Rural Internship / Civic Service and Social Internship

“RI/CSSI 2018”

Internship done at “Lions’ Blind Girl’s School,

Vadodara”

Report by: Dev Shah

17BME022
Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary

2. Completion Certificate photo

3. About PDPU and CSSI

4. About NGO

5. Internship Overview

6. Weekly report

7. About Vikaspedia and registration proof

8. Technology Gap

9. Challenges

10. Recommendations

11. Testimonials

12. Photo gallery

Executive Summary

This document describes my experience during this 21-day CSS

Internship and it talks about the opportunity given by PDPU to its
students and the outcome of it. It also includes everything that I did
and learnt during this 21-day period. The objective of this internship
was to develop a holistic view of social work and social welfare in the
community, with several emphasis on the role of different agencies
like Govt. departments and NGOs in human services.

The Internship also aimed at enlightening and sensitizing us and

making us understand the overall working of an organization
including its structure, functions, activities and funding. It helped in
generating humanistic values and principles of social work practice in
a secular domestic society.

My internship was at a blind school and my objective was to

learn their ways of teaching and interacting and helping them
improve and find better ways of teaching and interacting with the
students. This was supposed to be achieved by decreasing the
technology gap that they were facing.
About PDPU

Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University (PDPU) has been

established by GERMI as a Private University through the State Act
enacted on 4th April, 2007. The University offers programs to
address the need for trained human resources in the domains of
Science, Technology, Management and Humanities. It intends to
broaden the opportunities for students and professionals to develop
core subject knowledge which are duly complemented by leadership
training interventions, thereby helping the students to make a mark
in the global arena. This objective is being further addressed through
a number of specialized and well-planned undergraduate, post-
graduate and doctoral programs as well as intensive research
projects.

Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University’s 100 acre campus is

located in Gandhinagar, which is the capital city of Gujarat and
located 23 Km North from a well developed city called Ahmedabad
with a population of 8 million people. The city is famous for its
remarkable cultural development and social life.

PDPU offers multiple courses ranging from engineering, arts

and management along with maximum exposure and opportunities
to its students through various national and International exchange
programs with Best Universities worldwide. For development of its
faculties and staff the University endeavors for various Joint
Exchange and Research programs.
About CSSI

The importance of civic and social responsibility is paramount to the

success of democracy and promotion of dignified living and citizens
ensure and uphold certain democratic values written in the
Constitution by engaging in it. Associating oneself in understanding
issues of civic amenities, societal grievances and models of providing
succour to needy and unprivileged, one comprehends meaning of life
and living and experience the value and impact of giving to people
and learn to be productive members of society. In this context,
School of Technology has introduced Civic and Social Service
Internship as a training requirement integral to B.Tech. Program for
first year students. It is conceptualized as a platform for pre-planned,
organized, structured, supervised off-campus experiences with an
academic context.
About NGO

LIONS BLIND GIRLS SCHOOL is a non-profit NGO located in

Vadodara. Its main aim is to provide basic education to blind girls at
minimal costs. it helps those who do not have the financial means to
pay for a private blind tutor. All subjects that any normal Gujarat
Board school would have are taught here and they are taught using
the same books and have the same syllabus as any normal school
would have. Their examination pattern and question paper difficulty
is also similar to rest of the schools in the region. This has also
created employment opportunities for a lot of blind people as most
of the teachers at the school are blind.
Internship Overview

Over the course of our three-week internship, our project was

divided into two main phases.

PHASE ONE:

Before starting the teaching process, we interacted with most of the

students. We learned about the difficulties they faced due to their
disability, and how they overcome them. It was a good experience of
both of us. It was a great learning experience for us and they too
seemed glad to open up about their difficulties to someone closer to
their age group.

PHASE TWO:

The second phase of our project included taking up a subject and

teaching the students. We were told to teach literature and
environmental studies since that was not as complicated as Math.
We narrated stories and even taught them about the environment
and pollution.
Weekly Report

 Week 1
The first week of my internship involved an introduction with the
whole staff of the school and then they briefed us about the
things that we were going to be doing throughout the 3 weeks
that we were going to be there. First couple of days we were
supposed to just sit back and observe the way teachers of that
school communicated with the students, it was much more
difficult than what you’d assume as some of the students were
born blind so they’d have no perspective about how some things
looked or worked. We spent the rest of the week trying to learn
some of their ways of teaching like basics of Braille (We didn’t
really learn Braille as it is very complex we just understood its
working). At the completion of the first week we realized how
difficult it is to even do most normal chores when you don’t have
one of the 6 senses.

 Week 2
During the second week we were supposed to use what we learnt
during the first week and try and teach the blind students using
those techniques, we were not given complicated subjects like
math and science, we were given subjects like environmental
studies and social studies which would be relatively easy to teach
and even then it was very difficult to teach those students as they
would not be able to relate to a lot of the things written in the
book as they follow the normal NCERT books and they’re not
specifically written for blind people. This made us realize how
skilled and trained the teachers at that school were.

 Week 3
In the third week we studied the teaching procedures at that
school more in detail and looked for alternatives online. The
purpose of third week and our overall internship was to find
better and more efficient alternatives to some of the teaching
methods practiced there. This involved us attending random
classes and just observing and try and find a better way to
teach the topic taught in that class. After some brainstorming
and some research, we came up with ideas like audio books,
games for blind people etc. These were fun, interactive and
faster ways of teaching blind people. We spent the last day of
the internship explaining the principal and teachers of the
school about the alternative methods that we had found and
how those could be implemented.
Learnings

 By performing the tasks/assignments related to the projects,

an attitude of sensitized social responsibility was established.

 Throughout all the projects carried out, the key factor was
communication skills. The gap between what we intend to
communicate and what is interpreted by the receiver needs
to reduced and the response we get from them determines
how effective the process is. This realization has come from
interacting with a broad spectrum of people-from children,
to school peon to Principals.

 While interacting with all the students we realized how

different lifestyles they have from us, how all their day to day
activities are same but the approach to them is completely
different by the students.
Challenges faced

A) By the Organization: - Organization faces the below given

challenges and constraints: -

 Some events are not financially helped and public good needs
to be done for free.
 The organization did not have enough teachers and staff to
produce efficient work and the faculty was shorthanded.
 The major challenge is high cost of learning materials. Their
learning materials are not like those for normal children. You
won’t get them in bookshops.

B) By the students in Project/Assignment: - I personal faced very little

challenges due to very helpful nature of the organizational members.
Some of them are as below: -

 We being new to the field weren’t able to do

things till we can learn and consumed time.
 Never done this type of teaching work, were getting tired after
work.
Recommendations

 Record lessons and audio books. The easiest and cheapest way
to improve the learning environment for students who are
blind is to record all lessons. This way students can listen to the
instructions or lesson multiple times in order to make sure they
completely understand what is expected.

 Many classrooms rely on visual cues in order to ask questions

or get the teacher’s attention. It is very traditional for students
to raise their hand if they want to speak during a lesson. Blind
students may not notice when their peers raise their hands.
Instead, you should replace visual cues with audio cues.
For example, you could have students clap twice if they want to
ask a question.
 Provide tactile learning experiences. When you are teaching a
class with blind students, you should try and incorporate tactile
learning experiences whenever possible. For example, instead
of talking about different types of rocks, you should actually
have physical rocks available in the classroom for the students
to touch and handle.
This can also be done with different foods, shells, properties of
matter, etc.
Rural Technology Gap

Comparing Lion Blind Girl’s school with an urban school, I felt the
rural technology gap was massive. The entire school just had two
computers, which were in the main office. Apart from that, there
was no other piece of technology in the entire school. Surprisingly,
the two computers they had were used for data management
purposes, they weren’t incorporated for teaching. We recommended
the use of special audio books, specifically for blind children, for
more efficient teaching. These audio books can be downloaded and
played from even the cheapest of smart phones. However most of
the teachers were not aware of any such audio books, neither did
they know how and where to download them from. Due to
budgetary constraints, we understood the use of limited computers,
but we strongly recommended the use of audio books.
Acknowledgment

The rural and civic internship has been a great learning curve

and a wonderful experience for me. I would like to thank PDPU

and CSSI for presenting me with the opportunity to work with an

NGO. I would also like to thank Prof. Neeta Khurana for

supporting me over the course of the internship and being there

24x7 to resolve our issues. I would also like to thank Ms. Nisha

Arora, Principal, Lion Blind Girls' school, for entrusting me with

responsibilities and making me feel like a part of the

organization.
Testimonials

 By the NGO: -

We were very happy to observe the participation of Mr. Dev

Shah and his peers during his period of internship at Lions’ Blind
Girl’s school.

He was actively involved with us during the internship. He had

put his heart and soul in the tasks given to him throughout his
internship and tried his level best to help the NGO in its work as
well as the blind students.

 By me: -

I would like to thank Lions’ Blind Girl’s School for accepting my

proposal of internship at their NGO. I have learnt a great deal of things
whilst doing my internship there and extended my limits up to which
I did not deem possible.

I am also very grateful to Mrs. Nisha Arora for her constant support
which has helped me in experiencing the problems faced by blind
students.

I had a great time doing my internship with them.

About VIKASPEDIA

Vikaspedia is an online information guide launched by

the Government of India. The website was implemented by C-DAC
Hyderabad and is run by the Department of Electronics and
Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology. It is built as a portal for the social sectors
and offers information in 23 languages.

It was started on 18 February 2014 and has information in the

domains of Agriculture, Health, Education, Social Welfare, Energy
and e-Governance. The name of the portal is a portmanteau of the
words Vikas (Sanskrit for "Development") and encyclopaedia. The
portal provides information in local languages in all six given sectors.
Photo Gallery