 Hello and welcome to this video presentation about school-based mentoring for rural youth development in the Indian context. My name is Anuradha Kumar and I am a senior research associate at the Mentoring Initiative called Teach to Learn functioning in India's premier higher education institution called the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. High-heighting Madras as it is commonly referred to is located in Chennai which is in the state of Tamil Nadu in South India. Before I proceed any further, I would like to first set the Indian context for you. I believe it will help in clearly understanding the background of the program being presented today. Broadly, we are talking about a country that is that has 1.4 billion people. Of these, almost 70% of the population lives in rural areas on less than $2 a day. Means for economic upward mobility is seen as critical among this population. The students from these rural socio-economical poor families largely attend state government transfers. Later in the presentation, I will give an elaborate account of our mentees who come from these schools. It is important to note that India will soon touch the mark of having 50% of its population in the youth category. I appreciate the vision of this conference and am happy to be part of it. In this video, I will be presenting a new approach to school-based mentoring which involves formally connecting higher education institutions to rural schools. Though the approach itself has the potential to be adapted to any context, I will be sharing with you some of the insights and observations from Teach to Learns field implementations in the rural Indian context. This school-based mentoring approach involves formally connecting premier higher education institutions to rural schools. Let us first understand the two participating entities before exploring the mechanism. When I say institutional connection, I am particularly talking about higher education institutions that house state-of-the-art laboratories, expert faculty and abundant youth resource. IIT Madras is one such and its students are mentors in the Teach to Learn program. As I mentioned earlier, I would like to elaborate a little on what I mean by rural government schools in this context. These are schools located in the rural areas and run by the state government. More than 90% of the students in these schools are first-generation learners who come from socio-economically poor families. While the government has been successful in rapid increase of enrollment at the primary school level, the infrastructure, amenities and academic health are still substandard. As a result, when the children grow, due to poor guidance and lack of support, the attendance rates go down and eventually ends in high rate of dropouts at the secondary school level. In comparison to other states in India, Tamil Nadu is considered to be in the top five for its educational infrastructure and learning outcomes. With a population of 37 million people, there are around 37,000 state government run schools. Teach to Learns mentees primarily come from the rural schools in Tamil Nadu. We have observed from our participating schools that most students in these rural schools have poor self-confidence. Survey reports have identified that academic knowledge of students are two years behind grade levels. These students do not have the means to access information related to higher education and different career options. Not attending school in the last two years due to the pandemic has only made it more difficult for these rural children. When we consider the learning environment for the Indian rural students, though many corporate social responsibility initiatives, NGOs and government schemes actively contribute to meet the immediate and basic needs related to infrastructure, enrollment and literacy. In some states, rural government schools do not have bathrooms, which prevents girls from attending school regularly. For many villages, proximity to school is far and children travel six to seven kilometers to go to school. Their learning experiences are compromised as some of these schools don't have functional labs or even offer science courses after class 10. In such schools, due to lack of options, even students who aspire to become doctors end up taking accountancy and commerce courses after class 10. The school education experiences lack enrichment, leading to the unseen yet very important problem of poor skill and personality development. I do recognize the imminent need to address the tangible, infrastructural and academic needs. Yet, I would like to stress upon the fact that the non-tangible needs of underprivileged school students is equally important for their growth and development. The most important factor to remember here is that we are talking about entire schools serving the underprivileged who are at risk. They are at risk of dropping out of high school. They are at risk for graduating without sufficient knowledge or skills. They are at risk for not pursuing higher education. As opposed to societies where students at risk are identified from a general pool and selected based on need plan or teacher recommendations to participate in the mentoring programs in the Indian rural context. Every child that attends a rural government school is at risk. Now that you have a little bit of contextual background, let me try to answer some critical questions. How do we facilitate growth and development in rural children using the powerful resources that we have and plenty at the higher education institutions? How do we fill the gap? Teach to Learn's answer is the approach being presented today. That is, connect the two levels of education in a formal fashion so as to enable mentoring relationship between the youth of the two entities. Let me share with you why this kind of formal connection between higher education institutions and rural school is special. One of the important aspects of this approach lies in the fact that the undergraduate and the graduate students of higher education institutions are the mentors in this mentoring approach. They are at a tender age with abundant enthusiasm and energy. Having recently graduated from school, they are more like an elder sibling who can relate to the mentee experiences. These mentors belong in a sweet spot that puts them in a giving yet gaining position. Being a role model to mentees, they can build in them leadership qualities that can help build a strong professional future for them. On the other hand, though all school age children will and can benefit from having mentors, our particular group of underprivileged mentees come from schools where dropout rates are high, where enrollment into higher education is poor and who have undiversified network which is restricted to people and experiences that can only provide limited perspectives and opportunities. Despite having burning aspirations, these students do not have the means to realize their dreams. In this context, a mentoring connection that addresses the non-tangible needs can enable development of the underprivileged mentees from the rural schools. Now that you have some knowledge about the entities involved in the approach, let us explore the mechanism. Presently in India, there are few mentoring programs for underprivileged students but these are not organized by the school or offered within the school premises even though they are intended for school age population. They are offered at community level by NGOs to address the immediate needs mostly meeting crisis situations or enrollment and attendance. Teach to Learns Mentoring Mechanism operates as a two-way relationship between two levels of education in a structured and systematic manner using school-based mentoring mechanism to address the developmental needs of the rural youth. Meeting the developmental aspects in a formal, sustainable and scalable way is something unique to the mentoring approach that I'm presenting today. You might wonder how this mentoring approach will be beneficial. Well, we can see the benefits of this approach at three levels the micro, the meso and the macro levels. When we take a closer look at the micro-level benefits, mentoring experiences has long-term positive impacts on the personality of our primary beneficiaries, the mentors and the mentees. Studies from the western context say that social, intellectual, psychological and emotional areas are impacted positively from mentoring experiences. A simple example would be where a mentoring relationship builds hope, trust and network of the mentees and which develops leadership qualities and compassion in the mentors. Also, when teaching faculty from the two entities interact, teaching and learning practices get strengthened and a more meaningful dissemination of knowledge and information takes place. At the meso level, when two institutions of this nature connect in a formal manner, vibrant relationships are formed and encourages institutional level collaborations. While the schools will feel motivated to seek help, engagement with the community provides opportunities for the higher education institutions to understand real needs and accordingly innovate and invent useful measures. When adolescent youth in high school dream big and join higher education, when young adults in higher education become socially aware, when academic institutions join hands in developing personalities and providing collaborator platforms to enrich learning experiences, then the professionals joining the workforce will be knowledgeable, vibrant, competent and socially responsible. For a country like India, which is fast becoming the youngest nation of the world, such a growth could be a game changer in the global scenario. Does it make you wonder the potential outcome of such a beneficial approach to mentoring? The benefits of the approach can develop a mentoring culture. Programs that engage young adults soon to become professionals that provide a platform to think beyond their routine and understand needs of others will perhaps encourage the mentors to make meaningful social contributions as professionals. As a result of this connection, when rural secondary school dropout rates reduce and rural enrollment into higher education increases, the mentees who benefit from the connection will take it forward as resource providers. And in this way, a potent resource loop will be created. This sounds great, but what comes to mind at this point is, does this school-based mentoring approach really work? Well, with the backdrop of the Indian rural school scenario, you may have understood the need, the resources to meet the needs and the possible benefits of a mechanism that is used to address the identified needs. It's natural to wonder whether the mechanism will produce the desired results. With the realization that the research world is looking at empirical evidences, practitioners are looking for useful program mechanics, stakeholders are looking for building robust programs and investors are scouting for large-scale impact. Teach-to-learn has framed and has been successfully implementing school-based mentoring models using this approach in rural schools across Tamil Nadu. We have and we strive to build robust, evidence-based mentoring programs using this new approach. Let me share with you briefly three models that teach-to-learn framed using this approach where mentors from IIT Madras provide mentoring to rural school students. While the C-4 model involves peer-teaching, peer-learning skills, the One Lab One School model is about hands-on learning and the Teach-to-Learn model provides technology-enhanced learning. In the next few minutes, I will share with you briefly about each of these models. More information about Teach-to-Learn's other activities and programs is available in our website. In this C-4 model, mentors train Class 8 mentees in cognitive and non-cognitive skills, such as different ways of effective learning, planning, organizing, clear communication, presentation of ideas and creative use of information. To enable the mentees to practice these skills on a routine basis, the mentees are trained to teach their juniors. During these teaching sessions, the Class 8 students whom we refer to as C students, teach in a classroom set up academic subjects to Class 4 students whom we address as the C-4 students. The aim is not to make the mentees as teachers, but to develop in them qualities and skills that are used in teaching. The key point here is not just to provide training by the near peers, mentors, but also to provide a platform to practice and develop the new skills in a systematic manner. The expectation is that this training and teaching experience will build confidence, knowledge and life skills in the mentees. In this one-lab one-school model, the labs from IIT Madras are connected to rural schools. Each lab has a dedicated school assigned to it. The faculty and graduate students from the lab visit the school connected to them and spend the day in bonding, teaching and training the rural school mentees. They take with them devices that are used in everyday life, like the bicycle bell, electric iron, weighing scale. These devices are dismantled, assembled, and concepts used in their functioning clearly explained by the mentors. The specialty of the learning sessions is that the mentees get a chance to work on the device hands-on while learning the concepts. The devices chosen are based on concepts right out of the textbook, making it easy and immediately useful. Developing scientific thinking through device engineering is the core focus of this one-lab one-school model. The Teach in 10 model has just been rolled out. Here, rural school students are connected to mentors with the idea of creating a repository of teaching videos where the rural student will be teaching in the videos. Though the connection focuses on creating videos, the mentors and mentees jointly work on the necessary skills to explore and learn concepts, develop interesting narratives, aids, and creative presentations to produce high-quality teaching videos. During the mentoring period, the exposure is expected to motivate students, develop out-of-the-box creative thinking and design thinking. We also expect that these videos, which are closely related to the topics from the textbook, will act as an aid in helping students returning to school after the pandemic and motivate the rural school students to learn with interest. One of the important things that I wish to emphasize here is that even though all of our models are based on mentoring relationships, mentoring interaction-based learning experiences, each model has a specific focus area. They're all involved skills training as a key factor. Note that mentoring is the key mechanism used. It is provided in the school campus by near-peer mentors from higher education. We do recognize that emotional support and resilience building are very important for the mentees, which the mentoring programs of the Western world have researched extensively about. Some studies on mentoring have also pointed out the need and importance of skill building and creating targeted programs suitable for local contexts. In the Indian scenario, education and consequential job opportunity is seen as a ticket to economic prosperity and better life. Therefore, getting trained and developing skills while gaining knowledge and building social capital through these school-based mentoring programs will get the rural mentees to stay back in school and will motivate them to enroll in higher education. I'm happy to share that the outcome from our implementations have had a positive impact on our participants. I've shared with you here just a sample from the feedbacks we received. As you can see, the mentors have experienced improved thinking quotient and communication skills. The teachers have expressed that the mentees found very useful and interesting that even complex concepts were explained in simple ways. Mentees, on the other hand, have expressed that they have gained confidence and inspiration from mentoring relationships. As you can see, our implementations have been very impactful. However, we have realized that in order to give quality and to offer developmental non-tangible outcomes and reach huge population, it takes time and needs more evidence-based research. Policymakers and funding agencies must join hands to help scale the impact to a larger percentage of beneficiaries. That's one of the reasons I'm very happy for this opportunity to reach out to all stakeholders and beneficiaries. As we near the end of this presentation, let me share some insights from our field experiences. It is important to bear in mind when framing school-based mentoring programs the context and relevance to the local population. Explore what kind of program will be suitable to meet specific needs of that group of mentee population in that location. It is also important to understand the kind of stigma and belief systems in the local area. Cultural aspects and mindsets are critical to consider as well. When the population is diverse, the program must cater to the heterogeneity. Mentoring programs must establish the core objective by identifying specific skills or developmental aspects that will be addressed by the program. On the other hand, investigation of practices and outcomes to build robust models can add evidence and strength to the current findings. This can build rich knowledge ways and make possible use of models across cultures and continents. Cross-cultural adaptability and validity of programs across the globe is the need of the hour. With this, I wrap up this presentation. The school-based mentoring model involving connecting higher education institutions to rural schools has immense potential. Though we have been testing it in the Indian rural context, the model can suitably adapt to any community. I hope the information is useful and this will initiate dialogues and further discussions among stakeholders. I'm thankful for the opportunity and will be very happy to answer any questions related to our programs and models and the approach presented here today. Thank you very much.