About Us
The Organisation for Early Literacy Promotion (OELP) is a registered non-profit and civil society organisation founded in 2008, which has focused on building foundations for high quality learning within the early grades.
The OELP educational innovations have been built around the ideas of equity and social justice based on our understanding that school as a transformative space needs to be equipped to respond meaningfully to issues of diversity. We have aimed to go beyond the concerns of access to concerns which lay emphasis on what educational experiences mean for each young child’s identity, self worth and lifelong learning. At OELP, we believe in carefully designing classrooms as caring, inclusive and responsive learning spaces which motivate all children to learn actively and with fullness regardless of socio-cultural, linguistic and gender differences or diversity of available resources within a school.
We achieve this by developing conceptually sound, grounded and scalable classroom practices which are aligned to the mainstream educational system. The OELP innovations have evolved through more than a decade of intensive engagement with children, teachers, parents, communities and the State education system. This bottom up organic process has allowed us to deepen our conceptual understanding with new approaches and theoretical perspectives which are contextual to the needs of the children and situations on the ground. We continue to reflect and gain an in-depth understanding of the following:
OELP’s Scaling Up Process
The State Government of Rajasthan signed a four-year MOU with OELP and the Hans Foundation to scale our education innovations to schools across 7 Special Focus Districts (SFDs) in a phased manner from 2018-22. The State has mass-produced OELP’s pedagogical material and distributed them to 14000 schools. Our model extensively made use of the existing public education infrastructure of the State and aimed to strengthen it. This effort has been impacted by the COVID pandemic.
OELP’s Core Demonstration Program
OELP’s core demonstration program is located in the early grades of State-run rural schools in the Ajmer District of Rajasthan as our knowledge building and demonstration program.
11 Demonstration classes
650 Students and
11 Teachers
Impact
More than 70% learners read fluently and with comprehension at the end of Grade 2 in the 2018-19 academic cycle (subsequent evaluations were impacted the COVID-19 pandemic)
Impact
More than 70% learners read fluently and with comprehension at the end of Grade 2 in the 2018-19 academic cycle (subsequent evaluations were impacted the COVID-19 pandemic)
The core programme is also used as a demonstration site for providing exposure based training to NGOs and other Govt. stakeholders to advance their foundational learning goals. As a result, OELP’s outreach has been extended to – 3562 Teachers, 585 Administrators, 6 States and 19 Districts.
The COVID Pandemic: Children’s Voices
For young children in rural Rajasthan, Corona is a scary monster. It has impacted the physical and socio-emotional fabric of their day-to-day lives in multiple ways. The well-being of these children became our primary focus and concern. Within our limited resources we have tried to provide a space for these children to explore, share and express their experiences, understanding, and feelings about the pandemic. The OELP team was able to provide community spaces for in-depth engagement with young children in 10 villages in the Ajmer district. We decided “Let it be small, but let it be deep!”. The children’s voices are being shared through a few of their writings and drawings.
