Getting closer to students through puppetry

Making use of a dying art form, a secondary grade teacher from Kakinada rural mandal is not just ensuring 100 per cent attendance to the school in which he had been working, but also contributing to the increase in the student strength year by year. Pilli Govindarajulu, who had been into the teaching profession for the last 18 years, had spotted the potential in puppetry to attract the students from fishermen hamlets to the school.

Enrolment increases

As his teaching proved to be quite entertaining to the students, the Mandal Parishad Upper Primary School at Fishing Harbour Peta in Vakalapudi hamlet on the city outskirts has witnessed a steady surge in student enrolment from 70 to 160, forcing the government to increase the teaching staff from two to five.

Be it Telugu, social studies or general science, Mr. Govindarajulu explain the lesson with the help of puppets to his students in a simple form.

As his nimble fingers give swift movements to the characters he had chosen for the lesson, Mr. Govindarajulu teaches the lesson in the form of conversation between two persons or two animals or between a man and an animal. “This form of teaching is not just entertaining the students, but making them improve their skills in communication and storytelling,” says the 42-year-old teacher, who was born and brought up at Panduru Venkatapuram village in Pithapuram mandal.

The first seven years of his teaching career was like that of any other schoolteacher. However, workshop at the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT) he had attended at Udaypur in Rajasthan in 2004 shown him the way to get closer to the students by using puppets.

“In the workshop, they taught us only about mouth and shadow puppets. After returning from the workshop, I have started working on the subject and designed glove puppets, rod puppets and string puppets along with ventriloquism puppets. I convert waste materials into attractive puppets and use them to teach academic syllabus to children,” he explains.

When Mr. Govindarajulu joined the Fishing Harbour Peta School, the strength was mere 70 and he was one among the two teachers.

But, it was his new method of teaching that attracted the children and made even the dropouts to rejoin the school. “Even if I go to the school on a holiday and ring the bell, all the students gather there with in 10-15 minutes,” he says.

Mr. Govindarajulu is now providing training to his colleagues during the centre class and taking classes for the teacher trainees at the D.Ed College at Bommuru.

“I would love to spend my leisure on making new puppets and designing classes and moral values for the students,” says the recipient of ‘Best Teacher’ award at the district level and the TLM Expert Award for making teacher learning material at the State-level.