Spoken English: how to teach without teaching

From day one stepping foot in Alliance International School it became very clear to me that improving spoken English was number one on the Principal’s agenda.

Teaching all classes in English is a serious
selling point for the school: parents expect
teachers to deliver

“Watson-Mam, we are so excited you have come to make the all the children fluent in English”. Ah. A simple task then.

The need for English

I won’t deny that students’ English ability is a serious concern for the school. It is common knowledge that children in India who want a decently paid job or to continue into higher education post-school need to speak English. In a country of nearly 30 different languages, English is (sadly) becoming the communal tongue. And since every subject in my school is taught in English, it is crucial that students speak the language in order to progress in all their other classes.  

In my initial case study back in August I reported that the standard of English at Alliance International was pretty high. My classroom observations saw 9^th standard reading British Romantic poetry, and 5^th class explaining without hesitation that, “a noun is a person place or thing”.  Students would happily come and chat to me in break time about Harry Potter or how England will lose the cricket. I didn’t think there was much to worry about. Then, as the weeks ticked on, a few realisations hit me.  The classroom observations were set up and rehearsed ready for my viewing; 9^th grade children had memorised the words “dewy” and “effervescent” in the exact same lesson the previous day. And the children in 5^th could tell me (deep breath) “anounisapersonplaceorthing” but when I asked them what else a noun was in addition to a thing and a place I was received with unanimous blank stares. The students who had come to chat to me were those at the top of the class, sent by the teachers, and the teachers themselves had been told not to speak Hindi in my presence.

A lot of students = a somewhat daunting task

But why? The answer is simple: Culture of pride. To impress foreign visitors is something so deeply instilled in Indian culture that even the school Principal, who had actively requested my help, didn’t want me to see what the reality of the problems were. 

It has now been established that spoken English is a primary concern in school, particularly with students aged between 9 and 11 years, who by now should be able to make conversation and write in full sentences but in truth cannot distinguish between a capital and lower case letter.  One of the main problems is that certain students within every class who speak English relatively well answer all the questions and teachers let those who know very little to remain silently at the back with their heads down.

Developing a curriculum: harder than it sounds...

The key program I’ve been working on to help fix this is to develop a spoken English curriculum for these children.  Being an IDEX fellow, I’ve always got to have two things at the back of my mind: Sustainability and Scalabilty. In other words, any spoken English curriculum that I develop needs to be something that can be used by the school when I am no longer there (i.e. I should not be the teacher), and it needs to be something other IDEX fellows could potentially bring to their own schools. This is the only way to implement genuine change.

Working on some charts for classrooms with Mrs Tahera

All this was kicking around in my head a month ago. All the parts of the great plan for change were there:

1. Problem identified: need for improvement in spoken English in children from 4^th-6^th standard.

2. Solution proposed: a syllabus specifically for spoken English to be written by me and taught in school by another teacher.

3. IDEX considerations: make it scalable and sustainable.

However, I still found myself with one somewhat worrying hole in my plan: I did not have the faintest idea how to go about creating a spoken English syllabus.  

So I did what IDEX fellows do best: I found an expert and got her to show me how it’s done.  I branched out to a wonderful woman called Vaishali, a self proclaimed “kidologist” – trainer of students, teachers and parents for improving spoken English in children.  I spent a day at her house with her and her two kids trawling through English books and learning about all parts of English development.  Vaishali explained to me the importance of “sight words” – words like this, then, his, because – the types of things that make up 70% of all sentences. She also explained how children learn in word groupings: S A T P I N Go through S- nouns first, the A- nouns etc. She told me to bring in visual learning techniques with a “word bank chart”, then get children to form their own sentences and always, always make the children think that learning is fun. It was a great day which gave me a lot of food for thought.

A wealth of resources out there

Next step involved a lot of internet and bookshop trawling to get hold of components and work out how to throw it all together. Google search: Fun classroom games for kids; nouns beginning with S; sample quiz sheets; comprehension papers etc etc. I ended up creating a 4-lesson plan based around a group of 12 sight words and 12 nouns starting with a single letter. Lesson 1 and 2 involve teaching the words to the kids and forming sentences with the words. Lesson 3 is a spoken class – getting kids to fill in worksheets for dialogues then act them out in pairs and to the class. Some of the words in these may overlap from the last two lessons but many won’t. 'This is okay' said Vashali, 'just get them confident about reading aloud'. Lesson 4 is pure fun: take the kids out of the classroom and play games with them in the hall or let them watch a video. This lesson keeps students wanting to do the sessions and focuses them for other lessons in school.

All in all, the IDEX Spoken English Curriculum is going to have 24 lessons. The 4-lesson framework is to be repeated with a different word banks, different dialogues and a different sets of games. The final syllabus pack I envisage will contain six 4-lesson plans based around the six S A T P I N nouns and a whole range of sight words, a list of classroom and active games to choose from, a set of homework sheets to accompany every word grouping and a pack of dialogues. There will also be word bank charts to go up on the wall to keep a notes of all the words taught throughout the term. Every lesson on new words is to build on the ones from before, constantly expanding kids’ vocabularly and developing their confidence in speaking.  The very active way the classes are taught means no kids can be left quietly behind at the back. Everyone gets involved.

Shruti and Faisal hard at work at one of our meetings

Now that this package is very much in the making, the final step has been labour. Constructing this huge document is a really time consuming thing so I’ve approached other IDEX fellows who have a similar urgent need for spoken English in their schools.  Three other fellows have gotten on board and we’ve met a number of times to brainstorm and delegate tasks. They also brought a number of great things to the table that I hadn’t considered. Zach pointed out that this program needed impact assessment so we can see after 24 weeks if it is worth it. He wrote a pre- and post- test to give kids in schools.  Shruti, a native of Hyderabad, revised some of the word banks to choose words that Indian children are more likely to use. Faisal came up with different games he’d been doing with his kids in school in the times he’d been roped into teaching.

Ms. Rizwana,who is taking the classes and myself launch
the spoken english curriculum on parents day in school
At Alliance we are calling it A.E.D.P
Alliance English Development Program

It’s been a really good collaboration and the finished package is now nearly there. Myself and the three other fellows are piloting the program in our schools over the next couple of weeks in order to see if we need to make any revisions before handing it over to others. We are going to present it at the school owners meeting in mid December as a single document for other IDEX fellows to offer in their schools.

Fingers crossed we’ll see results. 

Back to the blogging

It has been a shamefully long time since I last updated my blog. Having now spent three and a half months out in India, working as an IDEX fellow, I now realise that thinking I could write a weekly work update on top of the million and one other things I have going on was somewhat unrealistic. That said, things are finally starting to settle out here and I feel it is most certainly time to let you all know what on earth I’ve been up to. Better late than never right?

Front of the school

To recap from way back when, my central job as an IDEX fellow involves working for a low-fee taking school as a strategy and business consultant.  At my school, Alliance International, I am trying to organise and develop all those aspects which make for the successful running of any educational establishment: academics, finances, management policy, discipline strategies and even infrastructure analysis.  One might think that for someone with a background in moral philosophy (as opposed to education, business or management) who has undergone a mere two weeks of training this is a rather daunting task, and truthfully it is. But to help support this consultancy role, all IDEX fellows have access to a huge network of service providers and experts in different fields relating to education to whom we can reach out for help and training.  In addition to this, amongst the group of fellows itself, we have a vast array of different skill sets and backgrounds and have formed working groups based on our particular abilities and the key focus for policy in our schools. The idea is that sharing knowledge and skill sets will make for the best outcomes.

Myself with Pre-primary on "Star Day"

Currently at Alliance International I have a number of different projects on the go.  August was spent creating a detailed case study report of the school to find out which areas were particularly strong or weak. September was then spent constructing a business plan with a timeline for specific projects.  Now that we are well into October, those projects are slowly coming into existence. My key area focuses are spoken English, careers guidance for older children, teacher training (particularly with regards to discipline strategies), inculcation of moral behavior, a special needs awareness program and application for building grants and student scholarships.

Working in India is both hugely rewarding and ridiculously frustrating and can be an emotional experience.  The last few months have been especially tough with the addition of finishing a master’s dissertation thesis on top of all other work (hence minimal blogging).  Things can be hard when I spend an afternoon explaining to my school owner that my job does not involve teaching and then being told the next morning that I’ve got five classes to take that day. Or when I try to go to school but local political activists, the Telangana, hold strikes for a month and close down the bus services so I can’t get there. But when I see twenty 9^th standard students happily chatting to locals about the dangers of using plastic bags, or when I drag my school owner (who regularly beats children) to a culture of peace training session and he ends the day by saying “I thought this would be a waste of time but I realise now how important peaceful disclipline really in in school” the job is definitely made worthwhile. This fellowship is all about taking small steps in the right direction whilst looking at ways that every project implemented in each school can be replicated in others and sustainably maintained.

School banner highlighting some of the
unique features of Alliance. Including the new
teacher from London...

The next few blog entries will outline some of the programs I am currently working on as well as the challenges I’ve faced and the mad ups and downs of living and working in India.

Applications are now open for the 2012-13 cohort. Anyone interested and wanting to find out more, feel free to contact me via email, facebook or on here. www.idexfellows.com

A day in the life of an IDEX fellow

I’ve made it through my first week of working in the schools and have been blown away by how many new things have already been thrown in my direction.  It’s been good fun meeting teachers and kids in school (who all treat me like I’m a world famous celebrity) and I’ve really enjoyed learning how to apply the things we were taught during training to the real world. Although every day here is different, I have tried to give an overview of what I do in this blog post by writing a day in the life of an IDEX fellow. I’m sure if the other fellows read this they will give account of totally different experiences to mine, but hopefully they’ll be far too busy with their own work to check it out…

My housemates all setting off on their
daily individual commutes 

6.45am: It’s wake up time for me. I have a cold shower, get dressed in my kurta and dupatta and sit at my computer with a coffee for about 45mins going through my action plan for the day ahead. At this time I might also do bits and bobs of research on local social enterprises and send the odd email to our program managers or someone from an organisation we are working with. I leave the house via a quick outdoor breakfast stop the local idly stand on my. Four idly (a delicious steamed pattie made from fermented lentils and rice), coconut chutney, sambar (a thin and spicy vegetable curry) and a chai totals at 16 rupees (22p). Bargain! I have to take two buses to school on my hour -ong commute, the second of which takes me to Golconda Fort, one of Hyderabad’s most famous historical sites. Every day as I walk to my school from the bus station some helpful (and confused) local tries to redirect me the Fort, assuming I am a tourist. There aren’t many other reasons a non-Indian would be going to this area.

Kids in 4th standard

9am: I arrive in school and have meeting with school owner Mr Syed Arif. We discuss the things I am hoping to get done that day and he tells me all the new ideas he has had. Mr Arif was born locally and is part of a family very well known in the Golconda area, the predominantly Muslim old city of Hyderabad.  Like many of the owners of Affordable Private Schools, he started out as a teacher in another private school and made a bit of extra money (and developed a very good reputation) by doing after school private English tuition.  He was able to go to the USA on a teaching program in Atlanta for a few years to work as a teacher in an American school and came back to India and started his own school, Alliance International, with the help of government loans and family money. Alliance has only been open for 14 months, but already boasts 1,200 children – a high number for affordable private schools. The kids pay up to 5,000 rupees per year (about £75) and range in age from preschool (age 5) to 10^th standard (age 16).  It is very impressive that so many parents have chosen to send their children to the school when it has been running for so little time and when there are so many other schools in the area, but Mr Arif’s reputation as forward thinking as well as his international travel experience has gained him much respect and parental trust. He is hugely keen to maintain this reputation and provide a high quality service as the threat of parents pulling their children out of school is one that is constantly on the cards.

Myself and Vice Principle Miss Tahera in the school's the brand new library

10am: I start out my work in school for the day. Every day is different and the range of things I do varies greatly. I am currently supposed to be putting together a case study of the school so I often sit in on classes and observe the teaching and look through the children’s workbooks. Sometimes I sit in the office and go through finance or attendance records. Often I move around the school, which has three blocks (senior, junior and preschool), chatting to the headmistresses of each block and finding out what they are concerned (or happy) about. I also do some building assessments and look at classroom facilities and how they are being utilised. My school owner has recently opened a new library for the kids which is great, but I’ve yet to see any children in it. These are the sorts of things I have to note down. Sometimes I get roped into a bit of teaching by students or teachers who still assume that because I’m English I must be here to teach. But I try to keep this to a minimum. In addition to observation I am also trying to initiate some small projects in school time such as teacher training, guidance counsellor sessions with disruptive kids and helping teachers find new online resources for interactive teaching before launching into a full business strategy plan in September.

1pm: School is finished for the day. Normally it runs until 4.30pm with taught classes until 2pm and compulsory study time after that, but this month it is Ramadan and, since the school is uniformly Muslim and fasting is compulsory for every student over the age of ten, everyone is let out early to go home and rest and pray. I remain behind with some of the teachers for half an hour to teach them one or two games from our new program EIG – English Improvement Games. EIG was set up by myself and Miss Tahera as a daily way to make children more excited about learning English. We compiled a list of games (researched from the internet) which all involve some kind of English teaching. We teach one game to the teachers each day, then the next day they play them once or twice with their own classes. It’s very simple and free, but effective.

The teachers getting into some ball games during EIG

2pm: I take my buses back from the Golconda suburbs to the central part of town where I live. I often head to a smart local coffee shop which is quiet and air conditioned and equipped with wifi and terrific mango shakes. I find that even a morning at the school completely drains my energy – there is absolutely no alone time as everyone constantly wants to chat – so Ruci&Idoni is a pretty good place to have some downtime and reflect back on what I’ve learnt that day. I type up my notes for the case study of the school I am compiling, send some emails, and do some prep for the following days.  Today, I have been emailing the project manager of MILLEE, an organisation which helps train children in English through the use of a very specific mobile phone program, to tell her about how the program went. There will be much more info on MILLEE coming soon on this blog (watch this space).

5pm: I head back to my flat in Banjara Hills via the xerox shop for any photocopying I need to do for the next day such as handouts for school or notes for the school owner. Often at this time in the early evening the IDEX fellows have to either meet with Allie, our program leader at IDEX, to let her know how our progress is going, or with the working group we have been assigned. The working groups are small sets of IDEX fellows who meet to work on specific areas of the IDEX program itself. I am on the social business committee so our job is to organise trips for the fellows to visit other social enterprises in the local area. We are currently doing research on different kinds of organisations including microfinance groups and arts and cultural community programs.

8pm: The rest of the evening is mine to use, for any additional work to do, skype calls back home and dinner. Sometimes there are drinks parties at the houses of other people in the Hyderabad social enterprise field which is a great opportunity to find out about social development work done beyond the educational sphere. Generally I’ll just pick up some parantha bread and dhal and wind down with my flatmates at home recharging my energy for another day…

Myself and one other fellow getting into the social enterprise mentality at one of our early brainstorming sessions!

Lesson one: What are we doing here?

I have been in India for a week and a half now and am getting fairly well settled.  The first week of training has involved a lot of meeting new people, taking in information on social enterprise and affordable private schools and a huge amount of life sorting.  All of the IDEX fellows were fortunate enough to be allocated apartments, which we have spent our free time decking out with furniture, fridges, washing machines and home broadband.  We have also been getting together our mobile phones and some Indian attire acceptable for work. The process of arranging many of these things is not like in England. For one, every single person requires you provide passport photocopies and an electricity bill for everything.  Not too easy when you’re trying to set up the electrics. And when people say they are going to deliver the furniture at 11am, they actually mean 8pm. And they’ll only bring half of it. The rest comes tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. But it’s been good fun and it’s certainly a bonding experience between myself and my four other flatmates.

There are 36 IDEX fellows in total working out in Hyderabad. 32 are from the USA, 3 are from India, and 1 (myself) is from the UK. We are being team led by one of the last year’s fellows who is hugely knowledgeable about the task in hand and has a lot of patience having lived in India for all of last year.  Despite her never-ending list of jobs (on top of managing and training us she has also started her own social enterprise over here with two other fellows from last year), she always has a big smile on her face. Although this year’s fellows all have a pretty diverse set of backgrounds and varied academic focuses, including business, international relations and education, we all share an interest in and belief in the value of social enterprise: economic and social development through business models and innovation.

Training consists of a combination of group teambuilding activities, information on affordable private schools and social enterprise and brainstorming about how we are going to be spending the next nine months. We begin each day at 8am with an hour of yoga (maintaining a calm disposition being fundamental to success over here) and work through until around 5pm, digesting lots of important information vital to the success of the coming year. We then have reading to do in the evening and research on local enterprises. Our job this year will predominantly be to work one-on-one with the owner of our allocated school to help them improve the quality of the service they provide: educating the poor. We shall spend the first month putting together a case study of the school itself to find out which areas are doing well and which need more support. We will be considering everything from teaching quality to school facilities to extra-curriculars to financials. Most of the schools are likely to be doing very well in certain areas but lacking in others.  Once the school case study is compiled we will be working with the owners to construct a school-specific action plan geared towards all areas that need improvement and then putting that plan into practice. Last year’s fellows helped develop shared library networks, computer lab programs, teacher training, extra-curricular clubs, creative learning programs and career guidance counselling systems. They also helped the schools apply for local loans for building projects etc.

Group training

One key warning to us has been to avoid implementing “fluffy” innovations. We need to be putting into practice sustainable models for change in schools that can be reused after our departure.  It is no help to a school owner if we come and teach one academic year’s worth of English and then leave.  Far more helpful is to give teachers guidance in their English teaching techniques and transfer skills which they can then continue to use in the coming years and train new teachers in themselves.

Alongside our in-school work, the IDEX fellows will also be meeting together in working groups specifically focused towards certain areas that might need improvement, brainstorming ideas for innovations and business plans that all schools might adopt.  For example one group will be looking specifically at how information technology might be used in schools. They will cover everything from getting computer systems in to schools in the first place to how school owners and teachers can best utilise technology. This group will consist of those in the IDEX team who have a particular background experience in computing and so will be able to give other fellows not so experienced in this field advice, strategies and business plans that they can pass on to their school owners. In this way knowledge is shared.  Other working groups might include those interested in helping career development, financial aids or arts projects. 

So week one has been a lot to take on board. New home, new friends, new job, new lifestyle. But training has also made me very optimistic about what I hopefully have to offer here and even more about the wealth of knowledge I am about to acquire. One key thing I have learnt so far is that social enterprise is about playing to people’s strengths and sharing knowledge and skills. Here in Hyderabad I am surrounded by extremely bright entrepreneurial individuals, so despite the fact that we don’t have gas in our flats and our toilets don’t flush, I am feeling inspired and excited by what can be learnt and achieved in the coming year.

Affordable Private Schools: everyone's a winner

Three days until departure. Lots of life juggling going on what with trying to write a dissertation, moving home from university, packing for ten months abroad and saying all my goodbyes. There is so much to think about when going to somewhere like India: flights, visa, insurance, bank account, phone account, medical kit, vaccinations, mosquito net, plug adapters... The to do (and to get) list is endless, and ticking things off takes time. 12,000 words on moral particularism and human rights has also been a somewhat hefty addition to my workload. Currently, my days are spent in the library; evenings packing, unpacking and repacking bags at home; nights out with friends or eating with the family. Sometime I get some sleep in too.  And I’m trying to learn Hindi. I can do 12 letters of the alphabet so far.

To remind myself of why all this craziness will be worth it, I have been reading ‘A Beautiful Tree’ by Professor James Tooley, which is an account of his research into Affordable Private Schools that has inspired much of the work IDEX sets out to undergo in Hyderabad.

Tooley’s book recounts ten years of his own research into Affordable Private Schools (APS): schools privately owned, set up by local entrepreneurs, located in the poorest areas of low-economy nations, and created to educate children from very poor families.  These schools are not well documented in the Western world and indeed Tooley himself stumbled upon them by accident whilst carrying out a separate research project. His story begins in the slums Hyderabad where he came across the surprising discovery that even in the poorest areas, many very poor families were choosing to pay for their children to be educated at one of tiny independently owned schools dotted on every street corner of the slums, rather than at the government schools where teaching, uniform and daily lunch is all free. 

The findings meant two things: the teaching in the APS was of a significantly higher standard to that in government schools, and the parents of children, even in the poorest areas, value education so much that they are willing to pay for this difference. 

Tooley argues that these schools are the way forward for the poor. They cost around US$10 per child per year, which is just about affordable for the average cycle rickshaw driver. Some children – orphans, or those from the very poorest families – attend for free, subsidised by the fees of others. The school owners make a small profit, the teachers are paid small, but sufficient, wages and the kids receive a good quality of education. These schools are businesses constructed for social means, the school owners genuinely wanting to provide a good service. This is social enterprise at its finest.

Each of the IDEX fellows will be assigned one of these schools to work with. Mine is called Alliance International. This is all I’ll know about it before I arrive since none of these schools, being very small (often just rooms in the houses of the owners), have websites.  Our job is to work with school owners to help bring new ideas and innovations to improve the running of their schools from experiences of our own education and market based strategies we will be learning in our intro weeks. These schools still have very few resources so we have to be innovative with what there is to work with. We will be looking at everything from school dinner plans to discipline strategies to sports clubs. I’m hoping to start a CV clinic to help children think about their future life plans beyond school.

The APS system has not been without criticism. Kevin Watkins, in a paper responding to Tooley, argues that development agencies should be concerned with improving free education for the poor and not improving the APS leading to a further subdivision of class in poor countries. I am aware that this might be a legitimate claim, however, I have a feeling Watkins may have somewhat missed understanding why it is that the APS have been such a success. Development requires that everyone involved in any project have a motivation to put in the effort to reach goals. In societies where corruption and bribery are still widespread, it is easy for things to fall through the loop and for some people to take advantage. In the APS, owners are motivated to keep their standards high as this is the only way to ensure fee paying children will attend; teachers in these schools will thus be motivated to teach well, not wanting to risk dismissal by the owners; families of poor children will be motivated to send their children to these schools because they will be aware of the significant difference in educational quality their children will be receiving. Everyone has a stake in maintaining the success of the business. And everyone is held accountable.

I shall be very interested to see for myself at Alliance International whether Tooley’s happy picture of bottom-up small-scale development is as he claims. I very much hope it is.


For more on Affordable Private Schools please look at the website for Gray Matters Capital which is the organisation sponsoring the IDEX fellows in India http://www.graymatterscap.com/affordable-private-school-initiative

The end of the school day in Delhi - ten to a cycle rickshaw, not an uncommon sight.

5000 miles from home....

“Change in all things is sweet” – Aristotle

In less than a month from now I'll be sat on board flight 9W119, flicking through the in-flight magazine and nervously sipping on my final glass of wine for the next ten months praying my luggage makes it through the flight change. Destination: Hyderabad.

I'm currently a postgrad student in the UK finishing off my Master's course in political and moral philosophy at the University of Sheffield.  In July I shall be leaving my comfortable student life and entering the world of work as a social enterprise consultant working with affordable private schools in India.  I am one of 30 recent graduates selected by Oglethorpe University in the USA to be a member of their IDEX Fellowship, a professional development program set up in 2010 through a partnership between Oglethorpe University and Gray Matters Capital to train graduates in social enterprise business aimed at tackling poverty whilst being placed head on in the environment they are helping.  IDEX stands for IDeate. EXecute. Solve. It is about bringing together different kinds of people from different academic backgrounds to exchange ideas and innovation with local people to provide sustainable change in developing countries. Take a look at the IDEX website here: http://www.oglethorpe.edu/IDEX/Homepage.aspx

In a world where 3 billion people still live on less than $2.50 per day, an amount many westerners (myself included) wouldn’t think twice about spending on a cup of coffee, the gap between rich and poor is widening. It is sadly becoming more and more evident that aid, by way of monetary donation, cannot sufficiently narrow this gap and counteract global poverty.  For every $1 of foreign aid that a developing country receives, $25 is spent on debt repayment and so those who need money the most are, by and large, not the recipients of it.  Genuine poverty reduction requires something more. It requires setting up business ventures to give people long-term work and a sustainable income, rather than a gift of cash to buy things in the short-term.  Aid functions only to medicate the disease of poverty, whereas genuine change requires tackling the root of the problem itself by way of market-based strategies with social impact. This is the philosophy behind social enterprise and behind the work carried out by IDEX. 

Although social enterprise is currently developing all areas of public and private industry including power, technology, agriculture and health, education will be the primary focus of the IDEX work.  Since education is such a fundamental part of the path to economic and social development, much of the work I will be doing in the coming year will be in this sector. Us IDEX fellows will be working with affordable private schools (APS), which are schools serving the poorest families in Hyderabad, to help them develop and provide the best quality teaching for the less privileged members of Indian society. Although in India, literacy rates have dramatically risen over the last half-century, most children will still not see school beyond age 15 and literacy rates are still much lower for girls than boys.  Education in the first step towards developing the skills needed for self made enterprise and development.  The IDEX fellows are expected to be inspiring independent business ventures with the APS leaders to improve the running of these schools.

This is a big task to undertake and, in all honesty, an intimidating one.  I am the only fellow accepted who is neither American nor Indian and I feel very privileged to be invited to the cohort, but equally under pressure to perform and rise to the task in hand. We are expected to be working a 50-hour week for our Indian salaries and schools run from Monday to Saturday. In addition to this work, we shall be flying to conferences and seminars all over the country to learn about social enterprise in other fields and make connections with other entrepreneurs. Coming from the background of philosophy of human rights, I have an awful lot to learn about how social enterprise works in the real world; it’s a big step up from sitting in coffee shops in Sheffield browsing online philosophy journals.  But it’s an exciting change and one which I intend to put my all in to.  The chance to exchange knowledge and skills with local people and with my fellow IDEXers is something truly valuable to my own professional and personal development. Hopefully I will be part of something that will benefit the lives of others too.

This will be my third trip to India, but the first as a professional worker rather than a backpacker. To a certain extent I have ideas about how life in Hyderabad will be but there are many things I cannot know until I arrive.  One thing I know for sure though is that since coffee is now off the menu (I’m sorry, but Indian coffee just doesn’t cut it), I’ll be drinking the masala chai that Indians consume in ridiculous quantities to get me through the ten months. This will certainly be a time of chai and of change. I’ll be giving account of my experiences of work and play over the next few months.  Please do follow me on this blog to see how it goes.

For more facts and figures on global wealth disparity, check out: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats