At a residential school in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, run by the Backward Classes Welfare Department, the love for learning languages runs deep. When I asked the students what had sparked this deep affection for learning English, without hesitation, they pointed to one person: Mrs. Lucy Priyadarsini, their resident English teacher.
Lucy reminded me of the free-spirited Maria from the film ‘The Sound of Music’, who left her abbey to follow her heart. As a former nun who worked and lived in a convent, Lucy picked up Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and English, and upon learning that my hometown is in Kerala, she asked me in fluent Malayalam, ‘sukamano?’ (how are you?). This sparked our conversations about how she urges her students to talk without full stops and seek stories beyond their classrooms.
“In our world, there is so much we don’t know, and I always felt that not knowing was not an option for me. Learning languages was a way of understanding the world bit by bit”, Lucy tells me as she shows me photographs on her phone from her classroom activities. Determined to pass on her love for languages, Lucy left her convent and joined MJPAPBCWREIS as a residential English teacher. For Lucy, teaching is not about chasing down missing semi-colons in exam papers; it is an act of lowering the barrier to employment and opportunity in the 21st century.
Back in 2012, the Backward Classes Welfare Department established the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Andhra Pradesh Backward Classes Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (MJPAPBCWREIS) to bridge the educational gap for Backward Classes, bringing them on par with other developed communities.
Mantra4Change, in partnership with MJPAPBCWREIS and Education Above All (EAA), has been designing and implementing programs to enhance foundational literacy and numeracy in schools. In the past three years, the program’s success has been measured in impact numbers and program reports — but numbers don’t tell the whole story. This blog attempts to investigate the impact of what we do through the lived experiences and voices of those at its heart: the students.
Bringing words and worlds together in language learning.
Chaitanya, a 6th-grade student, spends her school vacations tutoring her cousins in English by sharing the stories and activities she learned in class. She believes that more English-speaking people at home would give her more opportunities to practice. For many students, it’s tricky to develop a relationship with English words and sustain it, especially when it is a borrowed language. Today, one of the biggest challenges in schools is teaching English in non-English-speaking environments where the opportunity for organic learning is limited. This is why, despite having no restrictions on learning and using English, many students often struggle to assert themselves in the language.
In 2024, Hasini’s English teacher gave her a PBL assignment that she continued even after the submission deadline. The project required her to write a daily journal entry about her experiences for a month. Since this hobby began as an English assignment, she chose English over her mother tongue to continue expressing her thoughts. The comfort that Hasini has found in a second language comes from the enriching space her school and teachers have created, where language can be practised, seen, and reinforced. Lessons are never simply read but acted out in elaborate skits with music, dance, and artwork. Every morning, the school newspaper board is put together by students, articulating their ideas, opinions, and facts using proper sentence structure. Through initiatives like reading programs the familiarity that students have with the English language i s strengthened.
Dear, drop everything and read!
Asha, an 8th grader, made her dislike for English grammar clear to me. She does not like picking apart sentences, “I want to speak English like I speak Telugu, nobody taught me Telugu grammar as a child”, she declared, poking at the age-old conundrum, which comes first, language or grammar?
Despite grammar being an unnecessary villain in her linguistic journey, Asha loves reading biographies of women, especially about Savithribai Phule and Kalpana Chawla. When asked if she wanted to go to space as Kalpana Chawla did, she confidently said, “No, I want to stay on Earth and become a teacher like Savithri bai.” During the Parent-teacher meeting held in January 2025, Asha wore a purple sari to resemble the pictures of Savithribhai in her books and confidently chanted the poem ‘Go, Get Education’.
In an all-girls school, the admiration for inspirational women and women writers is common, but access to those stories is limited. To mitigate this, the seeds of the Reading Program at MJPAPBCWREIS were first planted during a school visit to Sattenapalli, where Mr. Krishna Mohan, Secretary of MJPAPBCWREIS, along with Mr. Nikunj Jhaveri, advisor for Mantra Social Services, and Mantra’s AP Team explored ideas to introduce diverse stories and a love for language. In 2023, the program began by distributing 40 Amar Chitra Katha books to each of the 107 MJPAPBCWREIS schools. In the following years, several additions to books were made, along with the introduction of DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) sessions in schools on Saturdays.
Jaiswini’s voice for the voiceless.
Jaiswini is an older student whom some of the students I interviewed looked up to. She was initially described to me as someone who had mastered English, and she confirmed this when she helped us translate from Telugu to English and vice versa.
As a 9th grader, her tryst with English is a bit more complicated. It brought her recognition in school and made her rethink her aspirations. Jaiswini has always loved animals, but now she sees them differently—not just as creatures to care for but as living beings who can’t speak for themselves. “I hope to become a veterinarian because animals can’t speak, and I would like to speak for them”, she says. Her initial struggle to express herself in a language that wasn’t her own made her think about the power of communication—and what it meant for those who had no voice at all.
At MJPAPBCWREIS, education is a community-led endeavor. Parents, teachers, and community members invest in enabling children to break generational cycles of disadvantage. Educators are taking a step further by evolving their teaching strategies because access to education alone isn’t enough. Innovative practices like Project-based learning encourage students to think critically about language—not just as a tool but as a medium that can shape both their lives and their perspectives.
Some students like Jaiswini have found a home in the English language ,while others struggle to put words and their worlds together. At MJPAPBCWREIS, teachers help create this connection, bringing language closer to the world students already understand.
