COVID-19 made it clearer than ever that the school does not and cannot be looked at in isolation from society. In this issue, there are articles that show not only teachers supporting children’s learning during the closure, but also how parents overwhelmingly supported teachers to continue their work; how, when all other ways of distance learning failed, the unanimous decision of parents was that the education of their children should go on.

This working paper aimed to evaluate the impact of a quality-controlled mid-day meal program from a centralized kitchen on children’s nutritional indicators and learning outcomes. It also looked at household characteristics of students to determine their impact on children’s nutritional outcomes.

This working paper reflects on the importance of how oppressed and exploited communities look at education, at the relations of power in pedagogy and curricula, how students internalize ways of looking at class life that come from their social location and so on in an Indian context.

Our bi-annual publication in Hindi bringing together the experiences and views of teachers in the field of education.

This issue proves that children can, and do, learn, provided they get the encouragement, support, respect and dignity that is due to them during the process and after. The response got for the topic was so overwhelming that it led to the creation of a second part.. It is all about children learning. and enjoying themselves in the process, rather than just getting a formal education.

Children are, first and foremost, individuals and so it follows that their developmental patterns are influenced by environmental conditions. With even twins differing in their abilities and milestones, it is near impossible to predict at what rate a child will learn. Thus children enter school with a wide range of abilities — and therefore possibilities.

However, the assumption that all children can learn the basic curriculum at the same pace, in the same way and to the same extent and level- is unsupported either by research or by personal experience. If we agree that children have varied strengths (multiple intelligences) the it surely follows that teaching methods have also got to vary correspondingly and that there have got to be multiple teaching styles.

This issue addresses many of these concerns and to do that we have a wide range of articles from writers across the country which establish resoundingly that every child can indeed learn — only it requires empathy and compassion from the teacher to make it happen.

An immigrant, who worked in an American machine shop, acquired polite standard spoken English by reading romance novels in an 18-week adult extensive-reading English as a Spoken Language (ESL) class. Full time employment in the machine shop and once-a-week class discussions provided the only places where the student was routinely exposed to spoken English.