Trainee teachers ‘learn a lot’ from Chandigarh classes

Education students at Macquarie University have completed their first teaching practicums overseas in northern India.

Macquarie University trainee teacher Demi Gilbert doing a teaching practicum at Chitkara International School in Chandigarh in northern India.

Education students at Macquarie University have completed their first teaching practicums overseas, spending four weeks at a school in northern India.

“At first it was very overwhelming,” said student teacher Elouise Ryrie. One of the big challenges was that the students — in kindergarten and Years 1 and 2 — were still learning English, she said. For most of them, their native language is Hindi or Punjabi.

Even though the Chitkara International School, a private school in Chandigarh north of Delhi, teaches in ­English, because most of the younger children are not yet proficient the Australian student teachers needed to be creative with visual and other non-verbal ways of communicating.

Macquarie University senior lecturer Robyn Maloney, who ­accompanied the students on the trip, said the group got very creative in its lesson planning, with lots of flash cards, hands-on activities, songs, games and dancing. They even used the nutbush dance to teach direction and numeracy, and used a picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to ­illustrate geometry.

“By the end some teachers in the school were saying, ‘That’s a good idea, can you teach me some of those things’,” Dr Maloney said.

“A big source of their learning was their community of 10 (student teachers). They did a lot of problem solving together.”

Ms Ryrie said there were also cultural challenges, many of them in communication. She soon discovered that the children did not see a nod or a shake of the head to mean yes or no, as it does in Western countries.

Different head gestures were used for yes or no in their culture and the “no” signal varied according to context. They could also shake their heads to indicate understanding, she said.

The Australian students, all in the second year of their course, also had to get used to the larger class sizes of about 40 in Years 1 and 2. And 40 is considered small in India, where public schools — Chitkara is private — generally have even larger classes.

Demi Gilbert, another student teacher in the group, said the big classes helped her learn a lot of ­behaviour management skills.

“I’d play a game of Simon Says to get their attention back to me,” she said.

Ms Ryrie said she also learned a huge amount at Chitkara school.

“Being children, they tell you what you are doing wrong,” she said.

The students had funding support for their trip from the federal government’s New Colombo Plan.

Macquarie University education professor Garry Falloon said it was among the first, if not the first, such overseas teaching practicum conducted by a NSW university.

He said it was made possible by a decision of the NSW Education Standards Authority last year that enabled the teaching practicum in India to earn credit for the students’ teaching degree, adding: “It was a visionary decision by them.”

Dr Maloney said the experience of teaching in India was highly valuable for the students.

It is intercultural learning, she said.

“We have lots of schools in Sydney with kids 90 or 95 per cent from other language backgrounds,” she added.