 Okay. Okay, so this is the last seminar, I think, is that it? Yeah. The last seminar. Yeah. So this is a lucky last. Today we've got Lisa Davies and Mikey Bramwich. They're going to be talking about a project that Lisa's been working for about five years in Northeast India, Language Education Policy Planning. We thought it would be, I met Lisa out at Cambridge at a conference a few years ago and she was talking about this project that is kind of action, action research I suppose. Yeah, and our approach. Yeah. It uses an action research approach to do real grassroots language education. So we thought it might be really interesting for some of the, to hear some details about that. Since we're a small group I guess it'll be fairly informal and we can ask questions or whatever. So this has got to be an economics and social science from Manchester where she did anthropology and then followed that up with an MA in international development of human rights at Goldsmiths and then an MSc in social research, social science research methods at Sussex. So her main focus, she wouldn't claim to be a linguist I believe. Definitely not. If you want to paint her into any corner, you probably want to call her an anthropologist although you'll see from the presentation that she's worked in various areas. She's working with survival international at the moment, doing a lot of education, direct action working with communities. So let's hear about this project in India in particular which is about policy and planning at the grassroots level. OK, so thank you all for coming today. It's nice to see a few familiar faces. So as Peter said, thank you. Today we're going to present to you the Head Start Totapara project and what the team have been working on over the last five years. The team's been quite varied in terms of who we've had involved. Most recently we've had myself, so as you said I'm an anthropologist or an educator, project manager. We've had an applied drama practitioner involved. We've got a linguist out there at the moment who's been working out there for a year. And we've had Mikey, who's a project manager, creative producer. So I got Mikey involved. He was out there for a year. A large chunk of it, the most grueling part of it was during the heavy monsoon season. So total immersion in a number of different ways. And he was brought onto the team to help with the nuts and bolts, the running of the project. Practical aspects such as construction, which was of the building which opened this year. The administration side of it. And the most essential part of this project, the glue of the project, which is the relationship building. And also just lots of hanging out really in terms of the relationship building part of it. Yeah, not much else to do in monsoon to be honest. But he importantly brought a fresh perspective on what the Head Start Totapara project has been doing and aims to do. And using his creative flair to help put together a lot of invaluable footage in terms of documenting language, tradition, songs, music and poetry. So we're both here to talk to you today more as project facilitators and practitioners. And we're very much learning as we go along. And we're doing the best that we can do with the knowledge that we're gaining and with the funds that we can get our hands on. So in the short seminar, we'll not only be touching briefly on a lot of the different aspects of the project but I do hope to keep it in line with the specific interests of the group that we have today. So it's roughly in three parts. We'll talk about the documentation side of what we've been doing. Then there's the education aspect. And then hopefully we'll have time to talk about the project management skills involved in a project like this or the suspension of. So to give you a little background on the Head Start Totapara project story. I arrived there back in 2009 really as a bit of a intrepid traveller looking to do a PhD at that time. But I spent two weeks there working with the children, doing a two to three hour day, working with them, doing a sort of play to learn type program. And it was at this time that I was approached by one of the leaders of the tribe who said that they wanted somehow to be helped with their education. Specifically a school that was going to teach in English. So over the last five years I took that on board and I've been studying, researching, networking, visiting other schools in India and in Borneo and Cambodia, living in Totapara for extended periods and doing seminars such as this as a means to develop the best approach. And this is why, one of the reasons why we're here today. So any thoughts, criticisms, ideas that you may have are very much welcomed at the end. The project's main activities has been the setting up and running of an education centre which is called the Chituran Jan Toto Education Centre, or CTECH for short. And this is for children aged three to six. And we've also been doing a lot of documentation of the Toto language and the traditions. A few other activities we've been involved in, which I'll just touch on briefly, was we facilitated in the building of a traditional Toto house. And as we did that I had a friend from the UK who's an architect. So whilst we were building that he was actually able to make a very detailed blueprint of that so that if in the future they don't know how to make it anymore and they wish to, we've got that architectural blueprint. We've also whilst we were out there in the last year, we're running an open-air cinema for the community, which was largely for the purpose of relationship building and also for the simple provision of community entertainment. And Mikey's also been spearheading a mini project with regards to music which has been collecting the songs and combining them in interesting ways, making them a little bit modern. So hopefully we'll have time at the end to play that and maybe have some discussion around that. So, Toto Pahra. Toto Pahra is a small isolated village in the foothills of the Himalayas and it's on the border of Indra and Bhutan, right on the border, if I just point to you. It's like, it's right here. It's absolutely beautiful around there. It's in the, it's in the Dawes region, which is actually that green area that you can see. And it's in the most north-eastern part of West Bengal in a district called Jabhpaguri. The total population is around about 3,000, whilst it's quite spread out. And actually the majority of the population is Nepali. But the village is famous for its endangered community, which is called the Toto's. If you do a Google search on the Toto's, you'll get statements such as the most primitive tribe in the world, the most isolated indigenous community in India. This is, from our perspective, a little misleading. In terms of primitive, it conjures up certain ideas. But they're really quite modern in terms of the access of knowledge that they have with the outside world. They have mobile phones, televisions. The music they listen to is hip-hop, recognizable Western hip-hop, dance tracks. And certainly in the way they dress as well is quite Westernized. Yeah, actually when I first got that, I had a lot of expectations, because I had what I've read and that's it. You hear words like isolated and things like that, and you have a certain thing in your head, and then I got there and initially I wasn't disappointed. There was an old lady wearing rags, you know, decrepit houses. And she approached me and she started speaking to me. And she was amazed, her mouth was agape, and she was laughing a lot. So I asked my colleague what she said. And he said, actually, sir, she said, she's seen people like you on the Discovery Channel. LAUGHTER That told me everything I needed to know really. She didn't get the irony either. We continue to find that funny. So the population of the totos is actually, it's around about 1400, although it's quite hard to decipher exactly what the numbers are. One of the reasons for this is because when a Toto man marries a Nepali woman, she automatically becomes Toto and their children are Toto. The other way round, if a Toto woman marries a Nepali man, she actually gets outcast from the community and has to live in a nearby town. So it's really hard to decipher exactly what the figures are there. The language that they speak is Totbika, you could say Toto, Totbika, which is only spoken by this community in this tiny little enclave. It's only them that actually speak it. Its closest related language is probably Demal, which is spoken in eastern Nepal. And it belongs to the Beto-Burman family of languages. In terms of its endangerment, it fits into Fishman Stage 6, whereby there is still some intergenerational use of the language in the homes. And according to UNESCO's categorisations, it's placed somewhere between vulnerable, whereby most children speak the language, but it's restricted to certain domains and definitely endangered, whereby they no longer learn it as their mother tongue in the home. The Nepali language is by far the most widely spoken language within the community. So the Toto language is very much being marginalised, whilst they speak it a lot within the homes. It is being used less and less, especially by the elders. And they're beginning to, well, for a long time now really, they've been adopting Bangla and Nepali words into the language. So with the Toto identity, you could say that the sense from them is that they... it's quite... it's very strong. They would say that maybe, first of all, we're Indian, then we're Toto, or they might say, first of all, we're Toto and then Indian. But one thing they would never say is that they're Bengali, despite the fact that they are in West Bengal. Yeah, another little story. When there was a wedding and it was a Toto man marrying a Bengali lady and there was lots of Bengalis that came in for the wedding. And one of them in particular came up to me and he was very interested in me and what I was doing. He was asking me lots of questions. He had this kind of attitude, I felt, that was very awesome. Maybe just because we were both outsiders to this village, or maybe more, I don't know. And he was asking me certain questions and particularly about language. And he was asking, do you speak Bengali? How much Bengali do you speak? I said, none, really, I can say hello. He said, why not? I said, I've been learning Toto. I can only normally learn one language at a time. I'm not the greatest at language acquisition. And he said, well, why don't you speak Bengali when you're in Bengal? I said, well, I'm not in Bengal. I'm in Toto Paro. And it just came out. I didn't really mean anything by it. I didn't mean a political statement or anything. I was surrounded by Toto's many of which I'd known for quite a long time and they burst out laughing and they were cheering. They really, really liked it. And that really kind of cemented a lot of relationships. It was an accident, really. But they kept talking to me, but they still talk about it. And that, for me, that told me a lot about how they consider themselves. So they don't really adopt much of the Bengali culture so much as they do the Nepali culture. And there's been quite a few waves of Nepali immigration into the community, which really started at the end of the 19th, early 20th century. And there's been different waves since. And so now the Nepali community actually is larger than the Toto community. In order to give you a feel for the culture and for the language, we've done a very short film or just a series of scenes to give you a sense of the things that we've been documenting. And this has been produced by Mikey and he was filming these over the last year and has edited it, well, especially for you guys. So, does there's anything that you want to say about that? No, it's just a selection of scenes from different things. You've already said it. This is the song class, the writing of the song. Oh, it's just a magic man. When he was just speaking to a director he was showing us what a dream he had. So he had a dream, so he had a song. Mm-hmm. Okay. That's the main thing. That's the main thing. That's the main thing. So hopefully that just gives you a little flavour of the culture. Yeah, so I'm just going to talk a little bit about what we've just seen. They're quite different elements to the culture. The first guy, we're calling him Gultra, he's the second oldest man in the village, oldest Toto in the village. He can't move. His legs don't work anymore. He had to go really far at the mountain to go and see him. So I didn't actually go for maybe six months. And when I started recording him, I had to translate to him. And the translator was having real difficulty. And that's because he was actually speaking another language. It's another language that Toto's used to speak. And it's one that's never discussed. It's never written about. It's something that Dr. Mansfield recorded. I've no idea about this. I don't think anyone did really. And it's kind of a mixture of really old Toto. A lot of words aren't used anymore. And... Butia, we think. Yeah. Probably Butia. But we can't be exactly sure about it. And it occurred to me at that point that this guy, he's not going to be around for too long. And he's one of maybe two or three people that speak this ancient version of Toto. So it became really, really important to record it. Because it won't exist. In Tania's time, it just won't be there anymore. It hasn't been passed down. It's an antiquated language. No one's interested in speaking it. So that was very important. And he's an absolutely lovely book. The second person you saw, ST, he's a bit of a prickly character. He's very cold. When I first met him, he was kind of rude. And he's either really rude or funny. But when he's funny, he's sort of mean, actually. And when I met him, he was just mean. And yeah, to me as well. Interesting. Yeah. But there's something about him that I really like, depth. And he's honest. And he doesn't just say what I want to hear. He just has this thing. So I kept on it. And he has two children. They were coming around to my house every day. So I was teaching them anyway. Playing games with them. So I built his trust through that. And also probably from drinking, booting his brandy. And the locally brewed you, which they make some rice. Yeah. We can put the world to rights a few times. And I realized he does have a lot of political things on his mind a lot. A lot of things that he's not supposed to talk about, actually, I think by... It's not necessarily the image that the tribe wants to put across, is that there's any problems. So for me, that was even more interesting. So eventually he trusted me enough to... Well, he actually came out. So I want to tell you this poem. So he eventually told me. And that's the poem that it was. And it won an award? It did. And that's why he was so proud of it and he wanted me to know. And he wanted me to hear it. And that's when I understood that the words that he's speaking, they're quite dark. It's the blood of the poor and the rich. Being bad to the poor. And I understand where these feelings were coming from from him. And maybe his initial reaction to me by the rich guy in there, he doesn't really know why I'm there and whether there's a religious thing as well. And that's something that I had to show him just through friendship, basically. So that's ST. And then we had Kali, who is the medicine man. But he's kind of everything. He's a factual totter. He's the face of totto culture. He's the one when Indian anthropologists come for two days to learn everything there is about totto culture. They'll go and see him. He'll do the medicine stuff. He'll do the dancing. And then they go away and then they know. They've got everything they need. And it is true. What he does is real. But it's not that widely practiced anymore. It is really just for show, mainly. So it's really important for me to document. But it was more important for me to find people at ST and the younger people and see what's really going on beneath as well. And then finally we had the three dancers. They do this dance at rituals and weddings and things like that. And when we were doing the open air cinema as well, they would come down. And at the beginning of the film, they would show this to the younger generations that were coming down. They were lit up from the light from the projector on the side of a traditional bamboo house. It's quite surreal. A mixture of technology and ancient rituals. But yeah, that's just the gist of what I was recording. In terms of why we were doing the documentation, really that came about because there are a lot of anthropologists and documentary makers from India that do lots of research and they like to write about them and regurgitate old information and create these documentaries. The first time I went to Totapara, one of the leaders of the tribe showed me this documentary. He was very proud to show me. And then all the way through, commentated that actually everything was wrong. So there was a sense of him being proud that there was this documentary that somebody cared, but that actually everything was wrong. Another documentary I was showing when I was last there on somebody's mobile phone. Again, look at this, really excited about it. But it was all in English, so he didn't understand what was being said. It was quite detrimental actually to them. And so the leaders of the community, they recognise that this is happening and in a sense that they're being exploited by people going in and making these documentaries for TV. Yeah, I should just add that my role in this work is just to talk them out. They don't necessarily want people to see everything that's going on. And so the footage that I've taken is not for a documentary, it's not for a wide audience. It's for them and it's for the interest of recording their culture. Not for us to edit as we want. So they wanted to create something that they could show to people and actually say, not only be proud that there was this documentary, but say that this is a true representation. So that was the first reason why we got involved in documenting things. But second of all, in terms of the collection of folklore and stories, these are stories that we then use in our teaching learning materials in the school that we've just set up. So CTECH, the Chittoran Toto Education Centre. That was really horrifying, by the way, when that happened. I just made some maths, I turned around for a minute and then they all had to follow up. Yeah. So these are the children in the school. And when I first got there in 2009 and it was requested to me to set up this school in English, I obviously looked first to see what schools were in existence. And there are two primary schools. One is the government school and one is a mission school. The mission school teaches in English and the government school teaches in Bengali. There is then a high school which teaches in Bengali. But there was no pre-school that was running or in existence. The government does have a program called the ICDS, the Integrated Child Development Services. But within Toto Para it was largely defunct. It was not really working. And as part of the ICDS program there in theory should be what they call Anigwadi centres, where the ICDS programs then are channeled. It's a space for the children and the teachers to go to. So we fill that gap in terms of providing education which doesn't exist at all in between the ages of three and six. So we're really prepping them to go on to primary school. At the moment we're just focusing on that. But within two months of opening this there's actually quite a lot of pressure from the parents and from the elites to continue and to expand it into a primary school. So we've got 56 children and we split that up into two sessions and it's really quite a big space that we have. So lots of room for running around an area for a library and toys. And we have a multiple language situation where they speak Toto, Nepali, Bihari, Hindi, Metch which is one of the other local tribal languages. So it's multi-multilingual. In terms of the teachers when we first were recruiting the pressure was put on to really look for teachers outside of the community. And so we probed this a bit more and why do you want the teachers from outside? And there was this sense that they would be better qualified but actually what happens with the other schools and these are mistakes that we didn't want to replicate was that they were having difficulties coming into Toto Pira. So if they live outside it's at least an hour journey to get there and back. It's over difficult terrain. Soon it's almost impossible to get there. And the teachers really, they don't have a connection with the children. So that sense of responsibility is not so great. So instead we started, we were recruiting from within the community and it turns out that we're actually quite a few people that want, you know, lots of people that want to be teachers that were at a certain level of education that were connected to the children at the school. So it was felt that it was better to have those from within the community that ultimately also speak the language of the children that they're going to be teaching. We, as an approach to CTECH we also encourage very strongly parental involvement. So rather than trying to keep them out we encourage them and we get them involved in teaching. And this way we're also teaching them the basics whereby they can then go back to home and carry on teaching the children. We have a holistic approach. So by that I really want to stress we're not just teaching a language. We're teaching arts, we're teaching motor skills, social skills, morals and importantly local traditions and about their environment as well. And we're developing locally relevant teaching learning materials. So we have posters around the classroom which are relevant to the environment in their language and big books as well and stories some of which have been plucked from Mikey's wonderful mind. He actually created a character called Banjo Toto. So there's a whole series of stories. We've got a few of these which we can I might actually sort of hand them around so you can have a little look. Do you want to say something about Banjo Toto? Banjo Toto. So there's only one if you don't mind passing it around. They normally have a moral. They're quite simple. These children are only 2, 3, 4 years old. But typically he gets into trouble and then finds the right thing to do. And then he's alright. He has a sister as well. I try and play around with gender roles a little bit to make sure it's not always... About a boy. For example, in one he gets told off for stealing and he has to... Father says he has to go and catch 2 kilograms of fish from the Hauri River. And the net's not working and his sister comes along and she sees as a hole in it. He's like, you can't fish. She shows it. And it all ends up with it. It doesn't stay. So the important thing there is that it's engaging the children because they actually understand what's in the story rather than it being based in a city like Calcutta or something where they're talking about fast moving cars and smog or whatever it may be that they can't relate to. So this is really important. On top of, obviously, the language policy for education that we have within the school. Now this does continue to be a tricky one and I think it will forever be a tricky one. I don't think the language policy for education with this school will probably ever be static. And that's because the language isn't. It's forever changing and so I think the policy needs to reflect that. It seems... Well, yeah, but before we open the doors to the school I had hoped to have the policy set, but like I said now I embrace the fact that it's something that every year probably needs to be addressed. It's not just tricky for us this situation of language policy through education. Across India it's challenging. It's challenging tasks for policy makers because of India's vast linguistic diversity. Arguably the issue of what medium of instruction at an early childhood education or primary level is one of the most debated subjects for Indian school education policy makers. According to the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights all language communities have the right to decide to what extent their language is to be present as a vernacular language and as an object of study at all levels within their education. So whilst we're saying that this is an alternative approach it is actually being espoused by the Indian government but statements like these seem to remain only statements and they're not really putting anything into action. Out of the hundreds of languages that were spoken within India only about 45 of them are officially taught at school. It's turning to research done in Totapara very recently in 2011 by a friend of mine Sujai Saka. He looked specifically at the use of Bangla within the primary schools and his hypothesis was as the medium of instruction in primary education for the Toto children is being conducted in Bangla the children face difficulties in learning and that's the case. To explain briefly about multi-linguistic education the benefits are multi-fold. First of all that the children are being taught in a language that they are most familiar with. India language policy tends to be more of an immersion type programme especially experienced by the tribal communities and those children they're being taught in the state language from a very early stage they fall behind because they don't understand what's being taught to them. With this approach you develop their cognitive abilities teaching them basics colours, numbers instructions, morals, health and then they can develop that and it keeps them interested it keeps them engaged and it keeps them motivated. If they're just being taught in a language they don't understand they're not going to be engaged. This also encourages parents involvement because the parents understand what are being taught they can also help out so whilst we have four or five teachers with the parents help we've got a lot more assistance. Probably the most challenging subject that I found anyway in the classroom when you have multiple languages is mathematics. It's very difficult if you're using numerals which ones do you use so we adopt the Singapore Maths approach which is using objects, almost only objects and counting in very simple logic because I think the parents find it hard to differentiate the difference between learning one, two, three, four, five and learning a logical process so we're able to do that much, much more easily by using that method and what we did is we used objects that were pertinent to the culture and to the children it could be stones, animals a lot of the stories we had were counting animals and we'd let them count in their own language in English because they can do it and they're good some are home schooled as well and actually one night I was at home and there was a child student that lived below us, downstairs it was quite late and she was counting and she's doing it really loud and I didn't really understand why I found it interesting we'd been doing it in class earlier I wanted to know what she was counting so I went downstairs and to my shock there was a big pile of dead lizards and she was just going through them with this big smile on her face and the reason she was so happy is because they're poisonous lizards so the more she found the better it was I didn't realise that actually my room was full of these things so yeah I tried to enlist her to kill mine as well but it was getting late so it was really nice to see her using that and using again objects that are relevant this time dead lizards to count and in fact she was doing that out of the classroom really enjoying it so that's what we tried to do I replicate within the classroom as well so in terms of using the mother tongue it's also a way of maintaining and revitalising an endangered language it increases their self-worth instead of them being knocked on the head and being told off for using their language they're now being encouraged to use it which gives them a sense of self-worth all of this leads to a better education and a drop in the push out rates and increases literacy in Totapara they're massively below the state average so only about 30% of totos were literate in 2011 compared to 69% of the rest of West Bengal so given that the community leaders felt strongly about keeping their language alive and wanted to provide a better education for the children an MLE approach seemed like the obvious choice so whilst I've outlined the benefits of MLE it hasn't been without its challenges when I first started looking into this there are different models that are available as to how to put this into action within a classroom so there are different models but the most common one would suggest that at a young age you are only teaching orally in the mother tongue and then slowly you introduce reading and writing then you introduce language 2 so L1 to L2 and again slowly introduce the reading writing bridging into that language and then you would do the same with the language 3 which may be Hindi it might be the national language or it may be a foreign language such as English so whilst I was trying to figure out how we were going to play this out in the classroom it occurred to me that the concept of mother tongue and L1 is actually not so rigid and with Toto children that we have whilst they Toto is their strongest language they were adopting and borrowing a lot of Bengali and Nepali so were we to ignore that or were we to embrace that are we to teach in a pure Toto or a Toto that is a mixture of the other languages the other issue that we have is that we've got children that aren't Toto so it's an inclusive school and this is very much what the community wanted so whilst we do have Toto's we've got Nepali, Bahari other tribals and so again that raises the question of if we're trying to benefit all the children then what language are we teaching in this is also reflecting in when we make the teaching learning materials what language are we doing it in are we doing it in Toto and so in what form it's also important that we had this really stresses the importance of having teachers that do speak that form of the language having a teacher from outside speaking Nepali would probably not be as good as a teacher from the inside so it was difficult to find the right teachers actually from a language and education policy perspective the language situation for us is really quite complex ideally from a language policy perspective considering what language of instruction to use and how we would develop the teaching learning materials we would say no to any of the children that were not Toto but this is not fair and it's not realistic furthermore this isn't an unusual case for any classroom even in remote tribal locations and around the world the children do not generally belong to one language community so it's an issue that I feel quite strongly about that it shouldn't be just brushed under the carpet and that the multilingual aspect of classrooms this is an issue that needs to be addressed so we have tried to address it within our project what we've tried to do and what we're doing is language profiling of each child so before they begin we go through a questionnaire with the parents and we ask them a series of questions that helps us to create an individual in unique profile for each child this results in each classroom being different it then has its own profile as well so once we know what are the different strengths and the weaknesses of the child because we've got five different teachers that are local but they all have their different language speciality so we'll have, we have a match so she speaks the tribal language but she also speaks Bengali, Nepali we have two Toto teachers who speak all the languages and then we have a Nepali teacher as well so they can focus on the different children as need be whilst it's really important to consider the mother tongue aspect of this it's really important that we don't just ignore the fact that developing the teaching learning materials is really really important we need to do this running alongside the language aspect of this so to make it even more complex it's the issue of English so initially the impetus was to start a school teaching in English but all the parents and all the leaders of the community they want their children to learn English English for them equals education and this is still very much what they want however as explained teaching the child in a language completely unfamiliar to them such as English would be detrimental to their cognitive development in general schools in India use this immersion approach to language learning where you expose a child to a language the quicker and better they will learn now to an extent this is true and there are many situations around the world whereby the children can successfully learn a language other than the mother tongue at schools however those that are successful are generally situated within a particular context so for example the child that's trying to learn English as the example language may have support from their parents at home the child may be exposed to that language via TV film signage they may have friends that speak in that language so they speak outside the classroom the child may have and most likely will have developed cognitively in their own language first and then just be transferring that knowledge already into the language of instruction if it's English and they may also be exposed to reading materials in that language in English so while evidence shows that child is far better to learn in their own language it is difficult to convey that to the parents of a tribal Indian community or any Indian community when they've been led to believe that to be educated is to speak good English furthermore they believe that the earlier the better is the only way to go about it so we had to consider this when looking at the mother tongue aspect of our approach what we've done is we've embraced English not only because of the motivation while the Toto community and the non-Toto community are in support of teaching the children in their mother tongue the number one motivation for sending their children to school is to learn English there is no point in there for ignoring this and enforcing that no English should be taught at all and language acquisition studies do tend to show that the earlier a child learns a language the easier it will be for them to pick it up later so accordingly we do introduce English in the classroom which goes slightly against the traditional MLE model even to the youngest children but it is not aggressive so it's not the language of instruction we introduce it in songs and in play and whenever we do use English it's always supported by the mother tongue this way the parents are happy because we are using English the children's early exposure to it in a conversational in a way that they enjoy it will help to provide some kind of foundation for later stage English acquisition this then also plays into the script and orthography side of the project so the Toto language at the moment it's oral while its script and orthography are now being developed the Himalayan language project virtually completed its grammar in 1998 however some technical issues meant that the work on it was suspended until now it has been said to me that the completion of the grammar is imminent and we've got a linguist who's working with the Himalayan well that they're in communication now and he's been over there for a year working on the phonology he's been collecting recordings and this is where Mikey's been helping out with the footage and with the audio as well so here in my quest to decipher which script to adopt I've spoken to Bengali linguists and academics who've worked within this community who I hoped would shed some light on what to do they all said without a doubt that Bengali should be the script to choose their argument when pushed was based on the fact that this was the state language and that most of the children would go on to learn Bengali at school they were exposed the most to which in Totapara is really not quite the case but it was still hard to argue with it is the state language and it is the language that a lot of them will go on to learn at school however the feelings from the community suggest that this was not the best decision so firstly the problem with the Bengali language is it's from a very different language group to that of Toto and across the board the Toto say that Bengali is very difficult to learn I don't know if any of you are familiar with the Bengali script but its clusters of consonants are represented by different and sometimes quite irregular forms thus learning to read it is quite complicated by the sheer size of the full set of letters and I know when you've been in a classroom teaching it, it takes a long time they've actually the children have fallen asleep by the time you've run through the end of the alphabet which is really difficult to keep their attention I think it's quite monotonous as well and so the alphabet combined with the letter combination you get about 350 different combinations secondly they do perceive the Bengali culture and language to be quite oppressive they do feel exploited by the local Bengali community and do not consider themselves to be Bengali despite being West Bengal as I mentioned earlier so having a script which represents a culture which they don't feel connected to is not necessarily a good thing they see English as being an empowering language it's not just that English equals education but it also offers a sense of empowerment it's probably no surprise that one of the leaders of the community who if you do a Google search he's the one that comes up he's the one that deals with all of the government officials he really does have the most power and his English is the best in the community as a non-linguist I'm able to take a little step back and consider the voices of the community rather than get too caught up in the ideological beliefs of the Bengali linguists in terms of the ABCs adopting a Roman script works on two levels because we're teaching ABCs so the parents are happy we're teaching English but also then they're learning Toto so just to critique MLE our approach and what we're doing it is very resource heavy and we have largely funded this project which gives us a lot of flexibility but communities that are wanting to do a similar kind of project get stuck because where do they get the funding from so something to be aware of is that potentially those who can find it fund it maybe organisations that use it as a subterfuge for agendas that may vary from those of the community or as a project such as ours so just touching on three examples you may get a Indigenous rights activist from within that community who feels very strongly about revitalising the language and then therefore they want to start a school using the MLE approach but those children might not actually speak what you might call the heritage language in this case so whilst that would be good potentially good as a revitalisation programme it might not be to the benefit of those children who don't actually you might as well be teaching them in English or Hindi because they won't understand it just as much there are also large networks of campaigners for MLE but some of those supporters are also in support of education approaches which are more close to the capital theory approach in education taking children out of their homes out of their villages and yes whilst teaching them in their mother tongue just basically translating the national curriculum so turning them into good workers for the nation and civilised so again an argument is there is that benefiting the child and thirdly it could be adopted by organisations for ideological purposes such as religious indoctrination so it's important that along with any language policy that the curriculum development is relevant to the environment the children are living in I can't stress how important that is in terms of we're doing all right for the time are we okay brilliant in terms of our approach to this project we both came to it with different project management skills I was in events management for a long time I had training in NGO management and you've worked in the creative industry as a project management as a manager yeah I mean I had lots of ideas about the project moving when I got there I wanted to use what I knew but the reality is when you get out there project management a western professional point of view is based on timelines and achievements at certain points it's impossible you can't do that so you just have to constantly change everything your methods, your goals even everything and we're constantly just speaking to the community really and finding out the best way of going about things we're learning constantly I tried and it just doesn't work it's just a matter of being flexible we would come up with all these fantastic ideas and be talking with the community about how to approach something and then everybody would be behind it and you'd start to then move forward on those things and then it would just fall flat on its face and there were reasons for that there was a while to figure out why they weren't working they've gone to work in a mine in Lutan for six months the person that you absolutely needed to do that and he didn't know that two days ago so he really wanted to do it and it's gone and that happens all the time he has to be prepared for it in terms of time this is a really interesting one because in my head when I went out five years ago I had an idea of how long this project was going to take to do in six months it's now coming up to six years and actually to begin with you think that's a negative thing because we're so used to hitting our deadlines but I've really come to embrace the fact that actually in this context the slower the better and that's because you're learning so much as we go along and also the slowness sort of allows us to change plans and methods without anyone actually noticing as I was saying about ST before with the poems that took nearly an entire year of relationship for me to be able to get that and to trust me to do that so this this approach of reflecting and changing and reviewing this is not easy as well you do get wound up because you have this thing and someone's really up for it and there's no reason why it shouldn't have and it doesn't and it doesn't again and it's difficult not to be frustrated by it but you just have to then concentrate on something else and it's in those moments of frustration that often we'd come up with the most creative ideas and either we're just weirdos or there's something in that I think that it's in those spaces that you allow to emerge that you actually find some really interesting things and come up with interesting ways of doing things this has got a profoundly positive annoyingly positive outlook on the world whereas I'm deep into the circle so we balance each other out very well and it's good because when I'll see that somebody is frustrated and Lisa will see something in that why don't we do that then we just blitz it and we come up with lots of ideas sometimes being spontaneous in the field that's always seem to work she's just being wrong in terms of innovation as we just said it was often in those moments of frustration when things weren't going right that you have to just take a sit back stand back and then see the positives in it but really through partnership with people like Mikey a professional creative you brought some ideas to the table that I wouldn't have necessarily come up with and a lot of it was seeing ourselves as partnering with everybody in the community and hearing what it was that they had to say and what it was that they wanted to do and really out of that attitude emerged the mini music project that Mikey was involved in yeah so they I mean I can't talk too long about this but in terms of music they have they don't have anything recorded they love type dance music they love a Bollywood type dance music yeah they love that and they actually play at their weddings but they do play their traditional music and they write songs but all they have is a guitar and drums and so they write music but they have no way of making that into the kind of music that they actually listen to and they have on their phones and they're here on TV and so at their weddings one guy in particular told me that he wished there was a toto language song or something that came from toto para that they could play at weddings and be proud of it and have everyone dancing so I said well why don't we try recording some stuff it was very very difficult so I had like a four track recorder and I was trying to record I was trying to get them to record a guitar track and their drums is basically impossible for them to get because it doesn't make sense to them because music for them is about sitting in a circle playing around a fire feeling it and it's folk music so that actually spectacularly failed I'll be honest with you but I managed to sample a few parts of it and just very quickly in a day put together a kind of western style dance tune using some of their vocal samples and some of their drums and guitar and I played it to them and they went absolutely nuts for it they were so happy and they had it as their mobile phone ringtones everywhere I was hearing this damn song which I wasn't that pleased with it meant so much to them I was really happy to be able to do that and it is just for them I haven't played it to anyone here but we might play it now I think to wrap the talk up now we'd like to play that song and just I thought I had about a project like this it's easy to to frame it it's easy to frame it in terms of preservation and maintenance and traditional but what we're beginning to do is frame it more in a sense of modernity and transition and continuation so I think this song kind of represents that quite nicely you don't have to play the whole song but that just gives you some nice guitars that come in that kind of bring it all together but yeah get the idea of it it's a simple thing it's quite easy to do they had no idea that I could be done in the jungle I'm making this and the jungle is crazy sound and of course it is possible nowadays they thought you had to do it as early and however it is they do it it showed them what can be done I think we'll leave it at that thank you very much for listening that it would be like a positive thing for Emily I think the thing to really if you start sort of going down the Emily Road and if you're looking at any one particular community is that every single community and every single school will probably have a different approach and a different model that they'll use I just was in Malaysia in Borneo and I went around about 15 different schools and actually if anyone is interested this is a book that was produced from there which we've kind of used as our base really but then built upon it and every single school whilst there are the core tenets they looked and they felt a bit different and they're in a different community with different if you want to say like a language profile they're different so just sort of be aware of that that what might work in one community is that it will be a completely different situation you can't just sort of say take that and put it over there because then actually it might be detrimental heritage, language, play schools for indigenous minorities developed by Carla Smith it was a good it was a good place as you said it all things just don't make sense for our community not adapting no no no because there's no there's absolutely nothing there's nothing around signage wise yeah yeah so they do speak Nepali but there's nothing that's really written down like the newspapers they're not exposed to it and in terms of the primary schools and the high schools all of that is in Bengali so yeah invest yourself in the situation and come up with some positive new solutions so from when it's kind of huge yeah but it really can't be done unless you actually live in the community and anyway there's one question that I might have listed we were talking about the teaching known materials and what language what did you decide on the English or a multilingual we we go on it's your turn in the classroom I mean on the walls we have we have a lot of pictures of things so not so many words it's just images so then we can speak to them in whatever language and they can show us on the wall where something is but we have a mixture of Bengali and English things on the wall it's getting there it's getting there that you have there we have a couple of things that are just about ready to go but our language he's been out there now for how long a year in Totapara and he was out there for a year first of all learning Bengali so that he could then better learn the language so it's been a very long process for him as well he's had to go into the community and build relationships up at the point now and yeah materials will start to be written in English in ice-cream in Bengali script and Roman script some of both we're going to concentrate only primarily on the Roman script and that's because of the use of English in the classroom but what we're doing is not completely hiding Bengali away because the difficulty is we have we'll go on to English medium schools but some of them the parents are sending them to us to learn English but then they're going to send them on to Bengali primary school we don't have any control over that so they're still exposed to Bengali and this is a preschool which makes it a little bit easier for us it could be a bit more flexible a lot of all work it could be fantastic if you could extend it into primary so that you could go on looking at this whole walking situation I hope that we can yeah situation there's a lot of pressure on us to do that and given that we're just beginning to develop the most basic of deciding which alphabet to adopt it's quite daunting so I'm trying to push that off but then at the same time I wouldn't have opened up the doors to this school I would have had everything sorted and prepared and the teachers trained and everything ready to go before opening it but then there's something in just getting on with it, puts the pressure on and things then start to develop but in terms of the script it might be that if it gets to a point where they are officially adopting a script the two are adopted so we're experimenting at the moment with when people are writing down their poems they can either use the Roman script or they can use the Bengali script at the moment we've got a real mixture in the community I guess depending on whether they've gone to English medium school or Bangor medium but I would say that for the purposes of the play school it's going to be in the Roman script we touched on it before but teaching A to Z to a three year old is possible teaching the Bangor alphabet to a two or three year old is extremely difficult so it actually helps and it gives so much motivation for the parents they can get involved they learn as well and a lot of the parents want to also learn English we don't have the resources to do that at the moment so actually through the play school we're also doing a bit of adult literacy at the same time definitely and I think this is why going back to the fact that things are happening very slowly to begin with this is a failure we're going so slowly then you figure out all these things before you put anything actually into before you make anything official even though it's taken five years or six years I think that's really been with the Mikey's just been out there for a year and I've just come back after six months I've only just stopped doing this yeah, fresh off the paint should go I think in some ways some of our methods seem to them they're less strict they're less uniform they are they have this tendency to teach like the alphabet and numbers just over and over and over again and things are just drilled in but we have we have just different ways of doing it and I think it was hard for them to understand why it works but they could see after three or six months actually the difference it was making and how happy the kids were however we do do the national anthem the Indian national anthem every day outside the school it's really weird but it's what they asked for and it's still that's still really important to them they do the national anthem, they wear a uniform but then they trust us enough to give us free reign and they could see they're all really really happy with the progress so for example in terms of alternative methods compared to normal school situations instead of having the children sitting in rows we have them sitting in circles unless there is a specific activity where we're using the board and it might be more sensible for them to sit in rows we tend to start the day and end the day and mostly we're sat in a circle with teachers sat down on the level with them and all the parents are involved as well and there's a lot of playtime and free time where we've got building blocks and things that they can learn but just through themselves and then you see the kids coming together and they're teaching each other and that's the other benefit of being in a circle is that they can learn from each other rather than everybody just looking at the one teacher who they might not understand if they're not speaking in their mother tongue in terms of the parents in the games and so I think a lot of them just come to have a laugh themselves but that can only be a good thing I know that a lot of tribal communities in India they feel that when the children go to school and they're taught not in their language by teachers who are from their community that the children lose a lot of confidence in their community there's a lot of prejudice that gets really internalised by the children and I was wondering whether you've seen a sense of increased pride in the language and in their way of life by having to do things more in a way that's more appropriate for them In terms of being able to address that with them being such young children I couldn't necessarily say it's not been running for long enough to know whether the education is on our approaches having a positive impact I'd love to think so but one thing that sprung to mind as you were asking this in terms of the communities feeling towards their language with some of the other activities we're doing we produced a booklet which had a collection of Toto poems and folklore and songs and I think it was in Bengali so that the masses could read it and we saw people just walking around we had an event one evening and a friend of ours who's probably in his 70s, 80s and he came along and he was holding onto his booklet and he was sat there and he couldn't read it he was an illiterate he understood what it was and that was an incredibly powerful moment in terms of that self-worth I definitely saw some changes in the community because we were obviously asking for things and they really, really enjoyed doing that and writing new things so I think it definitely helped in that way it's hard to see with the kids the kids are so multicultural they can speak any language they can get on with any kid the new generations are very different still ones there really are incredibly outgoing and we actually have to there's a break time where the teachers get together and just have a breathing we have to lock the door on the school because the kids are trying to get in and for the first couple of weeks when we opened the afternoon session started at half past one and children were showing up at 12 o'clock so as soon as the first session ended they were trying to get in and we were a bit like what do we do because this is really good that they want to learn but we need our lunch so yeah that's definitely a positive thing we're seeing from the kids it is very inspiring I'm curious about your documentation can you tell us more about it yeah I went in it was a bit of an open brief I didn't know exactly what I would be recording because to begin with it was just really the project management I didn't go there to do that I'm a photographer so I took a lot of equipment but I didn't know if I would use it or whether it would be appropriate but the more that we the project evolved the more important it seemed to be and certainly when I met people like Butran when I found out about this new language which is insane it then became hugely important I thought for the sake of I've just happened that you know because once it's gone it's gone I didn't realise that was the situation because people say that the Toto language is endangered but you know everyone speaks it there the problem is it's not being taught but I wouldn't say technically it's endangered it doesn't feel like it but it leads to saying other languages are creeping in so maybe it's diluting but certainly with things like the other language the ancient language that's very important so then I went on to music I'm very interested in music which helped so I was naturally gravitating towards the musicians of the village just for my own enjoyment I was playing guitar and playing songs I loved it it was really good fun and then I thought they were old folk songs and I realised that most of them were writing them themselves and that was really interesting which actually my best friend there was a very close friend P.K. he started his brother died when I was there aged 21 and it was a really sad time and that's when we became very close after that he had supported me when I was alone there for a long time I supported him over that period and after that he started he's an awful singer he's the worst singer you've ever heard but we'd always get woken up in the morning playing him like I'd hear him every morning at 5, 6 am playing this song every day this song and it the way he presented it wasn't great I assumed he'd stolen it from someone else not stolen you know who we all do he's just covering it and so I'm going around the village and I'm trying to find the most interesting songs and recording everything but he's singing the same song every day and I'm like every time I hear it I'm getting more and more kind of agitated and towards the end of my time there I said to P.K. what is this song whose song is this you keep singing he said I wrote it I said really what does it mean and he told me what it means who supports his parents and he has to there's no work in the village that he lives and he has to go out of the village and perform dangerous jobs to support his parents and it's sad because one he's in danger and two he's no longer his parent and I realised immediately it was about the father and it was just one of those moments where he was like really really sad and he's just been singing that every day since he lost his father and it made me feel stupid that I should have opened my eyes and looked at what was right front of me and then as a result of that he did actually have other songs and stories to share and one of them quite beautifully is in that teaching learning in that first book that we've got it's The Birds and the Bees now to go along with that I've got this which you can have a little look at in fact would you mind if I read it out because it really is a beautiful a beautiful poem so the story about the bees one day some bees made their hive at the top of a tree they were happy living there some birds would often visit there they would laugh and talk their lives were passing happily but their happiness would not last long one day two bad people came and set fire to the bees honey and to their hive next morning a bird came and looked at the beehive seeing it destroyed the bird wept a bird asked the bee what happened friend tell me everything the bee replied a catastrophic incident happened to our family but why do you not feel upset asked the bird no the bee replied no no though people are able to kill us and burn us still they are not able to make what we are able to make and I just it's good he told me a slight variation in the last line they will never fly they can kill us they can steal our honey but they will never fly they will never have our skills it's got a real way with words actually in terms of the documentation inside of it it seems obvious to go to certain people that are the ones who maybe are the elites or are the witch doctors but actually it's amazing when you just look at those that are in front of you how rich we can use that for teaching materials now that was another huge point of collecting these stories we use them in a classroom rather than me writing but it's also then being used by our linguist to help him develop the orthography and the phonology side of it he's helping translate all this I think it's great to see the linguist in a box you're a beautiful photographer I really enjoy the photography and the videos are too simply the thing and that's what often linguists miss is that they haven't got the eye for that they've got the ears for the sound but not the eye that's good see the documentation turned around and we thank our speakers for an interesting presentation