Our Programs

Foundational Learning Programme

Technical & Resource Support

Community Programmes

1) Foundational Learning Programme

A Foundational Learning Programme and supportive pedagogical materials have been developed in a bottom-up manner through intensive engagement inside classrooms.  

The two year Foundation Programme across Classes 1 and 2 is designed to support and strengthen children’s meaningful engagement with school-based learning by providing them with opportunities to become engaged readers, writers and thinking learners in simple and doable ways.

Location: OELP’s core area is located in the Silora Block, Ajmer District of Rajasthan. Through intensive work since 2008 in Classes 1 and 2 in select rural government primary schools, OELP has developed a core program as model demonstration sites for exposure-based capacity building of various stakeholders and knowledge generation with resource building.

OELP’s Extension Area:
Over the past few years OELP has supported implementation of their core ideas in 7 districts of Rajasthan as well as in select locations across 6 other states of India.

Components of the Foundational Programme

Structured and Competency-Based Programme

  • Foundations for schooling
  • Foundations for reading, writing and numeracy
  • Higher-order learning

Planned Learning Environment

  • Learning corners
  • Relevant classroom practices / pedagogies

Systematic Learner Tracking and M&E

  • Competency-based summative assessments 
  • Individual student portfolios 
  • Qualitative checklists for individual learning behaviours and classroom learning environment 
  • Observation formats for need-based and contextualised mentoring

2) Technical and Resource Support

The cornerstone of OELP’s approach to capacity building is the focus on classroom practice. OELP emphasizes on ‘how’ to facilitate high-quality learning through demonstration and modeling of conceptually sound practices within real-time classrooms located within low-literate contexts. The capacity-building workshops conducted by OELP are observation-based and experiential. 

OELP provides training and capacity building support to the following stakeholders :

Govt. school teachers and teacher coaches

Pre-service teachers from teacher education colleges and DIETS

Education practitioners from other NGOs

 Our aim is to model effective and efficient teaching-learning practices to enable teachers, teacher educators, and education administrators to support high-quality learning inside classrooms. We also intend to focus on capacity building within the State education system to build a pool of resource persons to support future scaling up. 

OELP’s capacity building program captures the following:

OELP Capacity Building Program

3) Community Programmes

The libraries have been aligned with the Class 1 and 2 Foundational Programme. OELP views the library programme as an opportunity to create a bond with books and reading in low-literate village communities through a variety of planned opportunities for children and elders in the village.

Community-Based Libraries and Reading Programme

The libraries have been aligned with the Class 1 and 2 Foundational Programme. OELP views the library programme as an opportunity to create a bond with books and reading in low literate village communities through a variety of planned opportunities for children and elders in the village.

OELP has three types of libraries:

Field Library

Village Libraries

Classroom Reading Corners

Our community library programme is expanding. The Field Library, which is our main library, has over 16,000 books. There are 8 Village Libraries. 

Village Bahus or Daughters-in-Law as Librarians

Over the past few years, OELP has recruited educated daughters-in-law as village librarians. Within their oppressed and highly patriarchal home and community environments, this becomes an opportunity for self-actualization for these librarians with an empowering spin-off effect on other women and adolescent girls who exist within the confines of the oppressive and patriarchal social environment of Rajasthan.

Pathan Sathi

The Pathan Sathi or Peer Reading Programme is a part of free reading that takes place within schools and in different libraries. This programme caters to the challenge of children who are not performing at grade level. It serves to build positive collaborative reading and learning bonds between young readers at different proficiency levels.