The School

Nestled under a beautiful chikoo orchard in the sleepy tribal hamlet of Sogve village, Dahanu, Maharashtra is the Tamarind Tree School. A bold and spirited learning space that believes in equity, justice and the individual’s right to dream. A space that breaks commonly held prejudices about rural communities and learning, determined to build an alternative practice of education.

Catering to the tribal children of Dahanu, Tamarind Tree School is a community of 125 first-generation learners who are gently exposed to the world of literacy and knowledge with the belief that they will become lifelong independent learners.

The Tamarind Tree school began in 2010 and is a government recognised school that runs from Pre Primary to Class 10. The first batch of students will be passing out in 2020 under the Maharashtra Institute of Open Schooling to get a S.S.C Certificate (in the medium of English).

The Model

The Tamarind Tree experiment is based on the concept of Open Education. Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. The organization is part of the global open education movement that believes that everyone in the world should have equal access to high-quality educational experiences and resources. We work to eliminate barriers to this goal. We strongly believe that the only way to build educational equity is through the Open Education movement which states that knowledge cannot be commodified and must be in the public domain for all to use.

Over the years, the school has been building a robust infrastructure that enables this to happen. As a first step, the school built its own Learning Management System (LMS) where students enroll in their courses based on the NCERT curriculum. The learning management system has been designed to enable students to learn at their individual pace and evaluate their learning themselves. The LMS has its own in-depth assessment and grading system for the facilitators to see, evaluate and take remedial measures.

Teachers become Facilitators in the school, gently nudging  the students to push themselves, seek concept clarity.

Given the fact that there are huge gaps in understanding and practice of digital literacy in the schooling system, Tamarind Tree has put in place a Digital Literacy programme that teaches the use of the digital medium from the Pre Primary classes, where students become comfortable users of computers and slowly move towards becoming independent learners of classical subjects like Math and Science. Our digital literacy programme does not stop there. We also prepare our students to learn computer coding, three-dimensional designing, animation and similar other skills which are expected to shape the world of knowledge in the foreseeable future.

One of the principles that guide our digital programme is a belief that every digital citizen must learn to be a producer and not merely a consumer of digital products.  By the time they reach Grade 5, students become producers of digital content, be it a video game or an animated story.

At Tamarind Tree, everyone is a learner. The roles of a trainer and trainee are interchangeable. There are many instances where a young learner would teach a trick or two of game making to an elder (read teacher) learner. This approach has helped us break the hierarchy of knowledge. It has also helped us to ensure that everyone’s journey towards knowledge continues relentlessly.

Tamarind Tree is looking for partners to support the operational costs of the school.

• The school is a space to see and experience a self-driven learning environment in action.
• Tribal students use digital tools and infrastructure with comfort and ease, equivalent if not better than their counterparts in a city.
• Tribal students create not merely consume digital content.
• Tribal students engage and speak very comfortably with each other and all facilitators in English.
• Students know what they have to learn and sit at their computer stations, with adult supervision
• Facilitators sitting with a student for one on one meeting to understand the child's difficulty and helping them solve it.
• Nutritious food and a lively dining space, that builds community.
• Students who by their appearance, behaviour and language come across as equal to students you may have seen in any mainstream school.