CHENNAI: Laying down pencils, erasers, sharpeners, scales, sketches, charts, glue, and scissors on their desks, in an orderly fashion, the students of Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram await their teachers. Some kids chat with their friends while some eat snacks, and the class representative tries shushes them to maintain silence. Soon, Krishnapriya Vinod, formerly an assistant professor and now a trainer with Rhapsody, enters.
Joyfully, the class of 40 go “Good Morning, Rhapsody miss,” in chorus. She greets them back and together they sing the Rhapsody anthem “Rhapsody for every day, Rhapsody we sing and play, Rhapsody for songs and games..
.Rhapsody through art we dream”. In the last decade, this has been a routine for over four lakh students from almost 400 schools in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Delhi, and Pune.
“Rhapsody started as an initiative to promote creative classrooms. The idea is to use music and other visual arts as inputs specifically curated to learn and clarify concepts of Science, Maths, language, and others,” shares Anil Srinivasan, a pianist and an educator. In May 2013, Anil founded Rhapsody Music Education to start an art-integrated approach to be used by schools.
According to him, the viewpoint for the mode of education hit him when he was invited to school functions immediately after he won the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2010. “When I visited a government school in southern TN, I interacted with the students and teachers and.