Gundecha Education Academy, Mumbai

Conceptualised and promoted by businessman Paras Gundecha and his late wife Mamta in 2004, this K-12 school has quickly built itself a reputation for liberal and culturally intensive pedagogies

Located in the Mumbai suburb of Kandivali, where high quality schools affiliated with the Delhi-based CISCE and CBSE examination boards and the offshore International Baccalaureate Organisation, Geneva are mushrooming, the Gundecha Education Academy (GEA, estb. 2004) is intent on providing K-12 education with a difference. This CISCE-affiliated school, spread over 2.25 acres, hosts a six storey admin-cum-academic block surrounded by a basketball court, tennis court, a cricket pitch, and garden with more than 270 varieties of plants.

“GEA started four years ago with the aim of providing stress-free K-12 education to children to make them love to come to school,” says principal Seema Buch, a physics and education alumna of MS University, Baroda. “Our objective is to inculcate self study habits to develop students’ concepts and skills, rather than content absorption capabilities. Our focus is on activity based enjoyable learning, and we give our students exposure to all possibilities to enable them to choose suitable vocations and professions.”

Conceptualised and promoted by Mumbai-based businessman Paras Gundecha, promoter-chairman of the Gundecha Group of companies and his wife, the late Mamta Gundecha under the aegis of Gundecha Charities constituted in 1982 to promote schools, colleges, institutions, hospitals, libraries, art galleries, playgrounds, public halls, and water huts, among other public utilities, GEA admitted its first batch of 450 K-VII students in 2004.

Since then it has received excellent word-of-mouth publicity for its liberal and culturally intensive pedagogies. As a result the aggregate enrolment  has grown to 2,235 students on its roster. According to Buch, the broad and carefully designed curriculum develops students’ learning application skills and ability to choose the curriculum of any examination board (CISCE, CBSE, IGCSE, IB) after class VIII.

The GEA curriculum is designed to stimulate both left and right brain activity to facilitate whole-brain thinking. “Our focus is on doing things differently rather than doing different things. For example, notebooks and textbooks remain in school, eliminating the need for students to lug heavy bags to school and back. Teaching is activity based and supported by thoroughly contem-porary instructional communication technology driven by JIL, ASCII, Eureka and the Waterford Early Reading programme, and connected by LAN to all the classrooms equipped with computers and TVs,” explains Buch.

Separate dedicated science, geography, and math labs; dance, music, art and two computer rooms; a mini auditorium (60-seats); a library with 13,907 volumes and 26 journal subscriptions and indoor sports and edutainment rooms (for the pre-primary section) make up the GEA complex, constructed with an aggregate investment of Rs.15 crore.

Teacher-pupil ratios in GEA classrooms have been fixed at 1:15 (pre-primary) and 1:20 in primary and secondary school. Beginning with a complement of 26 teachers in 2004, GEA currently employs 118 carefully selected teachers recruited following a written test, interview and adjudgement of a demo lesson. “After selection every teacher is given a thorough induction into the methods of implementing the curriculum. Further, continuous in-service training is imparted to enable and equip teachers to deliver classroom education in conformity to (sic) the mission and vision of the school,” says Buch.

Co-curricular education, and particularly social work is accorded prime importance. To this end GEA has adopted a pre-primary school for adivasi (scheduled tribe) children which is given appropriate classroom materials and teacher training inputs by the GEA staff and students. Environment and ecology clubs are active on the academy’s campus, where a counseling and remedial learning centre manned by two counselors and two special educators, also functions.

Four years after GEA inducted its first batch of students, the results of adopting best teaching-learning practices are beginning to show. One of its students (Shashank Shrivastava) was included amongst 72 students chosen from across India for an Indo-Japanese student exchange programme. More significantly, of the academy’s first batch of 49 students who wrote the ICSE class X boards last year, 39 passed with distinction.

With the school’s teething troubles over, Poonam Gundecha a graduate of the University of Texas with an MBA from Dallas, is upbeat about GEA’s future. “The feedback we have been receiving from parents has been consistently excellent. This year our students will enter class XII for the first time and we are confident about their doing well in the ISC board exams next year. Our future plans include securing affiliation with the UK-based Cambridge International Examinations board in 2011 and with the Geneva based IBO (International Baccalaureate Organisation) thereafter. Thanks to our dedicated faculty and cooperative parents, GEA has come smoothly on-stream. We want to develop and join the league of Mumbai’s premier interna-tional schools,” says Gundecha.

Harshikaa Udasi (Mumbai)