The English E.Teach (EET) project, founded in 2009 by retired management consultant Astad Parakh, has expanded its ongoing electronic English teaching to include additional grammar lessons since August 24, 2020. "We have been sending out daily capsules on grammar to a large network of zilla parishad teachers over WhatsApp. These are further disseminated to parents of school going children and also to teachers in our network. The online videos are reaching lakhs of students on a daily basis,” noted chief executive officer Piroja Shroff in conversation with Parsiana in late October. The grammar lessons cover concepts like nouns, adjectives, verbs, vowels, use of articles and sentence construction, she noted.
Every day, parents and teachers receive a WhatsApp message with video links for that day’s lesson. They need to select the link intended for the class their wards are studying in. Students are encouraged to answer the previous day’s homework questions. All grammar lessons are available on YouTube.
Above: An English E.Teach class in progress prior to lockdown; Piroja Shroff
In September, EET was assured by the Bombay Municipal Corporation that their block officers would send EET’s WhatsApp messages containing the grammar lessons to the principals of all the schools across the city. "This legitimizes our work during the lockdown,” noted Shroff.
Their existing educational videos are provided free to over 41,000 state schools in Maharashtra for classes one to five. These videos are based on the state syllabus and text books and teach the lesson with animated videos and music (see "The enabling educationist,” Parsiana, June 7, 2015). EET also trains teachers in their use of content and basic English, and then monitors the schools/teachers. "Our vision is to reach the poorest children, in the most far-flung areas, so that they too can learn English. Without these English videos, the children in the zilla parishad schools have no real way of learning English because it is often a completely alien language, even for their teachers,” stated an EET press release.
EET functions under the Bombay Community Project Trust, a nodal agency that supports developmental projects. It was founded in 1991 by banker H. T. Parekh and author Rusi Lala, among others