In Lucknow there are 29 Urban Learning Centres (ULCs), and I had the pleasure of visiting two of them. The children were divided three groups: class 1, class 2, and class 3–5. One ULC also had a pre-school group. The collection of books included books from Read India and other publishers, and one of the ULCs had a room in which the books where hanging from a string. Since Lucknow is a mix of Muslims and Hindus, there were books in both Hindi and Urdu, as well as English.
My Hindi wasn’t good enough to understand everything, but I did get some of it, especially when people were speaking to me. This was the case with the trainers I met, who didn’t speak English at all. Since I roughly knew the context, I could get a lot of what they said (and asked for translation when I couldn’t).
MP is the last state I will visit, which means my stay is coming to an end. In the coming couple of days I’ll be working on my final report, but also be sure to catch some talks on multi-lingual education (MLE) at J.N. University, which is something I am very interested in. I’m also hoping to spark Pratham’s interest for MLE…