School Contact Program, launched as part of the ‘Learn Without Fear’ campaign, is designed to highlight the negative impact of violence on children and the importance of treating children with dignity and respect in schools. The main objective of the school contact programme is to reach out to the campaign stakeholders, in this case, students, teachers and school administration. The campaign is designed for the government schools, which are reported as high incidence areas with a large vulnerable target group. The campaign reached 50 schools of Delhi in the first phase. Last year 63,000 students studying in Government school in Delhi were reached through this exercise.
The program has few components; chief among them is a direct reach out exercise in the form of a participatory presentation with the message of violence free school. This engagement is devised through an interesting play. After the play presentation participants are exhorted to write their feed back on the sheet provided as collateral. An interesting take away of the message of violence free school is given in the form of a bookmark to each of the participants.
The live theatrical presentation is modelled on ‘Forum Theatre’ which was started by Augusto Boal in Latin America and is now considered as one of the critical engagement tool. The theme of the presentation is conscientiously kept as a situation analysis of two opposite positions. In the first case the child is shown exposed to corporal punishment where as in the second case possible positive discipline responses are shown. In both cases, the situation presented is similar and would set against the background of a government school. The other point of view expressed will show the probable solution to the crisis. The two student characters are kept distinct to show each situation in correct perspective though in both the situations the characters come from similar social setup and from government schools background.
The idea is to explore all forms of corporal punishment through the carved-out characters. The common modes of punishment shown in the presentation would be descriptive enough to leave a mark on the audience so that they could relate to the actual situation. As the play will be performed by trained coordinators, they would be equipped to engage audience in an interaction after the play. The core idea would be to leave a lot of space for active interaction after the play and drive home the points of the campaign, ‘Learn Without Fear’.
After the presentation the school principals sign a pledge to keep their school violence free. The signed pledge is collected by the campaign coordinator along with the student feed back form.
The forms collected during the campaign are then collated at the end of the campaign and key-learnings are shared with the child rights activists and organizations.
This year the campaign is going to reach out to three states namely- Delhi, U.P. and Uttarakhand. In all the campaign will reach out to 150 schools and around one Lakh students.
“Learn Without Fear” campaign wants to not only impress upon the need of having violence free school, it would like to explore the provisions of the recently passed Right to Education act for having child friendly schools and the impact of positive discipline.
