Janhvi Kanoria:
A lot of these shifts were not because we wanted to be radical or different, they were because of constraints. We did not have teachers, so we had to rely on the community. We did not have textbooks, so we didn’t have the facts and we had to rely on discovery. We didn’t have schools, they were closed, so kids had to learn on the streets.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed, I’m Alec Patton, and that’s the voice of Janhvi Kanoria. Janhvi is Director of Innovation at Education Above All, an NGO based in Qatar. Education Above All focuses mostly on helping kids who aren’t in school get access to education. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, that meant about 263 million kids, or one in every five kids around the world. Not long after Janhvi started at Education Above All, the pandemic happened and over the course of a couple weeks, the number of children who didn’t have access to school got a whole lot higher than 263 million. What Janhvi’s team did then was honestly pretty incredible and that’s what this episode’s about. To find out all about it, I talked to Janhvi and to Lolwa Al-Saigh, who’s an Innovation Officer at Education Above All. Here’s our conversation.

Janhvi Kanoria:
My name is Janhvi Kanoria.

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
My name is Lolwa Al-Saigh.

Alec Patton:
Where did you both grow up?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I’ll start. I grew up in India, I spent my entire childhood in Bombay and I studied there, and then I moved to the US for my college years. And then from there on, I’ve lived in many different countries around the world.

Alec Patton:
Looking back now, what stands out to you most about your own education?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I was really fortunate because I had a great experience in my schooling years. There were very high expectations set for us and we were also not supported a lot in the best kind of way, because it empowered us to do a lot by ourselves. Our teachers would create opportunities, but then just discreetly leave and so then it was up to us to make the most of those opportunities. For me, school was an amazing experience. I look back at it with a lot of fondness and I really enjoyed my time.

Alec Patton:
Can you tell me about one of those opportunities where the teachers set something up and then quietly disappeared?

Janhvi Kanoria:
We used to have these Model United Nations when we were in school. I was a big history buff and I loved political science, so our teacher recommended this idea of Model United Nations and talked us through what it was. And then she said, “Maybe we can plan one in our school, we can host one for a couple of the neighboring schools.”
We all got really excited about the idea and we thought she’d help us set it up and plan this big Model United Nations, except she then discreetly left the scene and we were left, a group of five of us, planning this huge, big Model United Nations with almost 400 students across multiple different committees and topics and so on, with absolutely no idea how to do it, but it was the best learning and growing experience. It was the first time in my life I ever approached a donor, I’ve never managed logistics of buses and drop-offs, so from doing things like that to the actual content and managing that was just the best growing up experience. We pushed each other a lot, so it just gave us a lot of confidence.

Alec Patton:
You said you approached a donor?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
Tell me more about that.

Janhvi Kanoria:
We didn’t actually think that we needed funding to run the Model United Nations, we just assumed that we would run it in school and so we had the school facilities and what else would we need? And then we realized that one of the schools that was close to us, the kids from the school actually needed help in transportation, in getting to our school, so we needed to have buses, so then we said, “Well, the only way to really do it is have some money to pay these bus contractors.”
We didn’t have any money, of course, and the school was not willing to put that out, so we had to actually go to a donor. The donor we went to was another school friend’s father and he said, “Well, what’s in it for me?” We had to think about it and we had to say, “Maybe you can put an advertisement in the bus and you can share,” she used to make a product, which was a juice box, “You could share the juice boxes and we can get kids to buy it.” It was a whole business transaction that we did and then he supported us in the buses.

Alec Patton:
That seems so mean to a 13-year-old.

Janhvi Kanoria:
But I think that’s part of the charm of that, right, Alec? At that time, it was just part of the adventure, and we managed and we pulled it off. I don’t know what my teacher had in mind, so if we had failed, I don’t know at which point she would have maybe stepped in and tried to help us, but we didn’t, so she didn’t have to. But it was an interesting experiment, really.

Alec Patton:
Have you ever talked to that teacher since?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Yeah, I have.

Alec Patton:
Do you ever ask her, “What was going on in your head when you did that?”

Janhvi Kanoria:
I think it’s very different in hindsight. In hindsight, she always says, “Oh, I knew you guys could do it. I wanted to put out a challenge,” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I just feel like I’m sure that isn’t true. I’m sure there was some part of her which must have had a contingency plan in case it all fell flat.

Alec Patton:
Lolwa, where’d you grow up?

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
I grew up my entire life in Qatar, I’ve always lived there. I haven’t really studied abroad or anything.

Alec Patton:
Looking back on your own education, what stands out to you now?

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
Thankfully, I’ve lived a very privileged education. I went to a private British school and then I went to an American university here, and honestly, I had a lot of opportunities to join clubs, do a lot of different things. It also inspired some of the work that I do now, which is to give others this opportunity, as well.

Alec Patton:
Now, this is a question for both of you, what brought you to this work, and by that, I mean specifically educating kids who are unserved by formal education?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I think for me, there were three main drivers that maybe I’d like to share with you in mini-stories. The first is a very obvious one, I’m a complete anomaly, in the Indian context, of gender discrimination. I grew up having house help and their daughters never went to school, and if they did, they were pulled out of school very early in the interest of getting married or in the interest of beginning to earn a living and education was never prioritized. For me, this was not the case, I had a family that really supported my education and my overall learning. They really fueled my dreams, set very high expectations for me, so it was quite a different experience. The second was just, as I mentioned to you, I loved school and it really helped build my self worth. What really shocked me was close friends of mine who went to the same school as me had a completely different experience coming out of the school, one that totally destroyed their confidence.
Unfortunately, these are really formative experiences and these beliefs carry forward and they carried forward for a large part of my friend’s lives. Many years later they would say, “Well, I’m not the smart one, I am not the X one.” That’s because school taught in a particular way and we did particular activities and I happened to excel in those, but their talents were perhaps unrevealed till much later, and unfortunately, they never therefore gained that sense of worth as a result. I think my third experience was after I graduated from college, because I graduated in 2008, and that was, of course, the year of the big recession. At some point, I found myself jobless and I joined a low-cost government school, which was transforming into an IB school in a small town in India, and I was teaching there and helping across the board.
I was working with a group of 16- and 17-year-olds in a co-ed classroom and I was teaching them history. One of the things that really took my breath away was how little they knew about the world around them and how little they had been empowered to think or act. It just really was very disturbing to me because I knew that in a year’s time, these would be voting citizens of the country and they didn’t know or they weren’t able to differentiate between even very basic things. For example, we were having a conversation about a huge increase at that time related to just harassment on the streets and so on for girls, so a lot of that was happening and we were discussing that and across the board, the reaction was, “Well, we don’t get involved, we just walk away.” I said, ‘”That’s fine. I understand self-preservation, but what would you do if it was your friend? How would you react if it was someone you knew?”
Or in a different instance, we were having a conversation about a particular politician who was unfortunately very myopic in his perspective and therefore, bringing a lot of divisions, and all of them unequivocally said, “Yes, we would vote for him.” I said, “But why?” They said, “Well, because my mother told me,” or, “My father told me,” was the ultimate belief. They would hide that under a lot of different things, but at the end of it, when you kept probing the why, why, why question, it got there. I had a big debate with them and I told them that if they win, given that I was a voting citizen, I would vote for this politician, and if I won, then they would help me change their mind and that’s all I wanted.
Of course, I made sure I won, but the next day, they came back to me and this boy says, “Well, I went home and I told my mother we should not vote for this person.” I said, “Oh, that’s fantastic. What did you tell her?” Eventually, it came down to, “Well, because my teacher told me,” and I was like, “Oh God, this is not achieving anything.” It just made me feel like there has to be a science behind how we do this better. How could we be in this situation? How can we not empower kids enough to be able to think and act as they need to and participate as full citizens? Sorry, it’s a very long answer, but I just had this really deep desire, in a small way, to be the champions that I was lucky to have in my life with someone else and pay forward those opportunities.

Alec Patton:
When did you start at Education Above All?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I have been there three years and I think seven or eight months.

Alec Patton:
What were you doing when you started?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I was actually recruited to start the innovations team. The idea was that all of our programs and with all the impact that they’ve had, there were just problems that were facing the most marginalized that we were just not being able to tackle. They recruited me to say, “Hey, what if we were to start an innovations team and your focus was on some of those biggest challenges and problems what if your role was to essentially either design and develop, by yourself or in tandem with partners, a solution and then test it, pilot it, see how it goes, and of course, keep iterating on the solution if it is successful?” That’s what I was brought in to do and then, of course, COVID hit and our world took a 180 and we had to rethink and really get down into what we wanted to do to help the millions of kids who were suddenly put out of school.

Alec Patton:
Let’s go back to that moment, you first hear that name COVID-19 and so what happens then?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Actually, when COVID-19 started, I think we got a circular in the office which was to say, “This is your last day and from tomorrow, you will work from home,” and I remember there were four of us in the office, there was an intern and three of us in our team. Because we had been working on this digital solution, the first thing that hit me was we had done a lot of research into what was the digital content out there and so basically, I spoke to this team and I said, “Why don’t we put out a list which just says, ‘Here is the cost-free, open source, digital content out there which we have vetted and checked, this is the age group it’s applicable for, and these are the languages it’s available in’?” I basically said, “All of us speak at least two languages. Why don’t we look for the resources that exist in our languages and put it out there?” We put out this list I think in three or four days.
We had tons of people just offering to help, people who spoke different languages or were able to vet content in their language. What was really unique about this list was it covered seven or eight languages, which was quite unique because most people were just putting out English or French or Spanish or so on. That actually crashed our website, that list, because we had so many people come to our website to just check it out. I spoke to a couple of our partners on the ground and I told them, I said, “This is something we put out.” To be honest, I was looking for a little bit of a, “Congratulations, that’s amazing,” and they all turned around and said, “That’s great,” and then they down the phone and I said, “What’s happening? Why am I not getting rewarded for this amazing work I’ve put out?” And then I realized, because a lot of them told me that, “Look, we don’t have technology, we don’t have internet.”
There was this one partner we were speaking to and they gave me the contacts and they painted it so beautifully. This partner just told me, it was like, “I have a child, she doesn’t have technology in her home. When I say she doesn’t have technology, I mean she does not have TV or radio. Now, she also doesn’t have any books in her home, so she doesn’t have textbooks, she doesn’t have reading books. Now, the third thing that you should know is that her father’s a migrant laborer who does not live at home and is out trying to earn his daily wage and her mother is illiterate. Now, go, think of how she can study and tell me whether you think she’s going to come back to schools if the schools stay closed for a really long time.” That was really the challenge, Alec, and then it was like, “What do you do from here and how do you do this?”
Then that really threw me into a spiral, but really, it was an instinct, because I’ve worked a lot in IB schools and I’ve done a lot of project-based learning, and that just made me think, look, kids learn all the time everywhere, why do we have to assume that they will not be able to learn if they’re at home? I actually went back to the team and I said, “Hey, do you think we can design some content which helps the kids just learn at home? Let’s assume that parents are illiterate, let’s assume that they don’t have books. Now, what can we do and how can we do it?” It was really a complete experiment. We said, “Let’s just design 10 such resources and see, will it work? We have no idea. Will these kids be able to learn anything? No idea,” so that’s where we started.

Alec Patton:
You made these resources, how did you get them to kids?

Janhvi Kanoria:
We started designing this content and like I said, we started with 10. Now, I think we have 500, 700, but we started with about 10 and a team of three. We would just write the projects and circulate it to each other and review them. We had this frenzied activity for maybe 10 days, we were just going crazy writing and reviewing and finalizing. And then we realized we had nobody to actually use this content, what do we do now? We approached one NGO which we knew and they said, “Oh my God, that’s fantastic. Can we use it?” We said, “Absolutely. How will you use it? How will you reach the kids with this?”
They said, “Oh, we have this idea. In their community, there’s this one person who has a phone, so we’ll call that person at 9:00 AM and tell him to put his phone on speaker and get the kids to come around and just listen.” We’re like, “Really? That sounds really tough,” we’re like, “Let’s try it,” so it literally started like that. And then we just got NGO after NGO coming to us and saying, “Hey, can we use this? Can we use this?” They would all reach the beneficiaries in just the most unique of ways.
Those who had technology, of course, used it, so the people who had phones or had radios, which in our case was the best that it gets, they used that. For those who didn’t, some of them painted instructions in the village wall, which was then painted over. Some of them put it in newspapers, some of them did these group phone calls. Some of them had a facilitator or a older sibling or somebody in the village who took charge. Some of them… Do those bicycles which have loudspeakers which are often used for election campaigns?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Janhvi Kanoria:
They used that. They just had someone bicycle around town and shout out the instructions, and then that inspired one other person to use… You know how a lot of the mosques and temples have loudspeakers to call people to prayer?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Janhvi Kanoria:
They used those. Then we had to also make sure that we are designing resources in a way that the instructions can be communicated really simply, but also in case a teacher used it, then it would have all the sophistication involved.

Alec Patton:
That’s really interesting, because I’ve looked at the Internet Free Education Resource Bank and I was picturing, I don’t know, you print them out and laminate them and give them to people. I hadn’t realized how much it was a oral thing.

Janhvi Kanoria:
We have those cases, as well, so we have had context, and especially as time went by, one of our big realizations was that COVID, unfortunately, is just one in a very long line of interruptions that most of the kids who we work with face. Sometimes it’s a natural disaster or sometimes it’s political strife, but there are lots of reasons why school is constantly interrupted for them. What we realized is that these resources and just learning how to do project-based learning was empowering a lot of these NGOs in these communities to say, “Look, now we can power through all of these disruptions.” Of course, now when it is being used in a non-COVID context, very often, it’s printed out and it’s used in centers or it’s used in schools and so on, but in the early days, I would say for almost six to eight months, it was only distance education and therefore, we had to be really innovative with how we reached the kids.

Alec Patton:
In your TED Talk, which I highly recommend that everybody listens to and I’ll put in the show notes, you had these five shifts, teacher-led to community-based, classrooms to streets, globally-standardized to locally-relevant, raising hands to use your hands, and facts to discovery. Those are pretty radical and it sounds like pretty much from the start you were like, “This is how we have to do it.” I’m curious, did you get pushback? Did you get people saying, “Hey, we just need worksheets. Stop doing this crazy thing, these kids just need to do the formal education thing”?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Oh yes, absolutely. A lot of these shifts were not because we wanted to be radical or different, they were because of constraints. We did not have teachers, so we had to rely on the community. We did not have textbooks, so we didn’t have the facts and we had to rely on discovery. We didn’t have schools, they were closed, so kids had to learn on the streets or learn wherever they could learn. A lot of it was really brought on by the fact that we didn’t have access to all of these wonderful resources, but eventually, it led us to a lot of best practices in education. But in terms of pushback, it was really hard, but I think one of the best things that happened to us is people had no choice, so as much as they pushed back, what were the options? They either learned like this or didn’t.
We got so many parents who would reach out to say, “Why is my child just laughing and playing games? What’s going on? Why isn’t he writing? Why isn’t he serious? Why isn’t he sitting down?” We had teachers who said, “The kids came up with the wrong answer. This didn’t make any sense. They didn’t do it right,” or, “They wrote A for arrow, not apple,” or they did things like that and you’re like, “Well, yes, and that’s really hard.” We had kids come up to say, “Where’s the template? What are we supposed to do? Draw it on the board. We’ll copy it. What do you mean do it yourself? What do you mean draw model city? I don’t know what model city, I don’t know what I want to draw.” It was a big shock to a lot of people and it was really sad to see how we’ve conditioned everyone to believe that education can only be a particular way.
For example, a lot of the parents had no confidence in themselves. They would just constantly tell us, “We’re not literate,” or, “We don’t know, how can we do this? This is the teacher’s domain.” We had to keep going back to say, “Guys, please, of course you are. You have so much amazing wisdom and knowledge. Come on, you can tell your child a story, surely you can help him make the budget that you make at home every week, surely you can help him make a meal and measure out the ingredients. These are not things that you require a lot of education to do, these are things that you do naturally in life.” We had to do a lot of that unlearning and the process was challenging. For example, I think one of the things we realized is it takes maybe five projects, I would say, for people to get into the groove of it.
The first two projects, there was a ton of resistance from the kids. They were like, “Give us the answer, share with us the template, draw it out. What do you mean? What want us to do?” And then over time, they’re just like, “Oh, this is a lot of fun,” and by the end of it, they’re pushing the envelope themselves. They’re like, “Hey, I’m going to take this step further and negotiate with the village store that they stopped using single-use plastic and use these cloth bags,” so it became something that they owned. With the parents, we had to actually, A, convince them that they could be a part of their child’s learning, but in addition, we also had to actually tell them that, “Look, we will help you understand how your child is learning, so we will give you these mini assessments for you to do with your kids, which gives you confidence that actually, he does know how to do basic arithmetic, even though he seems like he’s just jumping around on a number line,” so we would also have to convince them like that.
With the teachers, frankly, they just saw the magic happening. They just saw kids bringing more kids in. They just saw kids just being so excited. We had so many cases in which kids were actually knocking on their teacher’s doors or calling up their facilitators to say, “Hey, can we get the instructions for the day? Can you help us with what we’re doing now?” Obviously, any sort of impact when someone who’s in the professional teaching sees that, it encourages them, but it was definitely not an easy ride.

Alec Patton:
Is there a project that you particularly love?

Janhvi Kanoria:
I think there are a few, but perhaps one of my favorite ones is this project called Flood Management. It was inspired by the recurring floods in the state of Bihar in India where we were working and they encouraged me to say, “Hey, can you develop something along these lines?” The project basically starts with the learners actually creating their own instruments to measure the levels of water in the nearby streams and rivers to be able to understand what the levels are rising. They then do a few different experiments, creating models to help understand what human behavior increases the chance of flooding, so for example, deforestation or changing off the course of water bodies and so on.
They then develop evacuation plans and design for themselves what were the most essential items that would be taken if there was to be a flood? And then they circulate that amongst the village so that people actually understand what to do when a flood hits. And then finally, for the older kids, we actually did an experiment for them to learn more about density by creating their own personal flotation device. They create life jackets out of discarded plastic bottles and they learn about density, but they actually learn how to make these life jackets and in that particular case, they actually use the life jacket. I felt like that was just transformative to think about the fact that they created something which saved lives and kudos to these kids for having done so much with that one project.

Alec Patton:
There was an actual flood?

Janhvi Kanoria:
It wasn’t a big flood, but there was rising water bodies and they used the life jackets.

Alec Patton:
Wow.

Janhvi Kanoria:
Incredible.

Alec Patton:
How did those kids find out what to do?

Janhvi Kanoria:
They had facilitators in each village who would just do the projects with the kids. Very often, they would meet in just any sort of community center which was in the village, that could be a temple, it could be a mosque, it could be just an open space, and they would learn there. But that one, to me, was a very transformative project.

Alec Patton:
In that instance, you have a facilitator who probably is literate and they are looking at the lesson plan and using that to figure out how they’re going to [inaudible 00:26:30]?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Exactly.

Alec Patton:
One thing I’m interested in, I know you were just in Poland working with refugees from Ukraine, and it seems like refugee populations are a group who Education Above All ends up working with pretty regularly, is that accurate?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Yeah, absolutely.

Alec Patton:
Are you using, do you call it IFERB or do you always call it the Internet Free Education Resource Bank?

Janhvi Kanoria:
No, we call it IFERB. I know it’s a terrible name, I apologize for that, but at the time, we didn’t really have the bandwidth to think of something more catchy.

Alec Patton:
I kind of like it. I like it.

Janhvi Kanoria:
Oh, I’m so grateful to hear that.

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
Plus, IFERB catches on after a while, you start liking it.

Alec Patton:
I’ve loved it from the beginning. I’ve always thought it was a little weird, but I’ve always loved it. IFERB, are you using that a lot with refugees?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Here is the context there, Alec, we did use it with refugees from the very beginning. For example, we did a project in Lebanon with a lot of the Syrian refugees who had moved there and were out of school, but what actually prompted us to develop slightly different content within the IFERB suite was when the Afghan refugees came to Qatar. When they came to Qatar, we had a great opportunity to interact with them and when we interacted with them, we recognized so many gaps, which were, frankly, quite frightening for us. For example, most of these refugees did not speak a word of English and a lot of them were going to be transported, as you know, to the US. A lot of them, for example, had no idea about which country they were in. They would often ask me, “Am I in New York?” When they were in Doha. They had just no concept of where they were going or what these other geographies would look like. That just prompted us to say, “Hey, what if we design content around survival English, around getting to know your host country better, et cetera?”
We put that out fairly quickly and we had a huge and very good response from the international community. We had even large NGOs like Save the Children and IRC adopt that content because frankly, it was just very timely, it was all available in Dari and Pashto, and it was very, very relevant to these learners. And then that gave us a bit of confidence to say, “There seems to be a gap in this short-term educational needs for these refugees, which is very thematic based on their needs.” Even in Ukraine, when the Ukrainian crisis started, we spoke to a lot of different partners on the ground and that led us to understand that one of the biggest challenges is that even though Poland was very hospitable and everyone opened up their homes in schools, there was no support given to the teachers on how to integrate or support these huge number and this huge influx of refugees.
We said, “What if we actually design content which the Polish and Ukrainian kids can do together?” We called it the Living Together, Learning Together content. There’s basically projects that they do together to learn about each other, so for example, one is about making their own country. They learn about each other’s countries and then eventually, they think about what they like from each other’s countries and they design their own flat, they design their own country slogan, they design their own geographical features, all of it. It’s a lovely way for them to learn things which are academic in nature, but also become friends, if you would like, and so a lot of our content then morphed into that. We’ve been working a lot with refugees with very specifically tailored content, but also with more generic content from IFERB bank based on whether it was a short-term and an immediate-term response or it’s a slightly longer term response. Lolwa actually has been working a lot with the Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Lolwa, if you want to say something about that.

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
I think the biggest thing I want to highlight is even though we have these resources and we’ve made them specifically based on the needs of Afghan refugees, when we work with partners or anyone, we work on also further contextualizing the resources. Whenever we work with anyone, we make sure that the resources are relatable to them, we make sure that the resources fit the context. I think that was a big part of what we did in Pakistan, we spent time contextualizing the resources and that’s what made it so effective. Because they’re open source and we worked together to contextualize the resources, they were even more successful. There was resources like Host Country, which helps you understand where you are, it helps you learn about the flag, the culture, the food, also the Survival English packages, so learning the letters, the words, just basic phrases for everyday use, all these resources acted as a quick response to support these Afghan refugees, even in Pakistan.

Alec Patton:
To adapt resources for a local context, what are the things you most need to think about?

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
First thing we do is a simple change to make just even the examples in the resource. For example, there was a partner that we had in Kenya called Edutab, when they were using the resources, a lot of the examples didn’t fit the context, so for example, names of rivers, they put names of rivers that are in Kenya.

Janhvi Kanoria:
There’s also cultural context and sensitivities which come in. For example, we are working in Afghanistan right now, a lot of the references to women and women in educational employment has been adapted to the context. We are very careful about what we want to say and how much of it we want to say. We have this lovely project on the population census where kids actually go out and run their whole own census. It’s, of course, a statistics and math project, but then they draw a bunch of different conclusions based on that. Through the project, we peppered in a little instances of just trying to investigate a little bit more the gender angle, so we changed that a little bit in Afghanistan because we felt like that would not be as appropriate in that context. Similarly, sometimes the contextualization goes beyond just examples or very simple, basic things, but it goes a little bit more into what is the context of the country, sometimes it actually changes based on the levels of learning.
Again, as one of those case studies we did, we recognized that in Ukraine, when it comes to social-emotional learning, it’s actually not a topic that’s often talked about and it’s not very recognized, so we said, “How do we ensure that there is some support on this domain, but we also are cognizant of the fact that mothers, who have typically migrated with their kids, are themselves going through so much trauma and it is live war?” We said, “Well, instead of doing it as we usually do in terms of projects, what we will do is we will create a series of bedtime stories which talk about some of these very difficult emotions, but in a very lighthearted manner and in a almost whimsical manner in order to make it very palatable.”
For example, we have a story about a tortoise who was looking for his home and then at the end of the story, he discovers it was on his back all along. Similarly, we wanted the kids to draw an analogy that their homes are in their hearts and in their loved ones around them and they don’t need to have the physical structure. It can just rest as just that story, which is a simple and easily accessible story, but we’ve given the parents prompts to say, “If you would like to have a deeper discussion with your child, here are some questions and activities that you can do together.” Sometimes it’s a deeper understanding of the nuances of that culture and those people that we bring in, so it really depends how much we contextualize. Sometimes, like I mentioned to you with the flood project, that was wholly created based on the needs of the learners. They gave me a challenge and they said, “Look, floods is a big challenge, can you create something on that?” I said, “Absolutely.” It really, I think, depends on the context.

Alec Patton:
That example that you said about Afghanistan, that seems like a really difficult call to make, especially just with you personally. Such a theme in this discussion has been empowerment for women and how women see themselves, opportunities for women, so it seems like to need to de-emphasize empowerment for women for local context seems like a difficult line to tread.

Janhvi Kanoria:
No, it’s very tough. Our idea is to ensure that the local partners we work with, we push them as much as we can to say, “Hey, why don’t you think of this, this, and this?” For example, we push a lot of local partners to say, “We think social-emotional learning or 21st century skills or so on would be good as an addition,” for example, when a lot of them say, “Only literacy, numeracy, science, et cetera.” But we also have to, at some point, know that they know their beneficiaries better and their contexts better. Very often, they’re willing to move, but there is also a line that they then draw on the stand for us to say, “Here’s where we are on this, we don’t go in this area.” But it’s hard, it’s definitely tough.

Alec Patton:
I’ve got one final question for you, is anybody using IFERB in schools?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Oh, absolutely. We’ve had at least five or seven of our partners use it in schools and in the next phase of our work, most of it is going to be integrated into schooling. Most of it when it’s done in schooling is based on a couple of different themes, either it is because there’s a lot of disengagement and so there’s this focus on making learning a little bit more interesting, fun, hands-on experiential. Also, some governments are actually moving towards that, like the Kenyan government, for example. In other places, it’s to drive certain very clear outcomes. For example, we’ve talked a lot about literacy and numeracy in South Sudan, we’ve talked a lot about working on 21st century competencies in Zambia.
In a lot of places where it’s brought into schools, it’s with a very clear focus, but when we do it in schools, more often than not, we align with the curriculum, so we choose resources from the bank which are very aligned to the curriculum, which focus on certain topics, which conceptual learning is necessary and difficult, and then we work much more closely on how that can be integrated into the regular teaching. But absolutely, it’s been used in schools, out of schools, in the middle, where they was suddenly out of school for a short period of time, all those contexts.

Alec Patton:
Going back to when you were a teacher, if classroom teacher you saw the IFERB curriculum, what would that person make of it?

Janhvi Kanoria:
This is a very loaded question, actually. To be honest, as a teacher, I was very overwhelmed. I think one of the things that overwhelmed me the most was trying to design lesson plans which were interesting and fun and interdisciplinary and still really drove home conceptual learning with discovery. I always felt as a teacher that I probably thrived when one of my other co-teachers had already developed that content and I had the opportunity to just focus on what I needed to do, which is make it work in my classroom, because anyway, Alec, as you know there’s a lot that’s on paper, but what happens in the classroom is pure magic, and it’s totally different sometimes. Sometimes it devolves completely from that paper into a different direction, sometimes it works out exactly as it was written. I just really very often wish that somebody would just do that work for me, so that I could just focus on the actual classroom teaching and the dynamics and the learning process.
For me, if I were to go back and assume that someone handed this to me and said, “Follow this. Here’s a bunch of resources and they exist and they’ve been developed with all of this in it, all you need to do is make it work in your class. I think I would have been really grateful. I know that overall in the world, we are moving away from scripted teaching, but I feel like this struck a very nice balance to say, “Here’s a way in which you can do this. You don’t have to do it exactly like this, in fact, we encourage you not to do it exactly like this, but here’s how you could do it, so in the case where you are truly feeling overwhelmed or short of ideas, go ahead.”
We’ve thought a lot about this, we worked a lot with our partners to say, “Let us train you on how to develop PBL resources yourselves so you don’t have to rely on us.” What it comes down to is they often just don’t have the mind space or the time to do it, so for them, where they’re busy running around on day-to-day operations and enrolling kids and managing the whole system on the ground, they’re really good at that and they should just focus on that, whereas we, sitting a little bit removed from the context, can hear what’s going on and have the time and space to develop the content. That is the balance we’re trying to strike to say, “We’ll give all this to you and help you contextualize it, and then hopefully make your jobs a little bit easier.

Alec Patton:
That’s a great note to end on. I think a lot of teachers are definitely feeling that, so teachers, there is totally free curriculum from IFERB. It’s been taught from speakers on the backs of bicycles, so you can definitely teach it as a full-time teacher in a classroom. Is there anything else you want to add, anything I should have asked you about that I didn’t, Janhvi or Lolwa?

Janhvi Kanoria:
Maybe just to give a little bit of background on what exists. IFERB, when you go to the website, can be a little bit daunting. We have four different levels of learning over there, so it starts from age four and goes all the way up to age 14. We have aligned it to a few different curricula, but it also goes off curricula into skills that we believe were just important to cultivate, especially when kids were learning from home. We have it in a few different languages. Those languages actually exist because partners have taken it, contextualized it, and then translated it, so the contextual translations are not just literal translations. We’ve now used it with almost 850,000 children around the world quite successfully. I think, Alec, as you mentioned, we’ve worked in the hardest of hard contexts, so if you are a teacher and you’re listening to this, I promise you, if you could use it there, you can use it here. Feel free, use it, enjoy whichever part of it works for you, because we are just trying to do some of the work to make your life easier.

Alec Patton:
That is awesome. Thank you so much. Lolwa, anything to add?

Lolwa Al-Saigh:
Just to add also that all the resources are available online, it’s just as easy as going on the site and just downloading the resources. Once the resources are downloaded, anyone can change anything, they’re open source, they can be shared among people, so it’s been shared in WhatsApp groups. It’s just as simple as going on the website and downloading the resources.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Janhvi Kanoria and Lolwa Al-Saigh. There’s a link to the Internet Free Education Resource Bank in the show notes and a link to Janhvi’s TED Talk. Thanks for listening.