaboration can be meaningful and useful online if one sets up a sensible structure around it – share norms with participants, model how to disagree respectfully, appreciate great questions, rotate partners so that they hear different perspectives, and design activities that give multiple participants an opportunity to express themselves.

5.       Creativity can be seen in the small things

Creativity was probably the hardest skill in our framework for us, to both, design for and measure. Initially, when we were thinking about creativity, we were trapped in perhaps thinking about the big, bold & revolutionary changes. However, as the program progressed, we realized that creativity could be seen in the smallest of things. For example, writing a sentence on a post-it to express one’s idea of beauty, taking a picture of an envelope to show communication, or even writing a poem. This experience showed us that there was no ‘one’ way to be creative.

So, there you have it. These were five big learnings from our long-term program. We will be incorporating these in spades in our next edition in October. Now that you’ve heard from us, we would like to hear from you... Have you recently designed and implemented a program to enhance 21st Century & Social and Emotional Learning skills? What have you realized? Share your learning, insights, and suggestions with us, whether you are a student, educator, school leader, journalist, author, illustrator, director, designer, or anyone else!