The Dharavi Project Design Thinking Curriculum

June 2016

Northeastern University

Claire Mancuso, Elise Melito, Jordan Massa, Julia Fakhoury

Table of Contents

Introduction Page 2

Scope of Work Page 4

Design Thinking Platform Page 4

Research Page 6

Focus Group Testing Page 9

Final Curriculum Page 13

Future Partners Page 13

Conclusions Page 14

References Page 15

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The Dharavi Project is a registered charitable trust that works to improve livelihoods and living conditions of green

workers in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India. Its mission is to provide green workers in Dharavi with a legitimate

and sustainable voice in the waste management value chain and increase their welfare by creating a platform to self

organize. Further, recognizing that children are often the most vulnerable in marginalized communities, The Dharavi

Project is developing a new generation of change makers through youth education, which has been our focus.

The vision of the project is to realize Dharavi as a community that is respected by the larger Mumbai society where

workers and their children are able to thrive and have the opportunity to choose their own livelihoods. Its value

proposition is providing opportunities to enhance livelihood for residents of Dharavi. Through use of a dual

generational approach, The Dharavi Project is positioned to catalyze change by increasing economic opportunities,

fostering sustainable environmental practices, and inspiring community development.

We have focused on the initiative of providing the youth of Dharavi with supplemental education through the

project’s community center. Our goal was to provide the center with an inclusive and innovative design thinking

curriculum that can be implemented by teachers and volunteers at the Dharavi Project, providing children with

transferrable skills that will help them to secure work outside of the slum, where laborious jobs are a danger to their

health, and their right to enjoy childhood.

As students of social enterprise, we value the opportunity to provide a creative, empowering, design thinking

platform for The Dharavi Project. Our individual skills and unique interests have inspired our development of a

coherent curriculum for the Dharavi youth center.

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Elise Melito Elise is a fourth year Sign Language Interpreting major. In the future, she hopes to enter the field of Special Education. Her experience with children with disabilities has provided insight and skills on the unique forms of education that tailor to a specific child’s needs. In addition to academics, she enjoys singing, exercise, and meeting new people. Claire Mancuso Claire is a second year Human Services major pursuing minors in Global Social Entrepreneurship and History. She has designed a social enterprise model that trains differently abled and underserved youth for the workplace, in order to increase the number of disabled and disadvantaged youth in the American workforce. In her free time, she enjoys exploring the outdoors, reading, and volunteering with local organizations. Julia Fakhoury Julia is a third year International Affairs and Economics major. Originally from Ivory Coast, she came to Boston to immerse herself in a new culture and learn more about the world in general. As part of the Northeastern co­op program, she will begin her six­month program at John Hancock Financial in July 2016. She loves to discover new perspectives and cultures, which led her to explore India, a country full of knowledge, surprises and discoveries. Jordan Massa Jordan is a second year majoring in Computer Engineering with a minor in Social Entrepreneurship. In July 2016, she will begin her first six­month co­op working as a hardware design engineer at Flextronics International in Silicon Valley, California. She is intrigued by the intersection of engineering and social enterprise, specifically the role of technology and design thinking in creating solutions to the world’s largest problems. She also loves to dance, explore, watch movies, and listen to jazz and soul music.

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Scope of Work

Our original deliverables for The Dharavi Project were as follows:

1. Design thinking resource kit for youth center staff

2. Situational assessment of youth and children in Dharavi Center program

3. Structured design thinking curriculum and associated materials

4. Participant feedback from prototype

After talking with Vinod Shetty, founder of The Dharavi Project and director of ACORN Foundation India, we

recognized the two main needs of the children at the center to be conversational English skills and practical

computer skills, applications of which are currently limited due to a single computer at the center. Throughout our

development of the curriculum, we made a conscious effort to integrate English and typing skills with a critical,

design thinking, empowerment­focused platform. We have consolidated these original scopes into two main

deliverables: a structured curriculum with design thinking resource kit and associated materials, and a situational

assessment of youth in the Dharavi community center including participant feedback from field testing.

Design Thinking Platform

The design thinking method follows five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (Stanford K12 Lab).

Our priority was to incorporate these critical thinking strategies with the practical skills required for the children at

the center to secure safe work outside of Dharavi. In developing this curriculum, we worked through our own design

thinking process.

The first step is to empathize with the user to understand needs and insights before attempting to formulate an

outside solution. The following is an empathy map that we created to capture the thoughts, beliefs, and feelings of

Ayesha, an energetic nine­year­old girl we met at the Dharavi community center.

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This is an example of an exercise we would encourage children to complete to engage them in the design thinking

process. An empathy map could be created around the character of a book they read or story they heard. Especially

in relation to social issues, empathizing with the players involved allows for students to appropriately analyze and

relate to them.

After empathizing with our user ­­ in this case, the children at the community center ­­ we defined the problem:

children at the Dharavi youth center lack the necessary skills to secure work that offers social mobility out of the

slum. After definition came ideation: how might we provide them with the computer literacy and English speaking

skills they need to find work that does not limit them to hard labor?

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Research

To begin the ideation process, we conducted initial interviews with the kids and parents at the center, as well as

founder Vinod Shetty. His vision is for the center to be a safe space for children to learn the English and computer

skills that would help them obtain higher paying, lower­risk jobs than those in Dharavi. We discussed the curriculum

needs of the children and defined our scope of work in the design thinking context.

We have also been collecting qualitative research and inspiration throughout our travels of India in the context of

gender studies. Urvashi Sahni, founder of Study Hall Educational Foundation, was a guiding light in creating an

inclusive, empowering learning environment for kids, especially girls. Her message that children have a “right to

enjoy their childhood, which is an important phase of their lives and deserves to be understood respectfully rather

than treated simply as a preparation for adulthood,” was a driving theme in our curriculum development. Many kids

in Dharavi drop out of school at a young age to work, lacking the skills required to seek a life outside of the slums as

well as losing the enjoyment of being a kid. We committed ourselves to developing a curriculum that the students

would be excited about.

Another influential figure was Gauravi Lobo of iesha Learning, who plays an active role in bringing an expansive

and empowering sex education curriculum to schools in India. A large takeaway from our discussion with her was

that children simply need a safe space to express themselves and openly ask questions in order for learning to thrive.

She emphasized that providing guidelines for instructors on how to teach the children was more important than the

content of the curriculum itself, and that providing concise instructions for the facilitator would ensure our program

was scalable, consistent, and effective.

Kinesthetic learning was another topic of research we explored. Kinesthetic learning is an active form of education

where children moving around during the learning process. We included this style of learning on our modules with

more engaged activities. Many teachers become frustrated with young children in the classroom because they are

often restless and squirm around during class, but we believe that this desire to move is a natural way of learning

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and should be utilized in the teaching process. This is quite different from your typical lecture­style education, with

increased benefits.

These benefits include, but are not limited to:

Understanding of concepts through personal connections

Instructor can visually gauge the understanding of students on a topic

Increase in the classroom energy level

Better connection and dynamic of the students with the teacher since they are involved as a participant in

activities

The following are brief summations of interviews that we conducted with the children at the school as part of our

research into the types of activities they would be looking for in our curriculum.

Ayesha, 9 years old.

She likes to study, draw and learn about computers. In the future she would like to become an engineer. Her dad is a

dentist and her mother is a stay at home mom. She enjoys being at the Dharavi community center because she can

practice the computer skills that will help her realize her dream to be an engineer. For fun, she likes to play football

and music, so she would love it if drum practices were incorporated into the center.

Eraf, 14 years old

He wants to be an engineer when he grows up. His father works in Dharavi making backpacks, and his mother is a

housewife. When asked what he thought was the most important thing he learns at the community center, he said

that English, math, and computer skills were all equally essential to achieving his dreams. He also enjoys going to

the center because of the weekly football matches in a nearby lay area.

Abusofiyan, 15 years old

His nickname is Serou, meaning ‘lion’. His favorite subject is science. His father owns a tailor house and his mother

is a stay at home mom. In the future, he wants to be a doctor, and he likes to play the Indian game co­co for fun.

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Muskan, 9 years old

She enjoys coming to the center because it is a play where they can get creative and let loose. She likes to draw and

play, and in the future, she would like to be a teacher. Her father is a hairdresser and her mother is a stay at home

mom, and she has 1 brother and 3 sisters. She likes drama and acting.

Shakir, 13 years old

He enjoys coming to the center because they are free there and have a space to learn. He goes to the center after

school. When he grows up, he wants to go to the military to serve his country. His father owns a fruit shop and his

mother is a stay at home mom; he has 3 brothers and 2 sisters. He likes to go to the center because he is encouraged

to reach his dreams. He likes football, and says that without the center his dreams would not be possible because of

the scholarships they offer.

Shahbaj Hussain, 13 years old

He likes coming to the center to read books and play games. He says there is not room for play in his house, so the

center provides a space to have fun. His father is a tailor and his mother helps run the business. He says that he

thinks the center helps children “achieve their goals” when they otherwise would not have the tools to do so. He

wants to join the Indian police so he can help people.

We noted that all of these children reported that their mothers were housewives. This indicated to us that it was

important to implement a curriculum that incorporates empowerment of women, with strong female characters in

children’s books as well as discussion of issues facing women and girls. In addition, all plays must include male and

female characters. Children are encouraged to play roles that do not correspond to their gender (boys can play

Malala Yousafzai and girls can play Prime Minister Modi). In this way, boys can better empathize with female

characters by becoming them through performance, and girls are given a space to break out of their prescribed roles,

and vice versa.

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Focus Group Testing

We tested different modules of our prototype on three separate occasions with children at the community center. Our

intention is for the children to eventually do these activities independently with some teacher assistance, but we

initially walked them through the steps of the modules to introduce them to this new way of English learning.

Module 1: A group of around 15 children with ages ranging from 7 to 14 were read Malala Yousafzai: Warrior With

Words with the help of a translator. The children displayed good focus and engagement while being read to, and

showed comprehension when asked by the translator what certain key words meant in English. The pictures, made

out of scraps of paper, greatly interested the children, and they enjoyed identifying the different elements of each

picture in English. Once the book was finished, the kids were given a minute or so the stand up, stretch, “get their

wiggles out,” and prepare for the next activity. The children sat back down in the circle and were asked a set of basic

discussion questions about the book, including:

How do you think Malala felt when girls were not able to go to school?

If you were Malala, would you have spoken out against the Taliban?

Do you think boys and girls should both go to school?

Why is it important that all children are able to go to school?

Observation: The children showed knowledge of basic emotion words when asked how they would feel if they

were told they should not go to school, such as “angry,” “sad,” and “upset.” We were impressed with answers about

how education is important to “improve your mind” and “better your future.” All students thought it was important

that both boys and girls go to school. Many said they would be “too scared” to defy the Taliban and speak up for

girl’s right to education, and that Malala was very brave.

Next, the children were asked to find partners (or groups of three) and draw on construction paper how they would

feel if they were Malala. Many were first unsure of what to draw, or claimed they “did not know how to draw,” but

with a little prompting, all of the kids had colorful drawings they were excited to share. When asked whether or not

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they would like to continue learning English in this manner, the children answered with an enthusiastic “Yes!” We

observed that Garima, our translator, played an essential role in the comprehension and engagement of the children.

She emphasized the keywords of the story in both English and Hindi to maximize understanding and overall

learning, which became a basis for our accompanying teacher­training module.

Module 2: A group of around 15 children with ages ranging from 7 to 14 were read a book titled Fledolin by Antje

Damm. The reading was aided by a translator, and throughout the book, students were asked basic reading

comprehension questions to ensure engagement. The children voiced that they enjoyed the story, and were asked

what lessons they thought were important, to which they suggested that the main character, Fledolin, was his own

unique self. After asking the kids if they wanted to act out the story, they responded with enthusiasm and smiles, and

quickly volunteered to be involved. Students were encouraged to stand up and “fly like bats.” Running around the

room with arms pretending to be wings, the “Fledolin” flew to the other bats to ask why he was upside down, as in

the book. The students were quick to point out that this wasn’t like the story because they were all “right­side­up.”

They were encouraged to use their imagination, but there was some hesitation and confusion on how to approach

this. A more realistic story may have been easier to expand this activity into a full on play, but enthusiasm and

excitement were expressed nonetheless.

After acting, the students were asked to draw a scene in Fledolin. Some wrote English sentences such as “Fledolin

playing with a yo­yo” as captions to their pictures, and others with different ranges of English proficiency copied a

page from the book as their English caption.

Observation: The students seemed to enjoy this activity and were rarely distracted during the story. Before the book

began, the students were asked what they know about bats; one kid quickly mentioned that bats produce

“ultrasound.” When asked questions throughout the story, such as who a character in the illustration was, many

seemed eager to answer. In addition, when drawing their own pictures, they showed pride in their final products.

Each student paid attention to the detail in their artwork, studying the drawings in the book as they created theirs.

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In addition to the enthusiasm and engagement, the students expressed care for one another. We noticed one student

who was receptive that his peer didn’t have a hard surface to draw on; he immediately gave the student his surface

and got himself another.

We observed that this module would be appropriate for higher­level English speakers, as creating a play demanded

the children to think and write using a sufficient amount of English vocabulary. This will be a good step­up from the

first module as children become more comfortable with the process.

A key factor the success of the module was the translator’s ability to engage the kids while emphasizing key English

words. We observed that translators with varying levels of fluency have a drastic effect on how well students

comprehend and react to the stories. This reaffirmed our takeaways from Gauravi Lobo that laying out specific

instructions for future facilitators is even more essential than the curriculum itself; if the teacher is unsure of how to

implement it, the children won’t take away any long­lasting lessons or skills.

Ayesha, Muskan and one of their peers looking at the pictures from A Butterfly is Patient by Diana Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long, the book that they read in group with Claire, Elise and Garima at the center on Friday, June 3.

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Children find the location of the world’s largest butterfly in Papua New Guinea on the Globe at the center on Friday,

June 3.

Claire, Elise and the children sit in a circle while reading A Butterfly is Patient by Diana Hutts Aston and Sylvia

Long at the center on Friday, June 3.

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Final Curriculum

Included in our final deliverable is an outline of our final curriculum guidelines, compilation of songs and activities,

teacher­training module, and other design thinking resources. In theory, the teacher­training module would allow

any teacher in the classroom to appropriately implement our curriculum. We started with an alphabet warm­up

activity as well as some music­related activities for the teacher. The purpose of these activities is to engage the kids

in a fast­paced fun activity while also practicing their English­Speaking abilities. In Dharavi, there is not much space

for kids just to be kids and play, which is why it is important to incorporate play into their school setting.

We created 3 modules for the students. The first is a visual book report, where the students read a book appropriate

to their reading capabilities, create an empathy map for the main character, and then present a visual drawing or

painting to represent some aspect of the story. Module 2 has the students read a book at their reading level, ask a

critical question related to the topic, and then develop a play about the story or topic. Module 3, for children at

higher English reading and speaking abilities, has a child find a newspaper article or some other outside source on a

social issue. They will then create and perform a play related to the topic. The purpose of all of these modules is to

combine English language learning with social awareness, critical thinking, and creativity. Practicing performing

plays will also give kids confidence.

In addition to these modules, we have created a basic computer skills lesson. In this, the teacher will project an

image of a keyboard explaining various functions and the standard hand placement. The children will each have a

print out of the keyboard, practicing each function as they’re instructed. This module was created as a result of the

pressing need for computer skills that the kids are not receiving elsewhere.

Future Partners

We made efforts to get in touch with several organizations over the past few days in regards to finding volunteers to

implement our curriculum on a long­term basis. After some discussion with Mentor Me India, we recognized that

their model of work doesn’t align with the youth center’s needs, so we moved on to others. We are providing a list

of possible organizations that might be able to provide volunteer teachers for the center in the future:

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1. Teach for India ­ teachforindia.org

2. Volunteer India ­ volunteerindia.org

3. Volunteering with India ­ volunteeringwithindia.org

4. Ispiice ­ volunteerindiaispiice.com

5. Aashansh ­ aashansh.org

Conclusions

When given the opportunity for intellectual, social, and emotional development in learning, children are

highly responsive. It is imperative for a safe space to be established for kids to learn not only academics, but social

responsibility, creativity, and empowerment. When provided with the opportunity to flourish in all categories,

students can expand their opportunities; for the children in the Dharavi Youth Center, these opportunities mean

social mobility through employment in non­hazardous jobs and increased wages.

From our experience with these children, they are incredibly intelligent and engaged in the process of

learning. If given the basic human right of quality education, they will thrive. The Dharavi Youth Center is an

essential place for the children to fill the gaps in their education. Government schools that lack funding often result

in inadequate or incomplete education, so the center has the opportunity to improve these children’s futures by

providing additional resources and learning spaces. We hope that our modular design thinking curriculum and

suggestions aid the center in its goal to provide the English language development and social empowerment through

creativity that are crucial for breaking the cycle of poverty. We are honored to learn from this organization’s

mission, and believe the tools we have provided will be successful in incorporating creativity and empowerment

with essential workplace skills, that together give children the confidence and ability to continue their education

and/or find vocations that do not have the occupational hazards of labor in Dharavi.

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References

Bucknell Education

<http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/jvt002/docs/asee­2008b.pdf>

The Dharavi Project.

<http://www.dharaviproject.org/intro.html>

Stanford K­12 Lab Design Thinking Resources.

<https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/332ff/Curriculum_Home_Page.html>

Study Hall Educational Foundation.

<http://www.studyhallfoundation.org>

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