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Learning, acting through tandem acts of kindness

With some theatre techniques, kids are being taught fundamentals in a novel way.

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Bruce the Shark has an anger issue. He is always enraged. At the slightest hint of irritation, he thrashes other fishes in the sea. As Aparna Athreya and Sowmya Srinivasan tandem-tell the story of how Bruce the Shark learnt to tame his temper, kids in the room step into Bruce’s shoes, introspect on what makes them mad and learn to control it.

Aparna and Sowmya have been using tandem-telling, a relatively new genre of storytelling, as a learning medium to foster social-emotional development in young children.

This is how it works: Two of them tell a story in tandem. They involve the audience in it with activities weaved into the story. This makes it more involving for the audience as just one person telling a story can often become monotonous. The stories are designed with a purpose. For example, if they want to teach children about colours, they figure out a way to include a rainbow in the story. They make it interactive by including songs, so that the kids can sing along and internalise the moral of the story.

“Tandem-telling is edutainment,” Aparna says. She was a software engineer for 16 years, volunteering with NGOs for children and doing pro-bono story writing for special schools. She quit the software industry to “move into the children and parents space” and became an entrepreneur with Kid and Parent Foundation she set up in 2010. Aparna met Sowmya around then.

Sowmya is a special educator and psychologist. She had worked with spastic children for five years after completing her training in child development and education. She also did a storytelling course with Kathalaya.

“Tandem-telling with Aparna just happened as we had a great rapport and intuitively knew what the other was thinking. Also, I didn’t want my stories to be just entertainment. When we tell in tandem, we engage with the groups better and the message of the story gets driven home very effectively,” Sowmya says. Much improvisation happens during the telling. At their last performance for a bunch of Anganwadi children at an exhibition called ‘Picturing Change’ at Thalam, they did the entire session in Kannada.

“We had planned a few interactive portions in the story. But when we saw how much the children enjoyed those, we increased them. We added elements like ‘hot seats’ where children had to play roles,” Aparna says. The story organically evolves based on the responses from the audience.It is not just the kids who learn with these sessions, it is a cross learning experience for the tellers too.

“By looking at how the children respond to the stories and the elements in it, we learn so much,” Aparna finds its heartening.

“It makes me feel I am doing the right thing,” she says.

What goes into the story
A lot, actually. Before arriving at the story, Aparna and Sowmya discuss who is the audience, what are the learning objectives, and so on. Then they decide on who will be the narrator and who are the interface between the audience and the story. They prepare props, music pieces and other elements on the stage that would involve the audience. They also decide on the “carry home message”—”That has to match with the objective of the story. Sometimes we have to play something up or down depending on our audience,” Aparna explains. In the Bruce’s story for instance, they had a song, ‘Talk It Out’, which the kids had to sing along. “They would remember it the next time they get angry,” Aparna says.

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