Janishala is an eight-month residential learning centre for Dalit and Tribal adolescent girls, located in Mehroni block of Lalitpur, where the Sahajani Shiksha Kendra programme is located. Learners who come to Janishala are mostly out-of-school young women, who have either not been able to complete their primary education, or have had poor quality education, or have not been able to access educational institutions like the KGBV. Due to extreme poverty and migration, and the fact that education for older girls is not a priority within society/the community, there is no platform for these young women to further their education.

Nirantar believes that residential educational centres have tremendous possibilities for providing quality education to a deprived target group and especially for girls and women. Learners are free from the daily burden of survival tasks, and able to engage with education in a focused, intensive manner. A residential facility also quickens the pace of learning. However, in order for the centre to have a sustained impact, the curriculum must be flexible and need-based, and attention has to be paid to the issue of 'quality' and levels of achievement.

The Janishala curriculum combines our experiences from the field over the last 10-15 years as they relate to education and empowerment as well as learnings from our work on mainstream curriculum development and textbook writing. Today, basic literacy or primary education is merely a starting point for young girls or women: their expectation is to use literacy to access the mainstream system for certification. So the Janishala curriculum was designed to create materials that would bridge basic literacy to middle-school learning.

The 8-month curriculum for Janishala was based on popular education and feminist pedagogical principles. Some of these include:

• Acknowledging and respecting local knowledge and local context
• Understanding social and political structures; and also concepts like diversity, continuum, hierarchy, difference - to interrogate these structures and systems of knowledge
• Democratic values (equality, equity, justice, participation and critical engagement)
• Perspective and agency-building (critical engagement, empowering education, 'things can change')

The curriculum at Janishala includes language and maths, and five 'themes' that cut across subject areas like social science (history, geography, sociology, civics) and science. These are: 'Our Body' , 'Land, Water, Forest', 'Market', 'Society' and 'Media'. The different themes intersected at numerous points - and so patriarchy and caste appeared in the body, society, land-water-forest themes in different contexts - to show how they are experienced in the learners' day to day lives.

The development of the themes keeps in mind also skill sets involved in the learning of social sciences and the sciences, which are building blocks for learners to shift to middle-school level curricula. The approach in the themes is to develop critical thinking skills amongst learners, with the view that education for rural women and girls must be located in an overall vision of being an empowering experience.

After completing the eight-month curriculum, learners are helped to prepare for the class 5 or class 8 board exam.

Janishala : A Photo Essay

A numeracy session using ethnographic weights and measures Enacting a story for a language class Getting a hang of using the computer Watching their footage after shooting first films A session near Chaprat river on land-water-forest on landforms A letter by a learner about visiting the planetarium on a first trip to Delhi