Dedication and Innovation in Education!
At first when one looks at Ranjitsinh Disale he comes across as any other young man with a charming smile and sparkling eyes, eager to make a place for himself in this fiercely competitive world, you delve deeper and you meet the real Ranjitsinh Disale who has carved a niche for himself in the field of education and who has today become an inspiration for millions of teachers in India and around the world.
After watching the young teacher’s reaction when veteran British actor and writer Stephen Fry announced his win during a virtual ceremony broadcast from the Natural History Museum in London on 3 December,Thursday, I could only wish more and more such successes for him in the future. The Global Teacher Prize that he won saw over 12,000 nominations and applications from over 140 countries. From among them, Ranjitsinh Disale made it to the top 10 and finally won the award.
Last few hours I am reading and watching all about him and his story. A young man who hails from a very small Paritewadi village in Solapur district of Maharashtra. He wanted to be an IT engineer and had enrolled in an engineering college. But when things did not work for him, he was persuaded to take up teacher training programme by his father. Although Ranjitsinh Disale was initially hesitant about the decision, his time at the teacher training college made him realise that teachers were the real change-makers in the world, and this realization according to me has been a ‘game changer’ for Ranjitsinh himself because not many young men these days would make such a career switch. Oh! how India needs many more Ranjitsinh if India has to emerge as ’Atm Nirbhar Bharat’ in the real sense, because education is the foundation of our economy.
What (and how) we learn in school determines who we become as individuals and our success throughout our lives. It informs how we solve problems, how we work with others, and how we look at the world around us. In today’s innovation economy, education becomes even more important for developing the next generation of innovators and creative thinkers and if a teacher like Ranjitsinh Disale leads by example then it sure is an extra bonus.
From starting his career at the Zilla Parishad Primary School located between storeroom and cattle shed in 2009 to receiving The Global Teacher Prize of 2020, Ranjitsinh has come a long way. He took upon himself the task to redesign the books from Std 1- 4 for the girl students of the tribal community so that they can comprehend the subjects better. He did it by re-designing textbooks to include QR codes that would contain video lectures, assignments, stories, and audio poems for better understanding, he became a winner that very instant. He became an innovator, and we need more and more of such innovators in our country, who can bring upon change in the education scenarios.
In my experience as school reviewer, I have often come across passionate and dedicated teachers who hail from small three tier towns of India and they needed an inspiration like Ranjitsinh in their lives! Many teachers and education leaders in small town India have ideas about how they might improve the educational system, yet very few possess the motivation, tools and support needed to turn their passion from an abstract idea into a reality.
Schools do not exist in a silo, teachers do not exist in a silo and businesses don’t exist in a different realm, we’re all at a table together, trying to solve the world’s problems. I am sure Ranjitsinh will agree to this thought process as it matches with his line of thinking. The world recognized the innovator and change maker in Ranjitsinh.
Teachers all over India have to examine the current situation followed by a mental exploration of how that situation could be improved upon. Teachers must ask three questions to get this process going, “What is the problem?” “How can I address this problem to make it better?” and “What tools do I have at my disposal to assist in this process?” Once they have explored the above questions and the answers are formalized, teachers should try to make that change on a small-scale within their own world, that is what Ranjitsinh did. Analyze the outcomes of that experiment and identify what further support might be needed to either hone the idea or restructure it all together. As a result of Ranjitsinh efforts, the Maharashtra government had announced in 2017 that it would introduce QR-embedded textbooks for all grades in the State. Moreover, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had also announced in 2018 that all NCERT textbooks would include QR codes in the future. This is the power of innovation!
Innovation in education is especially significant, considering the young minds molded by the education system today will be those leading the charge for innovation tomorrow. Though Ranjitsinh Disale may have dropped out of engineering college but his teaching work and his innovation which included adding QR codes to primary class books so that the children can get links to audio poems, video lectures, assignments and stories, is an innovation that will help produce many engineers and doctors coming from small towns and villages of India in the future.