When Muhammed Dilshad notched up full A+ in the SSLC examination back in 2019, its significance went far beyond being a mere personal achievement.
Dilshad, whose family hails from Darbhanga in Bihar, was the first migrant student to achieve that after coming through a still nascent Project Roshni in Ernakulam district. The project aims at enabling migrant children to overcome linguistic barrier and enhance their academic performance through a discourse-oriented pedagogy (DOP) with code switching – a process of alternating between two or more languages, as an enabling tool.
Dilshad was among the earliest beneficiaries when the project in its previous avatar was being tried out by a research team headed by his primary class teacher Jayasree Kulakkunnath at Government High School, Binanipuram, when he was in sixth standard.
