Current Status
Currently, TARU has a very small team of two people working full-time and a couple of consultants as and when more resources are needed. In addition, there is a galaxy of excellent external faculty sympathetic to TARU’s vision of education and help in designing and conducting courses. At present, TARU is funded by the WIPRO Foundation. TARU offers the ‘Bedrock Series’ and ‘Foundations of Education’ (FOE) programmes for WIPRO partners; these programmes are also open to others for a fee. The current programmes are as follows:
- Bedrock Series
- Foundations of Education (Certificate) Program
- Shiksha Darshan Samvad Shrinkhla
- Workshops on Early Language and Mathematics
- Workshops on Demand: Addressing Organisations’ Needs on Approach
The courses in the series (Philosophy of Education, Sociology of Education and Perspectives on Learning) offer a comprehensive understanding foundations of education facilitated by experienced faculty members. Participants can choose courses based on their interests and work requirements, with each course operating independently and scheduled to prevent overlap. Each course lasts for 6 days, except Philosophy of Education, which is an online course spread over 13 weeks. The other two courses will be held at Digantar Campus.
Last year’s (2022) batch of FOE in Hindi started in November 2022 and completed its 7 core modules, divided into three workshops, by mid-March 2023. The modules were as follows: Introduction to Education, Philosophical Perspective on Education, Sociological Perspectives on Education, Perspectives on Learning, Human Understanding & Curriculum, Pedagogy & Assessment, and Teacher Education. The module “Human Understanding & Curriculum” spanned 4 days, while the other 6 modules were 3 days each. A total of 38 participants from 19 different organisations across India took part in it. The schedule for the current years (2023-24) will be announced soon.
“Shiksha Darshan Samvad” is an ongoing online series of interactions in Hindi, started last year, providing discussions on essential topics related to the philosophy of education. Each 1.5-hour session on Saturdays sees an average of 20-25 participants, including educational practitioners, teachers, and students. Twenty-four sessions have been conducted to date, planned, and facilitated by Rohit Dhankar. Session recordings are uploaded to a dedicated YouTube channel. Participants can choose specific sessions without mandatory registration for all topics. Generous sponsorship offers scholarships for those in need.
In order to support the nationwide mission for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, leveraging its key strength in teaching Language and Mathematics, TARU plans two 6-day residential workshops on the nature and pedagogy of Language and Mathematics. Schedule for the current year workshops is yet to be announced.
TARU supports organisations with both onsite and workshops on the TARU campus . These workshops are organised on specific issues/topics as requested by the organisation. Recently, TARU completed a 6-day workshop for the Centre for Microfinance, focusing on foundational principles of Education and incorporating them with Draft-NCFSE 2023. It also covered Foundational Language and Mathematics.
These workshops depend on requests from organisations, therefore, have no fixed numbers and calendared schedules.
