VITAL proposes a simple method for integrating Constitutional values into everyday classroom teaching. The following steps are involved in this process:
- Teachers to identify portions or topics from text books prescribed by NCERT or State Education Boards while making a lesson plan
- Structure how to include the value example co-relating with the text portion identified
- Integrate the same with examples drawn from daily life experience/incidents
- Highlight the key human values embodied in the constitution through class room interaction
VITAL believes that this approach can help teachers appreciate that classroom learning is essentially about promoting this expansion from ‘Me’ to ‘We’. It can encourage them to constantly innovate their teaching. It can also enable them, as well as their students, to develop more sensitivity towards the needs and suffering of people around them. It can also help inspire students to excel in the activities in which they are involved and, at the same time, to become more caring and responsible citizens of the country. The approach can enable both teachers and students to better appreciate the importance of the interconnectedness of, and interdependence between, family, society, the nation and the world.
At the classroom level, the VITAL approach ensures that:
- The importance of academics is not diluted while value education is integrated in every period of classroom instruction and learning
- The workload of teachers does not increase
- Value education does not become a compartmentalized, academic exercise, with a separate syllabus of its own
Note: The above is possible by
- Observing all the positive dimensions of what is happening in and around us,
- Drawing from one’s own experiences,
- Collecting positive/inspiring incidents from newspapers/visual media and cataloguing them down. (Avoid all incidents that are religiously or politically biased).
- Finally sharing the example with students, that relates to the text portion and encouraging the students to connect with a value or a similar example.
Once the rationale behind this attempt is internalized the teacher would be able to bring out the same in his/her own creative and spontaneous way.
