 I am going to focus now very specifically on the classroom situation, classes and laboratories and this goes back to what I mentioned in the beginning about two things. Recognizing the equal worth of all individuals and secondly, recognizing everybody is learning and it is to ensure that everybody is learning and that nobody drops out. The reason why a lot of people began to do research on STEM and STEM communication is because it was felt that how we communicate, how we exclude current issues affects the progress of different people to scientific careers. So if women or if people of certain backgrounds were doing very well in school but do not progress on to careers in science and engineering technology felt it is partly due to what happens in the classroom whether we encourage or discourage people of different backgrounds. So here we are going to discuss some of the best practices relating to this. So it is felt that inadvertently without us consciously having a bias some it encourages so a lot of studies have shown that progressively as you grow from school to tertiary education to college university higher education the number of women keeps decreasing likewise with many other groups as well. How do we ensure students who perform exceedingly well very well who are interested in science engineering technology mathematics are able to pursue those interests let us forget about parents and society and so on us as teachers what can we do. So this here we are saying that there is socialization that happens in the classroom that is there are certain kinds of teaching habits that affect how students decide about their careers. What kind of careers they can go on to it depends on what we teach how we teach what kind of examples we do in the classroom all of those kind of things. So some general guidelines are given in this way and that is why the STEM approach is very important if instead of focusing very narrowly only on mathematics or only on biology only on physics if you can make it much more interdisciplinary and focus on problems it is found that more children will be interested of all backgrounds in going in for careers in science and engineering. So why for example is that you know in India we have a very large number of teams spending crores of rupees on smokeless chulas most of them have not been adopted in India most of them are worthless all that money has gone down the drain could it be because women themselves who are involved in cooking are less involved in the actual research. So you need to deal with expertise in cooking so many of the smokeless chulas the cook stoves go wrong because they are not adapted to the different cooking needs they can cook rice they cannot cook chapati they cannot cook dal they can cook something else. So bringing different skills together to understand a problem will ensure that people retain interest in science engineering math. If you teach the subject in an abstract way through textbooks only in terms of very narrowly focused problems then maybe people may not be very interested there is this very famous textbook in physics I think it is called Resnick and Halliday isn't it? Some of the principles of physics are taught only through weapons missiles and rifles and all that if I am not interested in military hardware then I lose interest in physics instead if you can show how physics is useful in daily life some people may retain interest. It is important we include involved more women so beyond scientific research outside of science how are these areas how are these concepts and theories useful incorporate personal experiences very interesting examples have been carried out by this Ekulavya group in Madhya Pradesh it is called the Hoshangabad Science Education Project. So biology for example if instead of teaching through textbooks you actually take them out and tease them with real plants they learn it better. If you are interested in learning about soil and geology take them and teach them about actual instead of teaching them only through textbooks. So using personal experiences of children outside of their houses makes them much more interested in science education and here we find women's experiences in the house especially left out while designing education textbooks examples and so on. Simple example is kitchen in Hindi Rasaian Shastra and Rasoi have the same root and all over the world chemistry first started in the kitchen because what do you do in the kitchen distilling and mixing and all of those kind of things isn't it. But how many of the how many people actually think of what we do in the kitchen as chemistry and how many of us use examples from the kitchen in the laboratory very few of us. So there is a disconnect between what happens in real life and what happens there. So that's why we are saying here Professor Fatak who started this initiative always keeps talking about silos avoid silos. What silos means is that we split up different branches of knowledge and teach them separately whereas bringing the different branches together understand means that more people get interested in science technology and mathematics and especially women and other marginalized groups the dropout rate from higher education decreases. Of course as we have said language should be gender neutral or neutral towards other communities and so on don't use models which are only reductionist or dualistic it's not only either or black and white one and two many things are gray. So how can we understand problems as having multiple causes so it is possible for example that a tsunami causes flooding in a coastal area but it's important that we go beyond tsunami to look at the structure of houses to look at environmental degradation which is causing flooding. So understanding multiple causes means that more people can relate to the concepts and theories or disease we are only taught about germ theory of disease. But germs occur because of hygiene because of sanitation issues because of diet some people who are malnourished get affected by diseases more. So exposing students to all of these means that they understand grasped concepts better that's why this STEM approach is very important discuss practical uses much more. And this ensures that more students retain interest in science as opposed to only using hypothetical problems examples which don't have everyday usage. Some specific kinds of instructions in the classroom one encouraging all of these generally in every classroom you all will know when you ask a question some people will raise their hand some people will never raise their hand the front benches will always have something to say back benches will not say anything but that because inhibitions. So do you always call upon only the person who is raising the hand that's what I did here okay that was I could you couldn't help it there may be people who may be shy who may be timid you have to identify them in smaller you can do that in students you can't do it identify them and encourage them to speak. So if you only identify those who raise their hands then other people get discouraged thinking teacher is not interested in me that's one way of encouraging you have to establish class norms that if some students ask questions others should not ridicule them cheer at them then they get discouraged forever this especially happens with boys and girls waiting time sometimes we because we are we know everything we think students also know everything we ask a question then nobody responds I give the answer but some people take time to formulate the question to formulate the answer some people are waiting for somebody else to raise the hand before I can say something nobody wants to be the first so waiting time is very important so that you encourage more people who are shy diffident timid to also participate in classes these are some ways in which you can encourage more people especially girls to participate more in class and get an interest in science subjects when you have large classes there are some classes here in IT where we teach 350 students in such cases you have to divide them up into smaller groups give more writing exercises some people are not always good at speaking they are better at writing so I have noticed also that some people do better when I make them present in class others do better when I give them writing so having more varied kind of assessment and exercises means that more people do better in class if you're teaching undergraduate students we have started this experiment in IIT now the teaching assistants who help us teaching in the classroom learning in the classroom some students have doubts I only have one hour so we have extra tutorials we find that for undergraduate students they are intimidated if they have senior PhD students who are acting as tutors if we can identify their friends to help them then they are more willing to come forward and accept that I don't understand something please help me to understand in laboratories also generally if you don't intervene at all what happens is they will divide themselves into groups of girls groups of boys so it's important that the group is mixed that the also it should not happen that only those students who get very high marks form themselves into groups and those who get low marks form themselves into groups so if you have more mixed groups they can learn from each other and what happens in the lab has to be connected to the research topics otherwise it just becomes mechanical kind of activities and students don't develop an interest in science provide role models so when you're referring to scientific work or I've visited a lot of engineering colleges and mostly they have pictures of male scientists hanging in all the classrooms and the libraries and the computer rooms provide role models try to increase the proportion of women faculty or if you don't have at least invite guest lecturers so that they understand that women also are a significant part of science and acknowledge women's contribution to science using these role models there are plenty of them in India itself ok of course make sure that your language is gender sensitive as we have learned earlier use examples all can empathize with so if for example you always use examples only relating to the military relating to weapons or arms or relating to astronomy and so on or high technology mission Mars not everybody will be interested some may be interested in other kinds of projects so one student here he mentioned to me came over very poor family from a from a village he explained that in civil engineering they only talk about all high-end luxury apartments and stadiums and planetariums they don't talk about low-cost housing and therefore he completely lost interest in civil engineering even though there are real problems to solve in India in general you should have all of these kinds of things in the classroom discussion debate it's okay for some people to disagree learning in groups and learning through consensus building that is trying to arrive at a common way of understanding things the first one is it true or false true B is false C false true D false okay these are things that you should try yourselves in your classroom so try to find out which kind of students have what kind of learning problems is it because of language so we say for example that subjects in humanities and social sciences because they are much more conceptual theoretical they require more language skills is it because of that or even in other subjects physics for example which is the lot of theory so a lot of students have difficulties even in IIT in understanding lectures because their English is not good enough is it because of their educational background family background is it because some concepts theories are very difficult to understand so which kind of issue do students have problem with and try to address those in the classroom how many of you make it a point to a give a chance to everybody in the classroom you do that okay what roughly 30% okay so and sometimes it's not possible because there is too much pressure on us I have to finish the syllabus I don't have time for discussions okay but in such cases what you can do is to spread out in this class I will ask these students next class I will give a chance to somebody else but also through tutorials through smaller groups and so on does the how often does this happen in the classroom the third point happens it happens but what happens is sometimes irrespective of the right or wrong answer if it's a girl who is saying it they start lapping okay or sometimes they in IIT they use a term called Magoo this guy is called like in English they use the term nerd any ad you know this person is very bookish therefore he doesn't play or she doesn't play the rest of the students don't like him or her and therefore when that person answers everybody starts clapping okay so there are these targets for some students so students can be very insensitive they're not mature okay so we have to ensure that it doesn't because in some cases some students can get very depressed it can have lifelong consequences for them okay it's very important that in the classroom there is encouraging kind of clapping but not the discouraging kind of counseling is very important so students have to be told that this is not acceptable again is something you can do in the classroom or the laboratory so with your own colleagues for as part of MOOCs or further workshops I suggest that you can do this but focus on these kind of issues teaching teacher-student relationship interaction between students in the classroom or in the laboratory how can you change the classroom dynamics so that learning happens for everybody and not only for a few people okay so I think I'll stop here