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“Teach them about the forests” . One late evening, a few years ago, I sat in the school room, in a small village, home to the Yanadi tribal community. I was waiting to meet two tribal elders.

It had been more than a decade ago since Subbarayappa, had asked a team from Bengaluru, “You are telling us about forests, about seeds. Why don’t you do something for our children?” Readily, the team set up a learning centre, in a cleaned-out goat shed. The children were free spirits. Their hands could shape in clay what they saw, they could hold a snake in their hands, the forest was their home – what must a school do for them? The eager community offered the team a choice of two sites – one for the temple and one for the school.

The children came – some readily, some hesitantly – but eventually they all came. The community elders came into the school to teach them about their forests, their life. A few hundred children from these communities have attended these schools. Several of them completed schooling, many could not. The school had touched many; how and when was not always clear.

And that is what I wanted to know. Duggeppa sounded happy, yet his voice had a trace of wistfulness. “Our children would not stand up and talk – now you have shown them the way to …. You have taught our children how to meet the world. We have lived all our lives here – we did not feel we needed anything. The forest gave us everything. (But now) our children do not have this. The forests are drying up. But now more people want access to the forests to take away its value”.

The school had come a long way with many proud moments. As I was wondering what next, he paused and said softly “(don’t forget to) teach them about the forests.”

“Google is wrong” . In another village, about 50 km from Mysuru, is a high school with a student strength of about 300. The class teacher decided that the children would map and document their village. Making measurements by bicycle, on foot, by measuring scales, the children toiled for 3 days to produce a map of the school and the village. They photographed events in the village, things that they thought were important. After much work and rework, they produced a map of their own village, and told the story of their world as they knew it. “We never knew the children could do so much work”, the teachers were surprised.

When the children were shown how their village looked as seen on a satellite map, they saw the richly documented Bengaluru and Mysuru. As they spanned out, there was nothing – their village recognizable only by the landscape change. Their village did not appear on the map. To blunt their disappointment, the teacher zoomed in, their school appeared. At this point, one of them could bear it no more. “Google is wrong!” the child exclaimed. The map his class had made of the school was more accurate and updated, showing what Google had missed. No further explanation was needed.

An era of alienation

What is our response to the vision of these elders, to teach them about the forest? And how do we assuage the indignation of the 14-year-old who saw that his world had been rendered invisible? They are seemingly unrelated problems. Or are they?

These were expressions of aspiration and hope; they were also expressions of resignation and indignation and of identities denied and eliminated. At their core, the concerns are similar – who decides what is knowledge, who decides who gets to use the knowledge and how, who decides how and where people can participate in social life, who gets to tell their story and where. Communities look to schools for learning yet they must leave behind what they already know; their pathways for a life of dignity no longer seem to include their physical or social world. There are millions of children called upon for “nation-building”, to build a society that they are excluded from imagining.

Appearance. The new normal. Drastically transforming the ways we live, work and interact with each other and disempowering the most vulnerable, we saw a glimpse of what this dystopia led by digital technologies would look like. No going back, we are being told – we do not even know who we have left behind and where. There are the seeds of alienation.

What should education do?

COVID may have been unprecedented but not unanticipated. With the relentless onslaught on ecosystems, weather extremes and new pathogens are no longer a distant imagination, affecting the marginalized disproportionately. During months of lock down, it was extremely clear whose lives, livelihoods and education mattered and whose did not.

We worship the technological makeover of society, yet large sections of society have no understanding of what is being made, much less how or why. It is more urgent than ever, that we understand the meaning of work; and what work does to affirm ourselves as human beings. And, it is time to bring this consciousness into education – of the need to end disharmony and to end alienation.

Fundamental to this is an ecological consciousness. Education must allow children to experience themselves as part of a larger ecology, developing a relationship with the life systems and the social systems around. Children are naturally drawn to the world around, and school education needs to build on this. And an equally important consideration would be to educate for democracy, with a conscious effort towards nurturing a culture of critical thinking, building attitudes and capabilities to function in a democracy, and creating a society that has place for the aspirations of all.

They say education is the making of society. If so, it is then surely time to take stock of where we are – perhaps to remake. This requires nothing short of a radical re-imagination. And now is the time.

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“It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction” – Rachel Carson

We are celebrating the World Environment Day, today. Every year, we talk about our renewed commitment to the Earth, the nature and the well-being of the planet. We are also reminded that there is no Planet B and educators are reminded of the need to bring this awareness in students and children. Indeed, the foremost challenge that our education must address today is that of large scale environmental degradation and its disproportionate impact on different sections of society.

Where does one begin?

Recently, I was watching a 2 year old, squinting very attentively at the soil, supporting himself in a semi-crawl, semi-sitting position. He had been following a group of older children, working on the garden, when his attention was caught by something in the soil. It was a beetle. He sat watching transfixed, his eyes darting to the left and right. When the beetle had accomplished what it was doing and went under the soil, he was perplexed, and poked his finger here and there, hoping to locate it. Finally, he seemed to accept that the beetle had other business to do and went about following the older children. The respect with which he observed and the calmness with which he moved on underscored for me how children can be influenced by the natural world. As I watched him, I was reminded of a quote from David Attenborough “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”.

That is where we need to begin, allowing children to experience and care.

Relationship with life around

Our school education is characterized by a huge disparity in terms of access to educational opportunities. On the one hand, are the children in elite schools with access to multiple resources and on the other, are the children who have limited opportunities to learning beyond the school text. Yet, across this spectrum, children have very little opportunities to be connected with the living world around them.

The “environment studies” curricula informs children about trees and water and wild animals and pet animals; they are told about water conservation and waste management. However, children have little opportunity to experience the natural world. Children need to experience nature – explore and observe. They need to participate in the natural world, have opportunities to work with the land, plant trees and grow gardens and watch insects and birds. They need to intuitively know themselves to be part of this natural world.

This relationship with life around is what will help children develop an understanding of their environment – the living world and the social world. Knowing ourselves to be a part of the total ecology is the foremost objective of environment education.

Environment education at Kaigal

This proximity to the natural world, respect for all life and working in harmony with what is around constitutes the core of the environment education program at Kaigal.

The program began in 2007 with the objective of sharing with students, the possibilities, challenges and strategies for a sustainable and ecologically responsible way of life. It is conducted out of the Kaigal conservation centre in a campus adjoining the Kaundinya Wildlife Sanctuary. A stream from the seasonal Kaigal river straddles the place and when the rains fail, the barren rocks complete the landscape. The forest here is dry deciduous and is rich in biodiversity though often carelessly referred to as scrub jungle. It is home to an elephant corridor and the Yanadi tribe, whose members are forest collectors. The understated landscape with its forests and streams and metamorphic rocks carries its own majesty, with an utterly different way of life, barely 3 hours from Bengaluru.

Structured as a residential program, the activities will typically include forest walks, working in the local farms, preparing seeds for planting, working the forest nursery in the conservatory, interacting with the local communities and gathering data on their agricultural practices, gathering data on forest bio-resources, working with children in the local schools and such other activities, all closely linked to the local environment. A walk through the forest – during the day and at night, with only the moon and the stars, completes the program. Food is an essential part of the experience and all the meals are cooked from locally sourced materials, and prepared by the local community. In all these activities, the children are guided by the resource persons from the rural and tribal communities, an experience that is valuable in more ways than one.

Educating to conserve

The children – young and old – usually arrive noisily, tumbling out of their buses and trains but fall into a reflective silence towards the end of the program – taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the natural world — a transformation that all of us who have facilitated the program have observed. Most often for children, two things stand out in their experience – the beauty of life around them, even in seemingly stark landscapes and an appreciation of the knowledge and skills of the people in communities so different from theirs. When interacting with the communities, older children often notice the challenges of resources and the impact of ecological damage. Over the many years, more than a dozen schools have brought hundreds of children to this program and often share how the program has impacted them and how differently so.

Conserving the environment requires us to see ourselves as a part of the natural world and working with the communities embedded in the environment. We have a long way to go; but the programs at Kaigal seem to be useful sign posts for this journey.

The post Environment education – what and how appeared first on Foundation for Education, Ecology and Livelihood.

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/education/teaching-with-empathy-1068831.html

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These words of a 16-year old, summed up the experience of the three days as the group of students gathered near the pond, watching the dusk fade into the starlit darkness near the forest. With the sounds of the crickets and the occasional croak of the frog in the background, they started out on a “solo” walk, in silence, with only the light of the stars and the moon.

This was the penultimate day of the school trip. Arriving from Chennai, the children had moved from being uncertain and unsettled to becoming quiet and receptive, over the days. They were participating in an environment education program in Kaigal, a small village along the fringes of the Kaundinya Wildlife Sanctuary, in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh. They had walked in the forest, played in the stream, learnt from the local farmers how to weed out a field, visited a primary school in the nearby tribal village and tended to the forest nursery and made seed balls to disperse for regeneration. And they had spent time, sitting by the stream or watching the butterflies. They slept on mats on the floor, ate simple, local, food, and had no access to any digital device.

Tightly disciplined, but flowing with the rhythm of the place and the people, the program calmed the group of teenagers as they shook off the nervous excitement of the city. Each one made their own connection with the place, the people and found their own meaning to the work they did. They got over their fear of the wild and were surprised that they could indeed live without the modern trappings. They realized there was much to learn and from so many people around. They saw the beauty of wildlife and experienced the peace of the outdoors, they encountered poverty and saw deprivation, they were shaken and they were touched.

As one of the teachers told me “We have never been to a place like this – did not know how the children would take it. But so good to see them so happy….”.

A different kind of an environment education

This is one of the tens of programs conducted by the Kaigal Education and Environment Program of the Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI). The environment education program began in 2008, and was offered to school students, aged 6-18 years, in an effort to bring into mainstream curricula a new approach of looking at environment education.

A typical program includes any of the following activities – walk into the forest, interacting with local tribal elders to understand forest biodiversity, mapping land use and documenting biodiversity, collecting seeds and saplings to help maintain a forest nursery, tending to the land and maintaining it, working with local farmers on their farms, interacting with the womens’ self help group to learn about sustainable enterprises and interacting with the schools for tribal children. The programs are anchored by the teachers from the tribal schools and members from the community enterprise, based on local bioresource; together these members manage the conservation and livelihood generation activities of the program as well.

Each program design was unique and the duration, scope of activities and based on the age group and the local conditions during the visit. Experiencing nature first hand and close interaction with the communities were the cornerstones of the program. While field surveys and direct work on the land helped students connect theory with practice, participating and learning with local communities – for farming or craft making – expanded the students’ horizons on what is worth learning and who to learn from.

While the younger children simply played and enjoyed the nature, the older children were also able to realize the threat to forests and natural ecosystems. Conservation became a direct concern that was everyone’s responsibility; the connection between ecological justice and social justice was becoming apparent.

Children are our hope

With the looming crisis of environmental degradation and the disproportionate socio-economic impact on society, one can despair and give up.

Or one can dare to hope and educate. The answer may be in re-imagining our education – where we have, for too long, educated only the head, and forgotten the heart. Our relationship with our environment is intimate and direct, and all of us need to experience and renew this relationship. And the best place to start is with the children – they are the hope and the reason for the hope.

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What should I wish for this New Year I wondered
In a viral haze that has showcased so spectacularly our sickness
The new jasmine shoots resolutely emerging from under the infested old
Provided me just the perfect metaphorical pitch

What we need now is a deep intelligence,
To understand that we have torn asunder life’s web of interdependence
All that we have belongs in and is from this world
To recognize that our lives owe a million debts to many

I pray that our hearts be filled with sensitivity
A religious mind, affected by the joy and pain around us
And dare to go beyond the virtuous bubbles
That we have so proudly crafted our privileged lives in

Have the courage to acknowledge what we have received
Without the arrogance to repay what cannot be paid back
Seek the gift of an able body, a fearless mind and an innocent spirit
To rebuild the shattered lives, heal the schisms and restore rights

The world is a place where we must all find our expressions
For we are all only as strong as the weakest among us
It is our space to live, laugh, love and create
What Life created, let no human being arbiter.

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Years ago, when I read the Mahabharata as a child, the story that stayed with me was how the Pandavas, during their years of exile, were requested by the animals in the forests, to shift camp.  “Let us heal and rejuvenate – give us some space”, they had asked.  And the disenfranchised brothers and the Queen Draupadi obliged and moved camp.  I was too young to understand it then but I wonder today if this is how a rights based approach to conservation would look, where access to the commons is seen from the perspective of all those impacted. The sacred groves that were prevalent across the country and the numerous stories of the vanadevatas are perhaps embedded  reminders of this same perspective.  “The elephant god came; we just climbed on the rock and prayed for him to leave – he waited and he left.  We were not afraid, the forest gave us everything; we never had to look elsewhere” – these words of the Yanadi tribal elder summed up the relationships that defined forests.  

A forest is a relationship. Not the trees, the human beings and the other animals but the complex web of life that held all these together.  There is an urgent need to revive this relationship with forests today.  Now more urgent than ever.  As you read this, about 18% of forest land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is to be handed over for the area to be developed as a trade hub and port and a tourist destination.  The ostensible plan for development does not seem to have factored in the ecological fragility or the geological vulnerability of the region.  The biodiversity of the region and the rights of the indigenous people  have become passe to discuss; how else can we explain the suggestion of alternative land for afforestation in Madhya Pradesh for the land taken up in the Andamans!  This kind of assault on natural resources, unmindful of ecological limits and excluding local communities and their rights, cannot produce a sustainable model of development. 

What is urgently needed is to build into our education system love and reverence for the natural world that we are but a part of.  A forest is not a mere metric for carbon credit.  It is not simply a collection of trees. It is a tapestry of life – the many connections of which we many not understand. Forests are cultural and natural resources. Equitable access to natural resources is to be understood as an inalienable right for all human beings, in fact all species that we share our home with.   A sense of ecological justice must be an essential part of the school curriculum for the students to understand the interdependence of ecosystems; we need to build in them the ability and attitude to understand the true costs of  of ecological disruption, both in and of itself and in terms of its impact on human societies.  

The Right to Education is meaningless if we are unable to address this continuous exploitation of natural resources and disruption of ecosystems, with its disproportionate impact on those who are already marginalized and disadvantaged.  Education is not the mere access to literacy and numeracy to produce minions for the economy; it is the promise for building an equitable society.  Ecological justice needs to the starting point for this movement towards social justice. And this should be the project of education.

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Years ago, I was moderating a workshop for developing the state textbook for ICT integration for school education; some of the finest minds in education were discussing the details of how to design, develop and structure the content.  Not a single woman teacher in that group; and I wonder if anyone even noticed.  This is by no means a unique setting.  In tens of workshops with teachers and master trainers for mathematics and science,  I would often be the only woman – perhaps a couple of more teachers.  It should not be surprising to see this, as you consider the educational choices of girls leaving school; the majority prefer to not take up science. 

This is a societal challenge – and our educational processes are accountable for an answer.  The solution needs to address multiple issues that impact the participation of girls in science, mathematics and technology.  The availability of role models, particularly the teacher, the quality of instruction, access to educational institutions, the organization of the science curriculum and the pedagogies that are adopted, all of these influence the way girls perceive science and more importantly themselves in science. 

The self-efficacy beliefs of the teachers and their attitudes to science and education, in my view, are the most important influencers in a young girl’s decision to pursue science. Science teachers often do not see themselves as people doing science, they are themselves impacted by the gendered paths that they were forced to take as a career.  Many times, the science teacher is someone who was encouraged to take up teaching because it is a good profession for girls and their own confidence in pursuing and articlating questions of science would have been subjected to the hegemonic structures in higher education.  Add to this the woefully inadequate science education infrastructure that is present in most schools – you have a guaranteed situation where the teacher herself lacks the confidence to explore, take on projects and “do” science.  While this part is easy to understand and many might also want to jump on to this aspect, a more subtle aspect must also be kept in mind.  The process of education is that of opening up your mind – questioning, exploring and learning.  Science education exemplifies all these and when young girls who have often been forced to remain quiet most of their life, move on to become science teachers, it is not hard to see what kind of a learning culture can be enabled in a classroom.  Teachers, being conditioned in the way society thinks of girls and boys, may often carry these perceptions, and perhaps even communicate these, even if unwittingly.  It requires an extraordinary, self-aware teacher who can transcend this.

The history of science, the commonly known version atleast, offers no respite.  A reading of all your science textbooks in school would convince you that there were no women in the world, let alone women pursuing science.  The roles played by women – the challenges they encountered to be there – do not even find a footnote reference in the textbooks.  Rosalind Franklin, Cecilia Payne, or closer home, Dr Janaki Ammal are not even mentioned in the textbooks other than as a matter of detail. Of course, this begs the larger question of how the story of science itself is presented- devoid of the social and cultural context of science, leaving open much larger questions of how can science education be mapped to lived experiences and knowledge held by communities. Gendering the curriculum cannot ignore the need to make the curriculum diverse ad inclusive.  But that is not the subject matter of this article; let me simply suffice it to say, it is upto the teacher to bring in these perspectives into the science classroom.  

Remagining the curriculum and transforming pedagogies is of utmost importance; something an empowered teacher can and must do.  Children – girls and boys – are fascinated by the world around them and it is important to organize the science learning paths for children, set in the contexts where they are located.  Focus on building the skills of doing science is essential and the curricular experiences are to be designed to build these skills.  A simple activity like taking the students out to survey the local vegetation and document can lend itself to increasing levels of content and process complexity; not to mention the enormous self-esteem impact it will have on students when they have generated scientific knowledge.  And for girls, the very aspect of walking outside, stopping, observing and talking to someone – or building something – will have an enormous impact on their sense of self-worth. Combined meaningfully with digital tools, these processes can transform the very nature of learning in schools and open up possibilities of creation and expression. 

These are not very new insights and have been highlighted in all curricula around the world.  For this curricular vision to be realised, though, the teacher must first view herself as a student of science and claim her rightful role as the arbiter of the learning journey for her students. 

It is time we rise upto this task; it is time that everyday belongs to the girls and women in science.

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“I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him”.

The source of my angst became instantly clear to me.

The NEP has articulated the principles that the education system must be built on – a holistic education that is equitable, that is locally relevant and uses technology and places the teachers at the centre of the process. These principles are as self-evident as they are not new. Further the NEP seeks to include a part of childhood hitherto left out of school education, namely the Early childhood years, from 2- 8 years. The structure it proposes seems to follow logically from the stated objectives. At every stage the child is to be prepared for the next level. The adults – teachers and caregivers – will be trained in all the techniques needed for this. And the system will be adequately resourced for this. So, what is the seed of unrest in me due to?

The discomfort in me was not due to what the NEP has articulated but on what it has remained silent on. About creating a school environment that is not determined by hierarchy between the teacher and student. On nurturing a learning process that is supported by a trusting and respectful relationship between the participants. On the fundamental principles that govern our structure of society and its institutions. On the implicit acceptance of the current, exploitative principles of societal organization. On the automatic role that education is being asked to perform in the organization of such a society.

Education needs to originate from the local for it to be truly empowering and emancipatory. For education to liberate, the processes must create original minds, capable of thinking, questioning and exploring, fearlessly. It is not to be exclusively focused on delivering an end product of an individual who can contribute productively, but rather be a process of unfolding and flowering. The NEP is correct in its assertion that the teacher is the central element of a reformed education; but a teacher who is concerned with the society as a whole, the ecology that we are a part of and the relationships that all of us are embedded in. Literacy and numeracy and functional excellence are essential and will emerge quite naturally from this process.

The curriculum must concern itself with questions of equity – not merely in terms of opportunities and implements for learning – but from the very fundamental questions of what constitutes learning, what societal requirements are allowed to be articulated for education, what skills are deemed necessary and the relative value of these skills. Students should become aware of questions of equitable access to resources and opportunities, meaningful livelihoods and diverse knowledge systems. School education should build in children an, original mind, capable of reflecting and discerning the right action, preparing them to live a life of harmony within and with the world. In the absence of such an overarching purpose, a mere stringing together of arts and crafts and arithmetic and sciences will remain just that – an assortment of different skills.

Education is not a mere instrumentality for a productive society; the teacher is not a technician to function in “a light but tight” regulatory framework. What is needed is a very different kind of preparation of the teacher – beyond providing tools to build numeracy and literacy, beyond the mechanics of teaching a craft. It is imperative that we reclaim the intellectual autonomy for the teachers in creating meaningful, culturally responsive and affirming learning experiences for the students. Let the teachers demonstrate the the potential and necessity of the normative project of education.

If we are to produce a truly equitable society, with opportunities for all, let Gandhi’s talisman be the point where we start.

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As I was torn between distress, anger and frustration, finally, I could only think of a prayer. For forgiveness.

We have let our indulgences – of the mind and the body – overpower the natural, instinctive intelligence that all life has. We dismiss the idea that living simply is to live harmoniously. We have overlooked the richness that Nature can fill us with. We have deluded ourselves with seeking the Almighty without a connection with the living, breathing world. We have thrown to the winds the wisdom of several traditional ways of living that showed us why the collective is more important than the individual. We have lost respect for the sacredness of life.

Making me question the very basis of the claim that human beings are intelligent beings. Because, if indeed we were intelligent, surely, we could not be missing the reprimand that Nature is giving us now. We would allow ourselves to feel the connection with other sentient beings. We would not allow the market induced paradigms override what out hearts will know to be right. We would not be blind to the moments and glimpses of truth, afforded in these months of isolation, as to see what is most essential for life. We would not be restlessly waiting for a return to the normal we knew, not recognizing that to be the path to more destruction.

So, I have decided to ask for forgiveness. For our ignorance. For our arrogance. In trepidation. For the remarkable misdeeds of our species. For the childhoods we have scarred. From the rivers that we will defile more. From the forests that we are on course to destroy. From the animals and ecosystems that we will destroy on this planet that is home to all. From the air that we poison. From the unborn children whose world will be poorer for our actions.

And with a faint glimmer of hope, that we will redeem ourselves once more with that forgiveness.

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