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NEW DELHI: When Ranjitsingh Disale said “let’s cross the border” two years ago, 5,000 students from eight South Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, responded with a resounding “yes.”
The project he built allows students from different countries to interact for six weeks a year to talk about their similarities and erase their differences.
“Just a few weeks ago, we interacted with students from the Lyceum school in Karachi, Pakistan,” said Disale, who won the prestigious 2020 Global Teacher Award last week, during an exclusive interview with Arab News.
“Both the Indian and Pakistani students met face to face. They forgot that they were from enemy nations after they started talking, ”he added.
Disale said the biggest lesson from the launch of the cross-border project in 2018 was the understanding that education is the “key to peace on the subcontinent.”
He said: “The amount of money that India has spent fighting the conflicts with Pakistan; if we had spent half of that money on education, we could have found a peaceful solution to the problem.” He added that the dialogue between students on the other side of the border was “important for peace and prosperity in the world.”
Citing an example of a recent interaction between students, Disale said that a Pakistani girl “was surprised that India and Pakistan did not speak” despite sharing many similarities.
“Zahira said that there are so many differences between European countries, that each country has its own culture and language, but that they still exist together. India and Pakistan have so many similarities, but we are still fighting, ”he said.
“This is what children feel when they interact with each other. It helps them understand each other. “
The idea for the project started after reading the 2016 Global Peace Index, he said.
“I realized that countries in conflict spend money on the military instead of on education. What is the result after spending so much money in the army when they are still fighting each other?
“If we want to make the world our ancestors dreamed of, this is the time to form peaceful citizens. We must maintain dialogue and increase friendship. Peace is the solution, not war, ”he said.
On Thursday, Disale became the first Indian to win the $ 1 million prize after transforming his rural tribal village of Paritewadi, in the Solapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, into an educational center and “convincing villagers for them to study “.
Disale, who teaches at an elementary school in Paritewadi, beat out more than 12,000 applicants and nominees from more than 140 countries around the world to win the award.
The Global Teacher Prize was established in 2015 by the Varkey Foundation in Dubai to recognize exceptional teachers who have made an outstanding contribution to the profession.
Disale was chosen for devising a new digital tool for teaching.
“I was dealing with children of the 21st century and wanted to teach them according to the ways of the 21st century. I didn’t want to be a teacher teaching students an 18th century technique, ”he said.
In 2009, he joined Paritewadi Primary School as a teacher, at a time when “it was a stable”.
“I was surprised to see my school,” he said.
Most of the girls in the village are from tribal communities where school attendance used to be as low as two percent and “teenage marriage was common.”
An additional challenge the students faced was delivering a curriculum that was not in their primary language, leaving many unable to learn.
To make the process easier for them, Disale learned the local language and translated the class textbooks into the mother tongue of his students.
Later, he taught them how to use unique QR codes to access audio poems, video lectures, stories, and assignments. He also created a personalized learning experience for each student.
“The first task for me was to bring the children back to school. I devised a five-year plan and envisioned where I wanted to see the school in the next five years. My goal was 100 percent attendance, ”he said.
He then launched an awareness program among predominantly rural parents “who were not concerned with education.”
Disale said: “It is a town of about 2,000 people, where most of them make a living from farming.” He added that he slowly and steadily “instilled in them a respect for education.”
Today, the results are visible to all.
A decade after the initiative was launched, the village has reported zero teenage marriages and 100 percent school attendance of girls.
The school recently also won the award for “best school in the district,” with 85 percent of its students scoring A’s on annual tests.
A girl from the village has graduated from college, something that was considered impossible just a decade ago. Another unique tool he used for the initiative was an “alarm on, TV off” program.
“I put a siren on the roof of the school that sounded at 7 in the afternoon. This was an indication that it was time to study and everyone should turn off the television. Parents had to spend at least an hour with their children and pay attention to the children’s homework, ”Disale said.
