Kali Kalisu: 2009-2015

Over the past 10 years, Kali-Kalisu has successfully deployed concepts, pedagogies and practices in the field of arts education and has enabled their dissemination within a wide constituency of government school teachers in Karnataka. Several Master Resource Persons’ training workshops were conducted across the state. Capacities in arts education were built, reinforced and consolidated with a number of school teachers. Three national and three regional arts education conferences were held during this period. Presently, a number of teachers have graduated to become facilitators and have been demonstrating arts education practices in classrooms in schools across the state.

The different phases of Kali-Kalisu displayed a strategy that organically shifted from engaging a large constituency of teachers in its early phases to nurturing a small but highly motivated set of individuals in the final stages. In the first phase, more than 400 teachers from across seven districts were given an orientation into the world of arts that included five art forms—theatre, movement arts, music, visual arts and puppetry. In the second phase, the focus shifted to conducting a more intensive training for a select set of teachers in a 15-day residency. The third phase was shaped around a series of regional conferences where teachers from across the seven districts gained exposure to a variety of discourses and practices in arts education, along with sharing of best practices from some of the teachers. The fourth phase saw a shift in strategy, where individual project and model school grants were given to a handful of Kali Kalisu teachers, who implemented a series of arts-based training for peers and students in their schools and districts, using local artist facilitators and involving the surrounding communities.

Broadly speaking, the programme has two strands—one that works at the ground-level with government school teachers and artist facilitators in teacher-training and grant making modes, and another, shaped as a public engagement platform for extending discourses and practices of arts education at the national level.