A Postcard from DAIS: Colours of India

Posted: 07 January 2022

Overview

On 20th October, DAIS hosted a RS Postcard on the theme of “Colours of India” to explore the vibrant and diverse culture of India and the significance colour plays in festivals, their national flag, food, and so much more. On the day, 170 students aged 11-13 from 30 schools across five countries – Armenia, Japan, UAE, Oman, South Africa and of course India joined the call. Participants were treated to colourful presentations from their peers with an introductory video – ‘Glimpses of India,’ followed by a presentation on the pre-tasks received from most of the delegate schools. Later, the participants were split up into smaller Baraza/breakout rooms for 15 minutes where the enthusiastic delegates learnt more about India as well as shared their respective cultures through fun, interactive and engaging games – ‘Zoom in-zoom out’ and ‘Image Association’. Back into the main meeting the concluded the postcard with an excellent reflection time with an appealing game of ‘Thumbs -Thumbs down.’

Planning

DAIS had hosted their first Postcard in July 2020 on the theme of ‘Welcome to India’, and since this theme was well appreciated by most of the participating schools, they wanted to build on this by exploring deeper into Indian culture. It was absolutely a marvellous experience as they learnt a lot about their own country while planning for this postcard.

Stage One: Planning on how to incorporate colours to signify the cultural diversity of India

Planning for this RS Postcard started in April 2021 with weekly/fortnightly planning meetings. The initial meetings took play on Saturday mornings to plan the schedule and the content.

Schedule: The Planning of the event started with a Core group of six middle school students aged 11-13 years. The group focused on making the postcard as vibrant as possible to represent the beauty and diversity of the Indian culture. They worked a basic schedule template scaffolding the 60 mins sessions. They also planned to create a teaser video that would be shared with schools to inspire them to participate. Another plan was made for the main session, the Baraza sessions, the games, media, and promotion and most importantly the content and execution.

Content: The Core group developed a framework using colours of the rainbow to guide the association with the unique cultural aspect of India – food, clothing, art, monuments etc. They started working on the ‘Colours of India,’ a rainbow-themed presentation, which dovetailed, after innumerable edits and several versions into the final introductory video – ‘Glimpses of India.’ The initial schedule and framework being ready, they realized that it was time to get more student volunteers who would help in micro planning and hosting of the event. They identified around 24 more enthusiastic volunteers, taking their team size to 30 student volunteers from the middle school. In the next few meetings, they sorted the volunteers to work on various aspects of the Postcard. About 12 students took up the responsibility of the working on the introduction video and teaser video while the other 18 students divided themselves into three groups to work on games – Zoom in, zoom out; Image association and Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down.

All the volunteers were on a common group (on MS Teams), so that everyone was aware of what is happening in their own teams as well as the larger event.

Stage two: How to build an interactive and engaging session to bring out the theme of the postcard?

Stage two of their planning included a lot of debating and discussion on what would make the 60-minute session extremely engaging and interesting. They came up with a minute-by-minute break up of the 60 mins session. This is how they planned a structure that would promote scope for interaction, sharing and having fun moments as well. A lot of effort went into designing the pre-task to ensure that the participants felt involved and engaged in the session.

Details:

Breakup of the 60 minutes session:

  1. Welcome and Introduction (10 mins) – The delegates were welcomed with the teaser video to set the tone for the Postcard. Then the host school introduced to the theme of the Postcard with the video ‘Glimpses of India,’ highlighting the range of diversity seen in their country devised into four ‘zones’ – North, West, South and East India.
  2. Pre-task session (20-25 mins) – Participating delegates shared one aspect of their culture, represented by a colour.
  3. Baraza sessions (15 mins) – Ice breakers were planned to ensure participants settled in with ease. This was followed by two games to introduce the delegates to some significant colours in Indian culture, flora and fauna, food, festivals, attire, transport, landmarks, tourist destinations etc.
  4. Reflection time (10 mins) – Reflection is a critical part of any event as it provides feedback and indication of the success of the event. A fun session was planned to reiterate the learnings from the Postcard as reflection with questions posed – Have you ever? Would you like to? The final game would enable all delegates to respond to their learnings from this session.

Challenges:

One of the main challenges was the age of our student leaders who were all aged 11-13 years. For most of them, it was their first attempt at planning an event of such a great magnitude and accepting leadership roles. However, with some mentoring, support and guidance from both Ms Manisha and Ms Pratima and the senior students, they rose to the occasion. With a team of 40 students helping to plan the event, it was a task to get everyone on board for the planning meetings was and to ensure that everyone remained engaged was difficult. We also had 8 new volunteers joining the planning team just about a week before the actual event due to an increase in the number of schools registering for the event. Getting the new leaders to understand all expectations required in hosting the event was not an easy job since they had not been a part of the planning team.

We had some difficulties collating the pre-work sent by all participating schools due because to some technical issues on the portal and also since many schools shared their pre-tasks after the prescribed deadline. This had a knock-on effect, as we were then unable to plan that segment in enjoyable time before the event. Our School RS Rep contacted the Heads and Rep’s of participating schools to remind them to send the pre-tasks to ensure everyone was included.

Impact:

Working on this event, we have experienced for ourselves first-hand, so many important aspects of management and leadership – time management, patience, commitment, playing to our strengths, ability to work with so many different fellow RS members, communication, the opportunity to interact, be guided and learn from our seniors, got exposed to international students.

We are proud of how the entire student body with more than 40 student volunteers stayed connected and accepted responsibility of hosting this event. They played the role of critical thinkers and problem solvers as they brainstormed, debated, and offered suggestions and solutions, for every hurdle we faced in the planning stage.

Students noticed the nuances and detailing that goes into planning a school event and realized the need for all information used in the presentations to be authentic, accurate and confirmed from reliable resources, before incorporating the same into the presentations.

For most of us, the fact that we pulled off the event, has given us a certain sense of self-assurance and confidence. We have seen for ourselves what cooperation is and what teamwork can achieve. We have experienced Magic!!

Long term outcomes:

We believe that organising this event will have many long terms benefits for our students including a willingness to extend oneself beyond academics to create a unique learning experience for others as well as self. We hope that this experience has taught them to accept challenges and to turn them into opportunities of learning and given them a keen sense of pride and ownership.

Advice:

Author: RS Rep, Manisha Nanda

 

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