Jaya M Chapparamane

Jaya M Chapparamane is an Assistant Teacher at the Government Higher Primary School, Birashettyhalli, Mandya District. She comes from the pool of trained facilitators who underwent the Kali Kalisu orientation workshop that was conducted by an earlier IFA grantee Shanthamani last year. Having been exposed to various forms of theatre, she now wants to use her skills to aid in the learning process of her students.

It appears to be widely accepted that facts, reasoning, and analysis belong to the domain of science, while aesthetics and imagination belong to the arts. However, Jaya argues that at every stage in the process of learning about science, making experiments and documenting the results there are choices that are made and intuition that is used, which is closer to the understanding of arts and aesthetics. Many of the processes of science too require the student to imagine possible outcomes, and thus thinking in terms of science and arts as binaries is limiting. This is the foundation on which Jaya’s project is built attempting a cross-curricular approach for a series of engagements with the eighth and ninth grade students.

Jaya plans a series of workshops on readings and writing of poetry. She will invite science teachers, poets, writers, and theatre artists to conduct workshops on discussing, reading and writing poetry. Then students will use these learnings to work on their science curriculum.  Jaya believes writing out a laboratory report of scientific experiments through poetry, helps students to connect in a metaphysical way, the cause and effect within an experiment. The students will also be encouraged to document their scientific experiments and learnings from them through poetry and the written word. The outcomes of the ten month engagement will include recitals, installations and a publication; and conclude with a celebratory event with the children and the parent community coming together at the school.

The deliverables of the project to IFA together with reports will include audio-visual documentation of the workshops, images, and a ten to twelve minute video document of the entire project.  

This grant was made possible with support from Citi India.