Resident Trustee
Dr Radhika Herzberger is the Advisor and Trustee-in-Residence at Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC), an educational institution located in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The Rishi Valley Rural Education Centre (REC), Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER), and Rishi Valley School function under the aegis of RVEC. Awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2013 for her pathbreaking educational initiatives, Dr Herzberger was the Director of RVEC until recently. She pioneered the concept of schools serving as resource centres for their communities. This idea found practical application at the renowned Rishi Valley School – the residential school for children from urban centres, village day schools for local students, and teacher education programmes that address the needs of children from both deprived and privileged backgrounds. Dr Herzberger earned her Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Toronto. A Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation India since 1982, she joined RVEC as Director of Studies in 1983 and became its Director in 1988. As her interests shifted to education, she designed a humanities curriculum for middle school and high school. She published Our Tribal Ancestors and Farmers and Shepherds, and edited Birds of Rishi Valley and the Regeneration of their Habitats, which focused on Rishi Valley’s immediate environment. Her publications also include papers on 19th and 20th century India and the current educational scenario. The prestigious D. Reidel Publication Co. published Dr Herzberger’s book, Bhartrhari and the Buddhists: An Essay in the Development of Fifth and Sixth Century Indian Thought, in 1986. The Springer Book Archives recently listed it as part of its larger electronic project to ‘preserve valuable scholarly content published between 1840 and 2005’. She has also published academic papers on debates between ancient Indian philosophical schools. Dr Herzberger is the Editor of Krishnamurti Foundation India’s Bulletin and is a previous member of CABE (Central Advisory Board of Education). She continues to contribute essays on J. Krishnamurti’s educational philosophy and the evolution of his thought over time.
Director
Dr Meenakshi Thapan is the Director of the Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC) and a Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI). She retired in late 2019 as Professor of Sociology and Director of the Delhi School of Economics, as well as Co-ordinator of the D.S. Kothari Centre for Science, Ethics, and Education at the University of Delhi. After meeting J. Krishnamurti in November 1973, she first arrived in the Rishi Valley School as a young teacher in 1974. She then returned to the University of Delhi for higher education. She came back to Rishi Valley in 1981 for a year to conduct fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation on the Rishi Valley School as a socio-cultural system. Life at School: An Ethnographic Study (Oxford University Press, 1991) is regarded as a classic in the sociology of schooling in India. She later undertook postdoctoral research at the University of London Institute of Education with Professor Basil Bernstein, the Karl Mannheim Professor at the time, and has worked in academia at the University of Delhi since 1986. She has received several awards and has collaborated on research with scholars from Canada, France, and Japan. She continues to engage in academic exchange with international scholars and speak to education scholars in India about research methodologies in education, schooling practices, and other related themes. At Rishi Valley, Dr Meenakshi Thapan has worked on the design of an online teacher education curriculum for in-service and pre-service elementary school teachers. The course, based on the National Curriculum Framework for Teachers Education (NCFTE) 2009 and the National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE) 2014, combines the unique pedagogy of RVEC’s Multi-Grade Multi-Level programme, Krishnamurti’s educational thinking, perspectives of great thinkers in education, and the requirements of the government’s vision and syllabi for holistic learning. The goal is to provide conceptual clarity to educators while also honing their abilities through various exercises, pedagogies, and examples in various multidisciplinary modules. Life at School: An Ethnographic Study (Oxford University Press, 1991, second edition, 2006) and Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood, and Identity in Contemporary India (SAGE, 2009) are two of Dr Meenakshi Thapan’s widely recognised books. Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity (ed., Oxford University Press 1997) was an early contribution to her publishing career. J. Krishnamurti and Educational Practice: A Social and Moral Vision for Inclusive Education (ed., Oxford University Press, 2018), Education and Society: Themes, Perspectives, Practices (ed., Oxford University Press, 2015), and Ethnographies of Schooling in Contemporary India (ed., SAGE, 2014) are among the most recent. She is now the Series Editor of Oxford University Press’s Education and Society in South Asia (2018-2027). J. Krishnamurti: Educator for Peace, her latest book, was published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis in 2022. She recently co-edited a special issue on ‘Subalternity, Marginality, and Agency in Contemporary India’ with Professor Akiko Kunihiro for the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), a journal published by the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
Secretary
Dr A Kumaraswamy is the Secretary of Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC), and was previously the Principal of the Rishi Valley School. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and has published numerous research papers in the experimental and computational domains. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at IIT Madras for a few years before taking up a research position at the Cement Research Institute in Delhi. He began teaching at the Rishi Valley School in 1982 after becoming interested in the domain of education and wanting to reside in a rural setting. Dr Kumaraswamy has been actively involved with all of RVEC’s rural development initiatives since their inception, and has been teaching at the RVEC when necessary. His responsibilities include conceptualising, planning, fundraising, mentoring staff, and overseeing the operation of the RVEC’s various community-related initiatives. Dr Kumaraswamy has been instrumental in implementing alternative technologies at RVEC, such as biogas, solar water heating systems, and solar power generators. He has led the campus’s water conservation and harvesting efforts and is adept with computer-based technologies, software development, and educational software tools.
Bursar
M S Sailendran, currently the Bursar of Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC), has been in the institution’s service for nearly forty years. A qualified Chartered Accountant, he has been passionate about making quality education available to rural children since joining RVEC and has been instrumental in establishing satellite schools in the neighbourhood. M S Sailendran has been intimately involved in implementing the Multi-Grade, Multi-Level (MGML) methodology in various parts of the country. He oversaw the development and production of RVEC’s revolutionary educational kit, ‘School in a Box’, and was actively involved in its implementation in Chennai Corporation’s schools.
Director
Director of the Krishnamurti Foundation India’s Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER), Rama Anumula has 35 years of service with the institution. She along with her husband, Padmanabha Rao, pioneered the RIVER Multi-Grade, Multi-Level (MGML) model and is in charge of implementing the RIVER methodology in various parts of India, besides Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Germany. She conceptualised, designed, and coordinated the development of numerous primary school learning packages, including ‘School in a Box,’ the Panchatantra Craft Package, the MGML Trainer Resource Pack, and the Pre-Primary Learning Package. She pioneered the concepts of ‘Matric Mela,’ a maths community festival; ‘Mothers’ Stories,’ which adapts and uses rural women’s oral traditions as reading programmes for first-generation learners; and ‘Miniature Shadow Puppetry,’ which adapts traditional puppetry as visual learning aids. Rama Anumula has led designer workshops for approximately 15 state-level resource groups to develop locally contextualised MGML teaching-learning packages. She has mentored students from universities in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the United States that have long-term collaborative projects with RIVER. Rama Anumula is an Ashoka International and Khemka Foundation Fellow, as well as the co-winner of the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award for India at the India Economic Summit, 2009. She holds an MA in English and a postgraduate degree in English teaching from the Central Institute of English & Foreign Languages, Hyderabad.
Coordinator-Curriculum
G Anil Duth, M.A. Education (Elementary) degree from TISS, Mumbai, has been with RIVER since 1997. He has overseen curriculum development and training in the MGML methodology for a significant number of groups from various states in India and agencies from abroad, courtesy his deep knowledge of the methodology. Anil continues to be engaged with research focused on addressing learning barriers faced by children of primary school age.
Coordinator
Thana Venu, M.A. B.Ed. from Dravidian University, has worked with RIVER since 1989. He has been a key figure in the implementation of the MGML methodology in schools all around the country, in addition to engaging in the development of curricula and training programmes, both on and off campus. Venu is responsible for planning and monitoring the progress of the implementations, as well as addressing issues that arise at the field-level during the process.
Headmistress
Sreevalli Ramayanam, M.B.A. B.Ed. from Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam, Tirupati, has been in service with RIVER since 2014. She is currently the Headmistress of the Residential Middle School and teaches English. Sreevalli is also active in monitoring the education centre’s satellite schools, visiting each one on a regular basis and producing field reports intended to resolve any flaws in the methodology’s implementation in the classroom.
Educators in a remote valley in India devised a community approach to instructing students when teachers were sparse.its catching on.
Dec.4,2018Padmanabha Rao,a leader of the Rishi valley institute for educational resources,With a student in aura Pradesh,india. Mr.Rao is a creator of a approach that encourages children to learn on their own
Ms. Dharssi is a journalist who reports on global development, sustainability and immigration.
One day at the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year in the rural Rishi Valley region of Andhra Pradesh, India, two dozen children in Grades 1 through 5 gathered quietly around four tables on colorful mats on the floor of their one-room school, working with books and worn laminated materials. Few looked up when I walked in.
Their school has no chairs and is more than three hours from Bangalore, the closest major city. But the students were working with learning aids so effective that by now they’ve been adopted by more than 250,000 schools across India and in more than a dozen countries, including Kenya, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The common problem they address is one of the thorniest in education: teaching in primary schools where one teacher instructs children at multiple grade levels at once.
The issue contributes to what Unesco called a “global learning crisis” in 2014, when it found that 130 million children couldn’t do basic math or read, even after four years in school. Recent data indicates the crisis is even more grim, according to Manos Antoninis, director of the Global Education Monitoring report at Unesco.
But experts, including Mr. Antoninis, say that Rishi Valley’s pedagogy, which lets children study at their own pace, offers a solution to the problem. The approach has also been found to be useful in wealthier countries like Britain and Germany, and is applicable in countries like the United States, where teachers often manage large classes of students who have varied levels of understanding even within the same grade.
“This methodology addresses the last child in the classroom, even the last child who is a disruptive child, who is a slow learner, who is a regular absentee,” explained Rama Anumula, an educator who created the approach with her husband, Padmanabha Rao. In the Rishi Valley school when I visited, students in different grades were studying Telugu, the local language, side by side. At one table, a teacher helped six students, including a 5-year-old girl learning the alphabet with foam letters and a girl in fourth grade reading a song about diversity in India. At another table, a boy in first grade helped a girl learn the word for “muddy road.” Nearby, two fourth graders took turns rolling dice in a game with words they recently learned.
At their school, the students work through the curriculum with hands-on activities they complete independently, as well as with teachers and peers. One decade after the approach was adopted in schools run by the Rishi Valley Rural Education Center, dropout rates were 30 percent lower than in nearby public schools, while student achievement in reading and math was up to 40 percent higher, according to the center. Now, Ms. Anumula and Mr. Rao, who lead the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources, work with Unicef, nongovernmental organizations and governments to spread their pedagogy.
The pair’s approach is based on the idea that traditional lecturing at children seated in rows and divided by ability or grade isn’t effective. That was their conclusion when they moved to the countryside to pursue farming after earning postgraduate degrees in English in the 1980s. In the rural area, Ms. Anumula met child laborers who had dropped out of school, yet yearned to be able to read the hefty novels she carried. Clearly, they were highly motivated.
But when Ms. Anumula and Mr. Rao spoke with villagers, they heard complaints that local children couldn’t do basic math after years in school. When they visited rural public schools, they saw an unworkable system: lone teachers lecturing students across multiple grade levels in turn, plowing through textbooks even as few students understood the material.
The problem is widespread. Millions of students are in multigrade classrooms worldwide, especially in developing countries, but teachers rarely receive training to manage such classrooms and policymakers neglect the problem, said Angela Little, a professor emeritus at University College London with expertise in multigrade education.
But Ms. Anumula and Mr. Rao saw opportunities to harness the natural drive and helpfulness of children by breaking down the ranked-by-grade learning in favor of a community approach. “It’s like a family environment,” said Mr. Rao. “Older and younger children together, they can learn many things helping each other.”
In 1987, the couple began testing alternatives at the Rishi Valley Rural Education Center, which runs schools for children from villages that surround a renowned boarding school. Ms. Anumula and Mr. Rao worked with teachers to parse the required curriculum around hands-on activities. They refined them by watching to see what excited students and teachers, and tossing out what didn’t work. In 1993, they published a model of their system, which replaces textbooks with activity cards. It’s called multigrade multilevel learning, or activity-based learning.
The method is meant to let students study at their own pace. They work through the curriculum by following subject-specific “learning ladders” that outline lessons with various levels of support from the teacher. Each rung of the ladder represents a learning milestone; the cards outline activities that introduce the student to a new concept, give him or her a chance to practice it and evaluate his or her understanding of it, along with possibilities for enrichment and remediation. To help children relate to concepts, activities incorporate local dialects, folklore and natural materials from the local environment. The curriculum also incorporates community festivals and group activities like singing and puppetry.
Students typically begin learning milestones at a table for teacher-supported work, where the teacher introduces the concept. Students follow the ladder to identify their next activity and then move through other tables to do work that is either teacher-supported, peer-supported, partly teacher-supported or independent. Teachers track student progress and adjust tasks as needed.
This way, the process engages learners who differ in natural quickness, prior knowledge and time to study. Child laborers, who frequently miss school for work, can pick up where they left off. The method allows for a “personalized education that one usually associates with very developed economies” and “makes that affordable for low-resource environments,” said Fabio Segura, head of international programs at the Jacobs Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit organization focused on improving child and youth development worldwide. Starting in 2015, the foundation considered more than 3,600 models to improve education in Ivory Coast’s cocoa-growing communities. Rishi Valley’s model is one of 12 the foundation is testing, with assistance from cocoa companies and the government, Mr. Segura said.
In Germany, about 150 schools use the method, according to Ulrike Lichtinger, a professor at Vorarlberg Teaching University in Austria. She spreads the approach with educators like Thomas Müller, professor of special education at Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany. When he introduced it at a school for children with emotional and behavioral problems where he was headmaster, students became more attentive and behavioral problems dropped “nearly to zero,” he said.
The approach gives students greater control over learning than conventional classrooms, said Kathrin Trimborn, a German teacher who studied the method for her doctorate and works with students with emotional and behavioral problems. “Working with the learning ladder, they always know, ‘O.K., I’m here and I have to do —- for the next week —- this, this, this. So many steps.,’” she said. “But they see how they improve and that’s what’s really, really motivating for them.”
Nevertheless, the way this teaching method overturns classroom and teaching norms has inhibited its spread in some places. In India, the pedagogy runs into a “chalk-and-talk” culture in which teachers stand in front of a class, lecturing from textbooks, and evaluate students based on memorization, said Venu Thane, coordinator at the Rishi Valley’s educational resource institution.
Changing that culture will take more than new teaching models. In fact, less than a third of primary classrooms in seven Indian states that used the method did so faithfully, according to a 2015 Unicef study.
The problem was that most teachers were poorly trained or didn’t understand the model. Others didn’t take it seriously, which means they didn’t appreciate how it could enhance their teaching. Some schools reverted to textbooks instead of activity cards, or didn’t adapt activities to make lessons relevant for their students.
The problem was that most teachers were poorly trained or didn’t understand the model. Others didn’t take it seriously, which means they didn’t appreciate how it could enhance their teaching. Some schools reverted to textbooks instead of activity cards, or didn’t adapt activities to make lessons relevant for their students.
The findings underscore what Mr. Rao describes as the biggest challenge to using the model to improve education, “dilution.” What’s needed is political backing, buy-in from teachers and long-term support for teachers, he added.
That was the lesson from Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, Mr. Rao said. In 2003, Chennai, the state capital, introduced the method to 264 public schools with help from the Rishi Valley’s institute. Based on results, many families pulled their children out of private schools and put them in public schools, a reversal of the usual trend. In 2007, Chennai’s commissioner, M. P. Vijayakumar, was given the job of extending the approach to the state’s 37,500 public schools. Within a year, average academic achievement in math, English and Tamil language classes increased by as much as 29 percent, according to a government-commissioned evaluation.
That was the lesson from Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, Mr. Rao said. In 2003, Chennai, the state capital, introduced the method to 264 public schools with help from the Rishi Valley’s institute. Based on results, many families pulled their children out of private schools and put them in public schools, a reversal of the usual trend. In 2007, Chennai’s commissioner, M. P. Vijayakumar, was given the job of extending the approach to the state’s 37,500 public schools. Within a year, average academic achievement in math, English and Tamil language classes increased by as much as 29 percent, according to a government-commissioned evaluation.
But Tamil Nadu’s success waned after Mr. Vijayakumar, a dedicated civil servant who gave his mobile number to thousands of teachers, retired the following year. According to Unicef’s 2015 study, many local teachers still didn’t understand the model well.
Such setbacks are to be expected, Mr. Vijayakumar said, noting that teachers have lectured at children in rows for centuries. Reform, he said, is not magic. “Changing the mind-set of so many teachers and so many parents and millions and millions of children, it takes time,” he said.
Even so, the approach is having a notable impact. Children in Indian states that use it performed “significantly better” on a national survey of learning achievements last year, said Begur Ramachandra Rao, an education specialist at Unicef India, in an email.
The Rishi Valley institute is now more deliberate about assuring that the model is adopted rigorously. The institute prefers contracts of three years or more so it can adequately support teachers and troubleshoot, Padmanabha Rao explained. This is a departure from a previous model, in which the institute helped with curricular adaptation and initial teacher trainings before moving on.
The institution is also incorporating technology into the method with support from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and the World Economic Forum. The institute has developed digital training guides, including videos, to help officials and teachers understand it. Last year, the institute also added activities involving tablets to the method in government schools in Andhra Pradesh. Students’ results are uploaded to a database where officials can pinpoint which schools need more support, Mr. Rao said.
After working to improve education for three decades, Ms. Anumula and Mr. Rao are committed to continuing the trial and error process. They’re driven by a singular goal. “Let children really enjoy childhood,” Mr. Rao said.