Monday, November 2, 2015

Achievement: An hour for Aparajita students free of work!

Aparajita Team has formulated a report this month. The report is based on the entire achievements and challenges that the program had throughout the journey. Although there were a bunch of success stories, one of the major challenges last year was the massive absence in class. With the IRB approval, an in-depth interview was taken from the students for knowing the reasons behind this huge absence. 
Interviewing the students was very useful for the program. Because it opened a gateway to get closer to the students  by knowing their personal stories. This led to creating a very close relationship between the teachers and students. The most important achievement of the interview was to be able to know the additional expectations of the students from the program. 
Family responsibilities, extra workload, for example, overtime duty etc were the reasons why the students stopped coming to class. 
After the interview, the team was in a hard time finding ways how to make the students come back to the class. The team started thinking about what can be done but found almost no ways to resolve their family and work problems. Eventually, the group came up with an idea of applying to the AUW Governance Committee for freeing an hour for the students when they will not work but will come to Aparajita classes.
The main motive of writing the report was to present the program to the AUW Governance Committee. By the end of the report, a series of recommendations were added where the team included their appeal to free an hour for their students. 
As the next step, the Aparajita team scheduled a meeting with the acting Vice Chancellor John Schroeder with the presence of the advisor of the program. In the meeting, the Aparajita team briefed about the program to the Vice Chancellor and at last demanded for an hour free of work for their students. 

At last, the hard work of the Aparajita team was paid off. An email of approval of freeing an hour for the students was received from the AUW Governance Committee on November 1st. 

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Logo of the Aparajita Literacy Program

Today was a special day among all the other special days as the Aparajita team has designed a logo for the program.
The path of designing a logo by the team was not very easy going. Two of the team members, Nur-e-Jannat and Bibi Joynab designed some samples of the logo earlier in hardcopy by pencil and paper. In the general meeting with all the team members and the advisor, the samples were shown for selecting a final logo. With some recommendation and correcting some designs, a logo was selected for making a colorful soft copy. Then, a problem arose that no one in the team knows how to design a logo in soft copy.
Roughly designed logo
There were many ideas to get the soft copy of the logo done such as going to a shop, seeking help from any students and faculty etc. But nothing worked. Suddenly, an idea popped into everyone’s head to seek help from an IT expert staff Mr. Luke, but that was the very moment when Mr. Luke was ready to leave the university and there were very few busy days left for him to help the Aparajita team. Still the team did not stop to approach to Mr. Luke for seeking help to make the logo. He was very enthusiastic and eager to help but was confused when he can give the team some time. However, the time did not work because of busy schedule of Mr. Luke, final exams of the team members and break after finals.
When the team members came back after the break, Mr. Luke was already gone. So, there remained a very little hope for making a soft copy of the logo. The team started looking for alternative helping hands. For the time being the thought of making the logo got stuck.
It is almost end of the academic year. The anniversary of the annual showcase is coming ahead, still logo is not designed. The team decided that this time the logo should be done in anyways. So, the team members determined to start. At first, they looked for online resources, but nothing worked as the design of the hardcopy is unique, which does not match with online templates. So, they decided to do it by Microsoft paint. Nur-e-Jannat, with some other team members started to work. After drawing so many lines she became successful to make the perfect shape of the soft copy of the logo. Then started color contrasting. Black, ash, light blue, dark green, white, yellow, orange, light pink, and what they did not try, but the final logo appeared perfect with a white page, black letters, yellow sun, and black background along with an AUW logo aside. After two and half hours of work, Nur-e-Jannat along with other team members successfully completed designing the soft copy of the logo.
Finally done soft copy of the logo
All the team members are happy and excited with the logo. Now, is time to show the logo to the faculty advisors. It will be a supersize for the advisor Sharmistha Ghosh and Christian Gigard and also for two missing team member Mousumi mili and Nurzahan Hira. Now, the team is waiting to the see the comments from faculty advisors regarding the logo.

Sadia Islam

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Fun Learning

Aparajita classes are not all about reading and writing. We collect educational videos or movies for the the students to show them fortnightly. The videos are usually shown after the regular lesions. After we the watch those, we seat for sometime and discuss what they think about what they have seen.
The video we showed in yesterday’s class was about gender equality and women rights. There were anecdotes of some people about overcoming some social problems such as child marriage, dowry, divorce, lack of maternal healthcare etc. The students shared that they also have the same kind of difficulty in their society like the video. When we asked them about how they deal with those problems, they told us most of the women fails to fight with the challenges they face because of not having enough courage and knowledge of what to do.
Students seemed to be optimistic after they saw the series of the videos as they saw people being successful to solve the same problems as they face.


Below is the link of what we showed them in yesterday’s class.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUe9W7sbpFY

Saturday, April 25, 2015

#Backlash: No_Show_In_Class #Explopring_the_Whys

The students of Aparajita Literacy Program showed very less presence in class since the starting of spring 2014. As this program is students’ welfare oriented, it did not want to let this situation go like this. We, the Aparajita team were very concerned about this issue. We thought that the students don’t come to class because no more they enjoy the way we teach them the lesions. We started thinking various ways to attract the students in the class such as presenting the lesions in practical ways (for example making dramas from the lesions), arranging games, playing funny yet educative videos, showing movies during the weekends and so on was in the list of the activities we did to encourage the students. But still the students’ attendance rate remained poor.
This situation put us in deep anxiety and we arranged meetings to brainstorm about what can be done. After thinking from different perspectives, we came up with various ideas but because of some limitations, we could not implement those. Finally we decided to talk to each of the students individually so that we get to know the root causes of their no show. As there are some ethical issues regarding interviewing someone, we had to get approval from AUWIRB. We wrote a proposal to the IRB board and we got it accepted in fall 2014 after several review.
For the proposal, we prepared a questionnaire for the students which included questions about their family, work, interest in class, causes of dropping out, their expectation from the classes and the teachers etc. After the approval from IRB, the Aparajita team proceeded for interviewing the students. 


Sadia, Mousumi and Nur.