RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT IN STATES AND VOLUNTARY ORGANISATIONS
As a National Resource Centre for NFE, the department mounted a series of programmes and activities at the States and voluntary Organisation levels. The main focus of these programmes and activities were to generate a sound technical resource base and building up capabilities at the State and Voluntary Organisation levels.
The various strategies evolved for the attainment of these goals were as under :
a. developing a specially designed orientation course for training of functionaries from Voluntary Organisations on a regional/State basis ;
b. holding of residential training programmes in some leading voluntary organisations using these as 'live laboratories' for innovation in NFE;
C. creating a forum for sharing of experiences among government and voluntary organisation faculty members through organising discussion meetings, involving them in National level workshops, Annual Conference on NFE and deploying the Resource Team to act as Resource Persons in other State organisations;
d. involving the functionaries from various organisations in planning and developing NFE curriculum and teaching-learning materials in regional languages;
e. organising process-based orientation programmes in regional languages using regional language versions of the basic training package;
f. involving functionaries in department's research projects;
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g. providing special inputs for exchange of expertise between functionaries of State NFE programmes and those engaged in DPEP-NFE intervention activities;
h. identifying and forming a core Resource Team at the State level for performing the double responsibilities of training of other functionaries as well as development of MLL based innovative teaching-learning materials.
The department also organised every year four regional level training programmes specially designed to address the problems and issues faced by the voluntary organisations receiving grants from Ministry of Human Resource Development. The training programmes also helped in joint planning of activities, exchange of experiences in innovative programmes and activities. Out of 640 voluntary organisations in the country receiving grant from the MHRD, the department has covered in its training programme over 500 organisations. More than 700 functionaries from these organisations have already been trained by the department.
It also had number of interactions with all the District Resource Units located in Voluntary Organisations.
Through these programmes, the department provided opportunities to the functionaries to develop insights into the learners' learning difficulties and identify the ingredients of effective transactional process. Further the programmes helped the functionaries to understand the approaches and orientation of the NFE teaching-learning materials. As a part of practical training in
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analysing the instructional package, the functionaries were assigned the task of lesson-wise book analysis. The demonstration lessons and the critical analysis of the lessons in the real live centres concretised the approaches and methodologies of NFE process.
The Resource Teams generated through these training programmes work jointly as team members in Government run as well as Voluntary Organisations, training programme for different categories of NFE functionaries.
They are also deputed to other States for working as Resource Persons in different training programmes.
The department has designated five leading Voluntary Organi- sations located in four regions of the country as its Field Stations. These are being used for experimentation, innovations of methodologies and trying-out its evaluation tools and teaching-learning materials.
These organisations have distinguished themselves through their grassroots level innovations.
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The Organisations identified are:
i. Rayala Seema Seva Samiti ( Tirupati, A.P)
ii. Samanvya Ashram (Bodhgaya, Bihar)
iii. Mitraniketan ( Trivendrum, Kerala)
iv. Loka Shiksha Parishad, R.K.Mission (Narendrapur,W.B.)
V. Gandhividya Mandir (Sardar Sahar, Rajasthan)
These organisations provide real life laboratory situations where the department mounts many of its experimental programmes related to teaching-learning material, development programmes and identification of potential learner specific teaching-learning strategies.
The department has also intensively tried-out its MLL based material series in Janakalyan Ashram, Sahajahanpur (U.P.), Loka- jumbish (Rajasthan), Konark Education Soceity (New Delhi) and Prayas (New Delhi).
As a strategy for strengthening of mutual support system the department involves personnel from these Organisations in all of its developmental and research project activities. The department has also extended its academic support to these organisations by organising specially designed training programmes for the core faculty members of these Organisations.
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