Urvashi Sahni

• PhD in Education (Language and Literacy)
• CEO at Study Hall Educational Foundation

In the Indian context democratic learning means building democratic mindsets and living practices in an inclusive environment where everyone is included and all voices are heard equally.

This is a text based on a keynote address that I gave at the IDIERI, 2022 conference in Warwick. The theme of IDIERI, 2022 was “Navigating mess and complexity in uncertain times.” It is particularly relevant to this issue because the project described in this keynote emerges from, and is embedded in, our on-going work at Study Hall Educational Foun...

This chapter argues for a structural, human rights and social justice-based approach to life skills, contextualized in an urban setting in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. This approach takes a more socially and politically embedded view of life skills than most other life skills approaches, which take a more individualized, decontextualized, and...

I come to the Radical Hope project as the international collaborator with the longest relationship with colleague and friend Kathleen Gallagher, now spanning over thirteen years. As Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Study Hall Educational Foundation in Lucknow, India, my work over the last three decades has sought to bring to light an impo...

Gallagher and Sahni elaborate on their decade-long collaboration, focussing here on their latest multi-sited ethnographic study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014–2019) and the pedagogy and theatre work carried out at Prerna School for gir...

This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategi...

Look inside: https://www.brookings.edu/book/reaching-for-the-sky/ .................. Since 2003 a privately funded high school in India has provided desperately needed education for girls from impoverished families in Lucknow, the capital and largest city in Uttar Pradesh. Urvashi Sahni, the founder of Prerna Girls School, has written a compelling...

This article provides a brief snapshot of a girls school in Northern India called Prerna. Girls in India are unwanted, unequal and unsafe. Every year a million of them are killed in the womb. One third of the world's child brides (read ‘girl slaves’) are in India. They live their lives in a grim, complex context where, gender, poverty and caste int...

We describe a two-year study of the use of facilitated video instruction in government primary schools in North India. The study involved deploying Digital StudyHall (DSH) in eleven schools, and following the progress of participating teachers in adopting the technology and pedagogy. The goal of the study was to evaluate the potential for large sca...

The educational system, especially in developing regions, remains one of the most challenging systems for intervention and implementation of change. The objectives of this paper are to present findings of the first year of an evaluation study of Digital StudyHall (DSH), a Facilitated Video Instruction system being used in rural primary schools in I...

Calls now abound in a range of literatures “philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies;” to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism. Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected a...

C alls now abound in a range of literatures—philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies—to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of "cosmopolitanism." Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected a...

This research explores the deployment of model lessons through digital video as part of an in-service effort to engage teachers in government and private rural Indian schools and non-formal educational settings. Our mixed method design combined tests of skills in English and math with participant observation and videotaping of English and math inst...

Drama-in-Education is basically process-oriented, but which counts more in foreign language learning, process or performance? In the fall term of 2005, thirteen students in my fourth-year seminar attempted to build a play on the pioneering journey of a historical female figure in Japan who contributed to offering higher education to Japanese women....

This paper draws on a 2-week design workshop conducted at a rural primary school in northern India to provide recommendations on carrying out participatory design with school children in rural, underdeveloped regions. From our experiences in prototyping low-tech and hi-tech English language learning games with rural student participants, we advocat...

This chapter is based on a micro-ethnographic study conducted in a second grade classroom of a rural primary school in North India. It describes and analyzes the means through which children appropriate literacy; the purpose that drove their development as writers; and the ways in which, as they enacted their purposes in this context, they grew...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Education in Language and Literacy)--University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-243).

In this paper, we describe a distance learning system that would allow resource-starved village schools in rural India to benefit from the better human and con- tent resources available in the urban environments. The e-learning landscape is littered with misguided and expensive "wire-the-schools" projects that have little to show for in the end. To...

to the success of these initiatives. This paper draws on a 2-week design workshop conducted at a rural primary school in northern India to provide recommendations on carrying out participatory design with school children in rural, underdeveloped regions. From our experiences in prototyping low-tech and hi-tech English language learning games with r...