Chalk-Talk and Beyond‪!‬ Manasi Thapliyal

If sharks were people_Bertolt Brecht's parable

I talk about another classic text in education, "Letter to a teacher"...

People, more often than not, do what is expected of them. We have all heard of self-fulfilling prophecies. In the educational context, can a teacher's expectation for her students' intellectual competence come to serve as an educational self-fulfilling prophecy?

I read few excerpts from Ivan Illich's famous text, Deschooling Society and wonder what we as teachers might think about his radical ideas. If, as Illich maintains, the most important learning takes place outside of formal schooling, what is it that is learned in schools?

As teachers we often wonder if we are good enough or we have done enough. Sometimes we feel elated after a class and often we wonder if we have been able to reach out to the oil line of our classroom! Sometimes we stumble in articulating an idea, a concept, something that appeared so crystal clear till yesterday, seems sort of ambiguous when we try explaining it to our students 🙄 Chalk-Talk and Beyond hopes to be a platform where we discuss these issues, experiences, educational ideas and research. We will try to bring the lived experience of classrooms, from the perspective of teachers, to a critical space of introspection and reflections. Sometimes there will be monologues, sometimes reading of excerpts from some of my favourite texts, sometimes informal conversations with my community of teachers and friends. If you have some ideas about how else to go beyond the Chalk-Talk educational context, do drop in a message!