Ministry of Education is organizing 9-days webinars on different themes as part of celebration of Shikshak Parv during 5-17 September 2021. The theme for today’s webinar was ‘Foundational Literacy and Numeracy: A Pre-requisite to Learning and ECCE’. Smt Anita Karwal, Secretary (SE&L), MoE, Shri Maneesh Garg, Joint Secretary (SE&L); Prof. Sridhar Srivastava, Director NCERT and senior officials of the Ministry attended the webinar.
Smt Anita Karwal stated that Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) has been given a lot of emphasis in NEP 2020. She informed that all the states have begun the process of allocating resources for Nipun Bharat, so the discussion on its implementation gains significance. Smt Karwal said that FLN will be spearheaded by teachers so they need to develop a mindset of recognizing the uniqueness of each child, and thus use unique interventions. She urged that administrators, planners, and experts have developed Nipun Bharat guidelines, which may be followed by States.
Shri Maneesh Garg stressed on the importance of FLN in school education. He highlighted that the vision of Nipun Bharat is to create an enabling environment that leads to universalization of FLN to ensure universal acquisition of FLN in primary classes within 5 years so that every child achieves the desired learning competencies in reading, writing and numeracy at the end of Class III. He informed that a five-tier implementation mechanism for Nipun Bharat will be set up at the National, State, District, Block and School level in all states and UTs. All stakeholders will have a specific role in the implementation of the mission targets and measureable key performance indicators will be developed for monitoring of the mission, he added.
Prof. Sridhar Srivastava, Director NCERT made a presentation on developmental goals and codification of Learning outcomes. He explained the three developmental goals of FLN i.e. children maintain good health and wellbeing; children become effective communicators and children become involved learners and connect with their immediate environment. He elaborated on the underlying competencies under each goal in detail, and explained the codification of the Learning Outcomes under each goal. Further he added that the competencies are age appropriate based on 21st century skills and the learning outcomes are progressive and are in continuum.
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