 |
REGIONAL RESOURCE CENTRE
Tour of Nammabhoomi
NAMMABHOOMI
Namma Bhoomi (Our Land) is located near Kundapur town in the Udupi district at the foothills of the Western Ghats on the bank of the river Varahi. The 6.25-acre campus was designed to give working children a chance to continue their education and also relieve the immediate burden of survival. The campus has residential accommodation, educational and training facilities for over 100 youth (girls and boys). The aim of the RRC is to be a community resource that….
The vocational courses conducted in Namma Bhoomi have received recognition for their content and the calibre of the graduates. The graduates are widely accepted for their apprenticeship programmes. This has generated increased interest in the local communities and a large number of youngsters now apply for the courses. Namma Bhoomi has received a wide recognition for the principles it promotes through practice. Its culture, ambience and vocational courses have caught the imagination of the general public.The education programme has evolved over the years, while responding to the emerging needs of children. The feedback and experience of successive batches of students have moulded the programme. Namma Bhoomi, a residential school for working children near Kundapur town, was inaugurated in 1993. It was designed to give working children a chance to continue their education and also relieve the immediate burden of survival. They felt that a residential programme would create an environment where caste and gender biases could be broken and a new value system nurtured by examining/ analysing one¹s society and the larger milieu in which we live. It would also improve the nutritional level of children. The educational and training programme has four components. Firstly, the curriculum that enables children to brush up and/or learn basic scientific concepts equivalent to class X of the formal system. Secondly, the general educational and awareness programmes address the developmental needs of children - focusing on development of the individual. The third dimension responds to the empowerment needs of children. The fourth component focuses on professional and vocational training needs of children. These are addressed through a range of skill training courses. This has emerged as one of the pioneering models in integrated education for adolescent boys and girls, and has been taken note of by the Planning Commission, Government of India as a viable model for replication.- Vimala Ramachandran and Aarti Saihjee, Looking back in order to look ahead, CWC – an External Review, 2001
The students of Namma Bhoomi are recognised as ambassadors of children¹s rights. The graduates continue to get support from the Makkala Panchayat on their return to their villages on completion of their course and they, in turn, continue to support the movement of working children. Though it started small, now, Namma Bhoomi is recognised as a Community Polytechnic by the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
CWC, in its involvement with street and working children, has stressed the importance of nurturing local bio-diversity resource bases as one important way of stemming the outlaw of children from rural to urban areas. It is also a way of retaining family integrity and providing for a sane childhood. On the Namma Bhoomi campus, CWC’s training unit in Kundapur, the children helped begin a small seed wealth centre of local vegetable seeds in 2002. They look after it and monitor what comes in and out, and keep record of seed exchanges. This is alongside their regular home gardening activities. The entire thing fits the bill of “Grow a garden, grow a curriculum” very well. Many of the children have come from traumatic backgrounds. Several of the most disturbed children have become ardent seed keepers and enthusiastic explorers and stewards of ecology and environment of their hearts and minds, and of their surroundings. The graduation ceremony of 2006 felicitated the 10th batch of professionally trained youngsters graduating from Namma Bhoomi. Dr. V.S. Acharya, the Minister for Medical Education, Govt. of Karnataka and the Minister in-charge of the Udupi district, inaugurated this programme. The training programmes at Namma Bhoomi have gained academic as well as aesthetic acclaim and are seen as a role model for the entire state. This year, Namma Bhoomi effectively hosted 34 workshops and training programmes during the year on wide range of issues for local, district, state, national and international participants and is well established as a resource centre not only for the region, but for the country. This is also reflected in the 5685 visitors to Namma Bhoomi –- who represented organisations, institutions, media, parents as well as the general public. By Damodar Acharya Published in Seminar July 2006 issue no -563 We were convinced that education cannot and should not take place only within the four walls of a classroom. We identified the need to take aspects of culture, environment, geography, society and politics into consideration while assessing the appropriateness of the education programme. We had repeatedly observed that it was the western perspective or the perspective of the upper castes which defined the parameters of good education’. The Appropriate Education Programme (AEP6) initiated in Namma Bhoomi explored the possibility of defining good education in partnership with children and members of the community.
Making half our dreams come trueBy Vimala Ramachandran Namma Bhoomi was designed to give working children a chance to continue their education and also relieve the immediate burden of survival. They felt that a residential programme would create an environment where caste and gender biases could be broken and a new value system nurtured by examining/ analysing one¹s society and the larger milieu in which we live. It would also improve the nutritional level of children.
An Appeal
: Join us in our effort and contribute to our cause!
|
