Spotlight on Faculty Grant Recipient: Doris Sommer

Spotlight on Faculty Grant Recipient Arts-based Pedagogy Training in India

Each year, the Mittal Institute selects unique proposals from Harvard faculty members to fund projects and research related to South Asia. One of last year’s recipients, Professor Doris Sommer, launched her pioneering Pre-Texts Program in India–a program she has brought to schools around the globe.

Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. While the number of readers has grown worldwide, reading comprehension stays alarmingly low, because students need to use texts in order to understand them. With Pre-Texts, students master texts by using them to create visual and performative arts.

Pre-Texts also coincides with the Indian government’s recent mandate to integrate arts into all school curricula. While this mandate asks teachers to focus on the rich art traditions throughout India, it does not guide teachers and principals on how to implement the arts-integration directive. That is where Prof. Sommer believes the Pre-Texts program can have a transformative impact in the country. In early 2022, she visited the Indian city of Pune to work with FLAME University to start Pre-Texts in India. The teachers, principals, and students who participated in the demonstrations of Pre-Texts in Pune experienced the advantages of this approach and were eager for their schools to be chosen as the site for a forthcoming pilot intervention.

Creating Art from a Text

Traditional teaching methods often fail due to the pyramidal design that they follow: teaching begins with a base of technical information, leading to an understanding and interpretation of the material, then concludes with a creative expression of what has been learned. Unfortunately, this method of teaching often leads to boredom and disaffection among students, who may become fearful or disengaged when trying to memorize new concepts, formulas, and words. Since art in this context represents an expression of what students already know, as opposed to a form of exploration, the act of learning in this way leads students to make a conceptual error about the discipline.

With the Pre-Text format of learning, the pyramidal design is reversed and

rather than being given facts about art, students are challenged to create art from a text. This leads to a dramatic difference in the classroom where students are now addressed as artists rather than struggling learners and, in this context, can learn to address challenges as opportunities instead of obstacles. The texts can be mastered through dance, drawing, theater, or creative writing.

Selecting Schools

To begin the initiative, Professors Sommer and Professor Yugank Goyal of FLAME visited several schools in Pune with different structures and models – three government-run municipal schools, mentored and run by the nonprofits Leadership for Equity and Akanksha Foundation, as well as four private schools. The team also gave a talk to school principals and coordinators from 10 other schools in the region and participated in several other meetings with relevant stakeholders, including the Municipal Commissioner of Pune. In several exploratory conversations with various schools and nonprofits, Professors Sommer and Goyal made a brief presentation of Pre-Texts, where they shared evidence gathered by the Shamiri Institute in Nairobi on the mental health intervention in that city’s biggest slum, Kibera. In Kibera, half the adolescents are clinically depressed – yet they have no money for therapy, no available therapists, and experience stigma against acknowledging mental disorder. Pre-Texts does therapeutic work there with no change of protocol. It is an effective and low-cost intervention, as it allows the entire cohort of adolescents to participate, without singling out a student. After one month of after-school, the results have been exceedingly positive.

Training Future Trainers

The next steps in Pune will be to identify a few schools as the sites for program pilots. Then Professor Sommer will virtually train the principal and teachers from two different levels. The group of 20-25 future facilitators will include the FLAME University team and other relevant stakeholders who can be trainers for future cohorts, expanding the program’s potential and impact.

Doris Sommer visits schools in Pune, India in early 2022 to launch her Pre-texts Program.