Zakiya Kurrien

Co-founder

Co-founder of Centre for Learning Resources

Zakiya Kurrien is the co-founder of Centre for Learning Resources (1984)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education from Pune.

Zakiya Kurrien is an Indian educationist and teacher educator. In 1984 she co-founded the Centre for Learning Resources (CLR), a Pune-based non-profit educational organisation working on early childhood care and education, foundational literacy and numeracy, and teacher development for children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. She served as a co-director of CLR for almost three decades and is now its Director Emerita and a member of its governing council.

Early life and education

Kurrien holds an MA in Education from Smith College in the United States.

Career

Kurrien has worked as a teacher and teacher educator in India and abroad. In 1984 she co-founded the Centre for Learning Resources with John Kurrien, who had previously been on the education faculty of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The organisation is run under the Society for Educational Improvement and Innovation and is based in Pune.

Over more than four decades her work has spanned the development and education of marginalised children. As co-director of CLR she designed interventions and capacity-building programmes and wrote materials for early holistic child care, early childhood education, foundational literacy and numeracy, and the teaching of English in multilingual settings, with a continuing emphasis on strengthening teachers' subject knowledge and developmentally appropriate pedagogy.

She has served on national and state-level committees on education policy, including the National ECCE Task Force, and has acted as a consultant to international organisations and Indian non-governmental organisations. She has also served on the advisory committee of the Early Literacy Initiative at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.[2][3][4]

Centre for Learning Resources

The Centre for Learning Resources (CLR) was founded in Pune in 1984 as a non-profit unit of The Society For Educational Improvement and Innovation, registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and the Bombay Public Trust Act 1950. It develops teaching-learning materials, children's literature and teacher training for early childhood and primary education.