Question

Visit some schools in your locality and prepare a report in the context of adaptation of salient features of NCF 2005.

Answer 1

The salient features of the revised NCF are as follows: Guiding Principles The NCF attempted to implement many of the good ideas that have been articulated in the past by various commissions to make it an inclusive and meaningful experience for children. The NCF is based on four guiding principles for curriculum development: (a) connecting knowledge to life outside the school, (b) ensuring that learning shifts away from rote methods, (c) enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks, and (d) making examinations more flexible. The NCF 2005 is critical of the perception about the child as a passive receiver of knowledge and emphasizes that the child can be made an active participant in the construction of knowledge by encouraging children to ask questions, relate what they are learning in school to things happening outside, encouraging them to answer from their own experiences and in their own words rather than by memorizing. It points out that interaction with peers, teachers and older and younger people, can open up many rich learning possibilities. Learning tasks and experiences, therefore, need to be designed to ensure that children seek out knowledge from sites other than the textbooks—from their own experiences, from experiences at home, community, from the library. The approach to planning lessons must therefore move away from the ‘Herbartian’ lesson plan to ‘Constructivist pedagogy’, planning activities that challenge children to think and try out what they are learning. It recommends significant changes in learning Languages, Math, Natural Science and Social Sciences, making education more relevant to the present day and future needs of children. In Language, it emphasizes on implementing the threelanguage formula with emphasis on mother tongue as the medium of instruction. It focuses on language as an integral part of every subject, since reading, writing, listening and speech contribute to a child’s progress in all curricular areas, and therefore constitute the basic of learning. English, Mathematics and Science are found to be the three core subjects in which a large number of students, nearly 50% fail. This is perhaps the biggest limitation of the elementary education system. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) addresses this issue. The Focus Group on “Teaching of Science” emphasized on experiment based learning in school science curriculum. Improving school libraries, laboratories and workshops is required to promote culture of experiment based learning while reducing the importance of external examinations. A need was also felt to have computer–interfaced experiments and projects utilizing database from public domain. Mathematics learning should help in enhancing the child’s ability to think and reason, visualize and handle abstractions and formulate and solve problems. The teaching of Science should be recast to enable children to examine and analyze every day experiences. Environment Education should become part of every subject. It also recommends a paradigm shift to study Social Sciences from the perspective of marginalized groups. It recommends gender justice and sensitivity to tribal and dalit issues and minority sensibilities.