Teacher Fellowship Program
(25 December 2023 – 10 January, 2024)
The 2-week Teacher Fellowship begins on December 25th, 2023 and concluded on January 10th, 2024 in Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Studies, Bangalore. This year there are 13 participants which include, 6 monks, 1 nun and 6 laity participants, and they are all active science teachers in different monastics. This program in particular intends to support these teachers in their efforts to take the lead in advancing education.Through this project, the participants are inspired to rethink the possibilities of teaching and learning in their classrooms by attending classes taught by renowned teachers from different places.
We have two teachers for the program and during the first week we had Jyoti Hiremath. She is a Freelancer Science Communicator and a teacher Educator. Throughout her class, she involved a creative approach to hands-on teaching-learning science at their respective monastics. She intended to train monastic science teachers to be equipped with building science-related toys for hands-on activities that they can use for their students. Consequently, participants were tutored with making various toys for hands-on activities that they could use in the class for productive and enduring learning.
Subsequently, for the second week, a founder of SciRio Suchitha Champak, conducted the class and she intended to equip them with tools of science communication to teach science concepts. They discussed Bloom’s taxonomy for pedagogy and setting up learning goals for their courses using the SMART framework. Moreover, she focussed on implementation of creative course design for the students, which includes, identifying the learning objectives, assessment and plan learning activities in depth. Henceforth, on the last day, each one of them prepared a course featuring all the methodology they were introduced and thoroughly taught in the class.
About the teachers:
Mrs Jyoti Hiremath
Mrs Jyoti Hiremath is a freelance Science Communicator and a Teacher Educator. Previously, she has worked with the Scientific Public Outreach Programme (SciPOP) at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, from 2006 to 2017. She was taking care of documentation of “Arvind Gupta Toys from Trash” and was actively involved in the Teacher Training Programme as well as Student Engagement Activities. As a Science teacher educator, Jyoti has conducted teacher development workshops in many states across India inculcating the innovative approach in classroom teaching. Jyoti has been working on involving creative approach in hands-on teaching-learning science at school level.
She has been effectively engaged in taking these activities to tribal students and teachers, as well as to rural regions of the country. She has also worked with specially abled students having disabilities of hearing and speaking. She is passionate about communicating science through hands-on activities and also works with the strong belief that toys need no language to reach out to people.
Suchitha Champak
Suchitha Champak founded SciRio to change how society views science. They help scientists, academic institutes, and enterprises share their advances in science creatively. At SciRio, she combines capacity building, collaborative projects, and unexplored markets to engage the public effectively. After working at the Indian Institute of Science and Centre for Human Genetics, she left the lab to prove that science is for everyone. She envisions a future where science and society co-evolve to empower everyone. She is a TEDx speaker, and news outlets like The Assam Tribune and BioPatrika have profiled her as a scientist-turned-entrepreneur. She also helped create proactive policies for science communication in the newest version of India’s STI Policy.
