Educational Innovations in Rural Tamil Nadu: Tsunami-affected Arunthatiars of Sathyamangalam

This paper reports on the human aspect of a two-and-half-year collaboration between mathematics teachers of the City University of New York (CUNY), and grassroots organizers in rural Tamil Nadu. Reporting on student success in Calculus classrooms in New York at the International Conference to Review Science, Mathematics and Technology Education in Goa in 2004 just prior to the tsunami, the CUNY professors were asked how their innovative methodology of teaching-research could be implemented in community-based schools in dalit hamlets. In the non-formal, community-based schools and bridge schools, in the tsunami-affected Arunthatiar community, a new methodology, teaching-action-research (T-A-R), began to develop, in which the educational environment of the child is viewed as it is shaped by school, home, work and community.