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OUTBREAK OF CORONA: GIFTED RESPONSE
DR. SUJALA WATVE
Jnana Prabodhini’s Institute of Psychology, Pune, Maharashtra.
The Pandemic:
The pandemic of Corona virus started in December 2019 from Wuhan in China and spread all over the world in a very short span of time. Many epidemics of diverse diseases, specific to countries and locations have been recorded earlier; a few of them can spread all over the world and then are considered as Pandemics. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared 10 main Pandemics till date. These earlier Pandemics are named as The Antonine Plague (165 AD), The Plague of Justinian (541-542), The Black Death (1346-1353), The Third Cholera Pandemic (1852–1860), The Flu Pandemic (1889-1890), The Sixth Cholera Pandemic (1910-1911), The Flu Pandemic (1918), The Asian Flu (1956-1958), The Flu Pandemic (1968) and The HIV/ AIDS Pandemic (2005-2012). Each time, there was some new germ behind these pandemic diseases and it took years of research to find a definite drug treatment for these diseases. Scientists have devoted their whole lives with the commitment to find creative solutions. To see how these intelligent people, take these calamities as challenges and how these challenges become their life goals, is of interest.
Scientific efforts
Here is one very interesting story of Dr. Hultin and his passionate efforts for getting to the root cause of the Spanish Flu that occurred in 1918(Taubenberger, et. al., 1997). During the Spanish Flu Pandemic in 1918, 80 inhabitants from a small place in Alaska contracted this disease. 72 people died and were buried at a place, which was mentioned as the Brevig Mission. Sometime in 1951, 25 years old Hultin, studying for his doctoral degree in Microbiology at the Iowa University, came across this event, which aroused his curiosity. He strongly believed that the virus must exist in those frozen dead bodies. With the help of University students, Hultin planned for its exhumation. He took the permission of elders in the town to dig the graves and get the necessary samples for his study. With his team he thawed the earth, dug the graves and got samples of lung tissues from a few bodies. Preserving those samples till they travelled from Alaska to Iowa was a challenge. He travelled by a DC-3 propeller-driven airplane, which had to halt for refuelling multiple times. During every stop, Hultin used to get down from the plane and refreeze the samples with the help of carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher to preserve them in good condition. The co-passengers made fun of his ‘noisy’ and weird practices, which he just ignored. With all those efforts he brought the samples to the lab, took out a sample with a pipette (which needed to be done at that time by mouth), and injected it into a chicken egg. All these efforts were in vain as the virus could not survive in the egg. What a frustrating experience it must have been! But he kept on working.
After 46 years, in 1997, Hultin read an article on ‘Sequencing of Genome of a Spanish Influenza Virus’ by a molecular pathologist Taubenberger from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. That gave him an idea how the research could be continued. Bearing the expenses himself, Hultin again went to the same place, retrieved the samples of the influenza virus using more advanced techniques and technology. The experts at Washington joined hands with him and the riddle of RNA of the virus was solved! He did not expect money or fame in return, but only wanted to solve the riddle.
Cure for the disease
During the earlier pandemics, people were under the spell of religious faith, magic and other unscientific practices. With no medicine and due to lack of insight about the problem, a trial and error approach was used to save the people from the terrible contagious diseases. Staying away from patients was seen to be the only successful way to save others. Through the observations of medical practitioners in those days, isolation of patients, staying apart from others (social distancing), staying at home (quarantine) were the strategies used in those times.
Advancements in science and technology have made it easier to pinpoint the causes of these diseases now. The microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, algae, fungi, protozoa, helminths etc., of various types are identified and successfully treated. A new strain of corona virus seems to be the cause behind COVID-19. Its nature and functioning is also revealed. The world is now waiting for the proper treatment to cure and stop it from spreading. Until then, practices like social distancing and quarantine are being used to control its spread.
Facing the challenge
Initially when there was an appeal from the Prime Minister Mr. Modi for a voluntary lockdown, people responded with vigour. On 22nd March 2020, the Janata curfew was well observed by the 1.3 billion population of India. The first lockdown was announced from 24th March for 21 days to prevent further spread of the COVID-19 virus. The second lockdown was announced from 14th April for 19 days, the third lockdown from 4th May and the fourth was announced on 18th May 2020.
This has partially taken care of slowing the rate of spreading of the disease but what about the mental health of the people undergoing such a long period of lockdown? Mental health professionals are trying to take care of this issue, from their point of view. Educationists are finding ways to reach the masses using advanced technology and to continue formal education at all the levels. Educational policy-makers are modifying the existing practices to adapt to the situation. Farmers, industrialists are trying to ensure continuity in production. Economists are reinventing ways to maintain the balance between existing systems. Naturalists are already hinting that the frequent occurrence of natural calamities is because the balance of nature is disturbed due to human greed.
It is a big challenge for the medical and paramedical fraternity to save the human race. In case of earlier pandemics, it was the joint effort- from scholars to microbiologists- that could help the human race. The trend shows that the viruses have undergone evolution and are attacking the human race with a more modified DNA structure. To tackle this, experts from all over the world across various fields are working with their intellect and passion. This is a challenge for the entire human race. Will our National Education Policy, the current education system based on ‘equality’ (and not ‘equal opportunity’) support the highly intelligent children for that?
Need of the time
To take up this challenge, individuals with high intelligence, innovative and critical thinking, passion, and commitment to science are needed. Such personnel need to be developed through proper efforts. In the view of nature-and-nurture principle we all believe that some potential is inherited by birth and some need to be nurtured. Highly intelligent children can be identified from certain indicators such as having quick grasping and learning, good memory, reasoning, and critical and logical thinking. But intelligence and thinking alone are not sufficient for effective working. Along with high intelligence, a passion for certain goals, creativity, skills and subject-expertise are essential. Intelligence is mostly inherited (almost 75%), but creating motivation, passion, and resilience definitely require scientific efforts. Are our children, with high potential, getting adequate opportunity to be identified and nurtured at home and in school? The answer is No! Offering scholarships, organizing competitions, disseminating information does create challenges, but it is not the way to ‘raise’ them. As mentioned before, high intelligence needs to be accompanied by commitment and creative approach, which needs to be nurtured from an early age.
Assumptions
Psychologists working on giftedness strongly believe that intelligence, giftedness and talents are different terms having very specific meanings. Intelligence is also conceptualized from different angles and seems to be mostly measurable, where many intelligence tests have been designed by all countries from time to time and as per the needs. But a gifted child (or child with gift) and giftedness (as behaviour) are still debatable points. Talents are assessed only when they get expressed in practice. So keeping this limitation in mind, some relationships are assumed. It becomes very convenient to use a single word like ‘gifted’ and hence it gets used very synonymously. ‘High Ability Learner’ is the assumed meaning of ‘gifted’ for the current purpose. The individuals who have inherited (not contaminated by environment) high potential in any walk of life are ‘high ability’ individuals. Probably those can be measured with special instruments. Simultaneously she/he should be an ‘ able learner’, who is interactive with her or his environment.
Identification of the gifted
Every human being is born with some natural inheritance. It is a unique constellation of certain assets and a few weaknesses. Need for physical and psychological survival acts is the inspiration behind learning. Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy Model (1943) is one of the best explanations to support this. Right kind of exposure to surroundings, opportunities to interact freely with the environment, and a conducive atmosphere provides the strong foundation for the learning of the child. Observing the child and her/his development helps to understand and build up the profile of the child. Observing, rather than teaching, becomes very important in the early years of life. Parents and observers need to have this skill for letting the child ‘do’ and not force them to learn. In school though the purpose is stated to be ‘all-round development’, the emphasis is on academic development, which needs to be corrected. Teachers need to be observers and facilitators of a supportive and encouraging atmosphere. For the later years, there are some non-formal and formal procedures of assessing development of children which need to be functional. This will definitely help to compare the child’s objective profile with the background of the population of her/his age. The profile will highlight the strengths of the child as well as areas of weakness. Parental expectations and teacher biases could be minimized with such an objective profile.
Nurturing the giftedness
School system, for the cause of ‘equality of education’, is uniform for all. Though the ‘child centric’ approach is suggested in educational policy, the uniqueness of a child gets neglected for various reasons. There are no efforts taken to whet the extra appetite of a high-ability child. Here, to have ‘equal opportunity to education’, it is of utmost importance to view education with a broader meaning. Individuals use their preferred senses while learning. Teachers should always ask themselves, ‘Am I allowing the child to use one’s preferred language? (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory).’ Freedom of learning, choice of learning language, choice of time and duration, providing own ‘space’ and appropriate encouragement can develop passion within a child.
Educationists do not advocate readymade answers for most of the questions. Questioning, experimenting, experiencing, doing independent work, need to be fostered for developing a creative urge within the child. This will provide ‘appropriate’ challenges to learn on its own. During these challenges, the child gets the satisfaction of using its preferred strengths.
A larger goal needs to be shown for channelizing the learning path. A true educationist never insists on the ‘right’ path but encourages the child taking ‘its own’ path. Most of the high ability children prefer to have their innovative ways of achieving goals. This will foster passion for learning, applying and finding novel and off-beat solutions to problems. Putting them through a single uniform system may help to build subject expertise and skills but it is less likely to encourage creative solutions. Gifted children can provide solutions to problems of uncommon nature. Here, all the characteristics of the gifted are at stake and the individual uses all her/his potential to find one or many solutions to a problem in a scientific manner.
Jnana Prabodhini (JP) School for the gifted
JP believes that high ability individuals have a more complex and more integrated neural system of interacting with the external world and they are more sensitive towards the environment. This can help in more efficient learning as compared to the normal population. High ability individuals also show extra-appetite and hunger for learning new things in their own unique way. They learn faster and with more accuracy as compared to the normal population. For them, learning is multidimensional, inter-woven and integrated in nature. Identifying potential in childhood and fostering them appropriately is the ideal way to transform giftedness into talents. At the same time parents and parent-like mentors seem to be the right agency for helping children learn. By the time they are in standard 5, the children start using their own potential more efficiently.
Bapat (2017) explains ‘Man-making’ as an objective of education. The founder of JP Dr. Pendse mentioned the objective of the school as developing leadership among ‘gifted’. For identification, Jnana Prabodhini Prashala (JPP) selects children, based on Indian standardized intelligence tests. To support the school, Jnana Prabodhini’s Institute of Psychology (JPIP) works on continuously developing and standardizing psychological tests and implementing them in practice. It has started out-of-school programs for gifted students from Pune on weekends throughout the academic year. Here also, standardized measures are used for selection of students. At the same time, monthly workshops are conducted as part of a 2-year training for parents, to identify gifts in their children in non-formal ways. All these initiatives at JPIP are done with a nurturing purpose.
Nurturing the high-ability learners
Jnana Prabodhini has three more schools, which are general schools, without any selection based on intelligence tests. The nurturing practices are similar to the gifted school. (Bapat, 2017). For nurturing their high-abilities, it is necessary to consider their six characteristics as per the Model of Potential for Advanced Development (Khire, 2000). High ability learners are sensitive to their surroundings, they have a large source of energy to be responsive to the happenings around, they select and assimilate new information and can well adapt to the new circumstances. They have great learning capacity as well as capacity to grow horizontally and vertically, they demonstrate capacity to create, reproduce and regenerate innovative solutions to problems, and lastly, have the capacity to throw out unwanted or useless information. This happens in all domains of life, physical, intellectual, emotional, social, moral and spiritual. The activities planned throughout the school years can transform the abilities into talents in any of the above single or multiple domains.
There are a complete six years’ span at hand to nurture students’ specific potentials through all-round- development, create passion and commitment to work, and enhance creativity. The goal of the school is reflected through its motto ‘motivating the ‘able’ for social change’. Throughout schooling, efforts are planned and implemented to nurture the child’s potential to the fullest extent and to motivate them for creating social change and solving national problems. The activities and the school model are unique for the gifted education in India (Bapat 1998, 2017). Lavalekar did her doctoral work on creating social awareness among gifted children through special activities. (Lavalekar, 2004), which is again a very special effort for channelizing intelligence for social change.
Lockdown: Turning to opportunity for home- learning
From the beginning of the lockdown, the Principal and teachers shifted to online teaching. Classes were held each day for about 5 hours with breaks in between, through mobiles, emails and apps. This went on for 15 days until the portions were completed. New things like projects, experiments and activities were advised at home. The Internet was available at hand for help. Ample material regarding curriculum and outside curriculum was provided. Every change became smooth and comfortable.
Students had several questions regarding Corona and COVID-19- What is this Corona? Can it infect me and my parents also? Will we be kept apart from each other? What happens to the infected person? Can we talk to such persons to know how they suffered? Is there any medicine to cure it? How to avoid Corona? Can we touch things like.........? With the increasing age, the questions went more in-depth of the topic. Nature of the virus, how it spreads, how it is transmitted from one person to another, how to halt its spread, its comparison with other viral diseases were some common questions. The online lectures by teachers covered such queries regarding Corona. They also inspired students to explore more information from available sources. A prompt feedback of students was collected over Google Forms. (Marathe,2020) The responses revealed points such as: 1. They felt some abrupt change and a little stress but could cope up with the new routine. 2. Uncertainty about the future was felt, but had time for introspection 3. Space to think on complex issues 4. Getting good space for self was a very pleasant feel. 5. They could utilize their free time with family members and could do activities of their choice. 6. No strict routine, except online lesson hours. 7. Lockdown was an opportunity to learn, and experiment, learn different things. 8. At the same time friends were distanced. 9. Technology helped here, and 10. New apps and related technology were learned. They reported many things they learned and experienced. It was a positive approach to look at this period as ‘turning lockdown into an opportunity to think in innovative ways and find many options to use the period for ‘diverse learning’ for self-enrichment.
Lockdown: Service to humanity
The alumni of JPP (JP-youth) continued to come to JP for diverse types of activities such as teaching JPP students and mentoring them. The school education in JP is very highly focused on futuristic thinking (though under different titles) right from standard 5. Hence the JP-youth were very much aware of the Corona pandemic since the beginning of January 2020. They were very much aware of the trend and expected the lockdown to happen. They could immediately shift to online teaching tools, a variety of technological applications, and homebound learning activities (using Jnana Prabodhini distance learning site). Besides they were highly concerned with the needs of the lay and disadvantaged people, who were unprepared for the lockdown. The JP-youth also realized difficulties of people who could not travel to their own towns due to unavailability of public transport. Their innovative practices of serving the specific needs of particular groups and reaching the needy (exercising due caution) merits a separate discussion.
Jnana Prabodhini members at Beed, Ambajogai, Solapur and Harali (Osmanabad) are engaged in providing support for the needy affected by the Corona lockdown. There are special efforts to help the migrated labour by providing them food and shelter. Last year there was intense participation in work regarding water scarcity. All these members are gifted as per definition given by Columbus Group (1991). As per this definition, “Giftedness is an asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm”. To conclude, gifted is not equivalent to only high intelligence, but it is a constellation of potentials, characteristics and motivation to use the resources within. All the above facts suggest that the ‘gifted’ can see challenges in difficult situations, and travel the path of betterment and progress of society, but they need to be provided with opportunities and encouragement for using their potential for larger goals.
References:
Bapat, G.S. (1998). An Unique Experiment in Gifted Education. In Proceedings of Fifth Asia Pacific Conference on Giftedness. N. Delhi: Department of Education, University of Delhi.
Bapat, G. S. (2017). Man-making: nurturing abilities, motivating the able. Pune: Jnana Prabodhini. Columbus Group, (1991) http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/isad/columbus-group.
Khire, U. (2000). Potential for Advanced Development. In (Ed.) Maitra, K., Towards Excellence: Developing and Nurturing Giftedness and Talent, New Delhi: Mosaic Book, pp 48-72
Khire, U. (Ed.) (2013). Jnana Prabodhini: a new experiment in education, Vol. IV-Part II. Explorations into psychology of human abilities: research journey of 50 years. Pune: Jnana Prabodhini Samshodhan Sanstha.
Lavalekar A. (2004). Samajik Janiv Samvardhan- prayogatun prashikshanakade. (Nurture of social awareness- from experiment to training). Pune: Jnana Prabodhini Samshodhan Sanstha.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96.
Marathe, P. (2020). Study of Online Learning experience. An Unpublished presentation prepared for Jnana Prabodhini Prashala, Pune.
Piirto, J. (2002). Motivation is First – Then they can do anything: Portrait of an Indian School for the Gifted and Talented. Gifted Child Quarterly, 46, (3).
Khire, U. (2013) Giftedness and talent in the Indian context: nature, identification and nurture. In D.P. Chattopadhyaya (Gen. Ed.), History of Science philosophy and culture in Indian civilization (pp 621-662), vol. 13, part 3. Perspectives on human cognition. New Delhi: Centre for studies in civilization.
Taubenberger, J. K., Reid, A. H., Krafft, A. E., Bijwaard, K.E., & Fanning, T.G. (1997). Initial genetic characterization of the 1918 "Spanish" influenza virus. Science, 275, Issue 5307, pp. 1793-1796.
Watve, S. (2013) Why gifted education? Pune: Jnana Prabodhini Samshodhan Sanstha.