Alumni Expression

Being a Rainforest Teacher

I completed Holistic Education Fellowship recently and am about to embark on a journey of facilitation at a school. I am no teacher, but a lifelong learner and the facilitation journey will help me in this process. It is going to help me be a child again and experience the wonders of the world around me. As a child, I was a bright student and learnt things quickly. But when I joined the Holistic Education Fellowship at Bhoomi, I realised how much of joy I feltwithexperiential and community learning.

In my childhood, learning at school was by rote. The lessons were the most important and we would sit and listen to the teacher and reproduce the same without experiencing most of it.We got very good at theory, but can theory really teach you what you need to learn experientially?

I studied in a vernacular medium school, who scored good marks in English but could not speak in the very same language . In the chemistry labs, we would just follow the steps given to match our results. We were never taught or allowed to experiment! I studied civil engineering and in the first-year of engineering we learnt without ever touching a brick or mortar. Academically, all of us learnt the same things regardless of what interested, appealed, and helped us learn.I was interested in everything that came my way, but I realised that only academics wererevered, and I directed myself there.By the time I appeared  for my board exams, I had stopped playing and dancing, I guess all my friends did that too.

Let me tell you a story that I heard recently. One day, a group of children were standing in front a tree with their teacher. The teacher asked them to draw. After some time, the teacher was amazed to see that the first child had drawn a tree, while the second one had drawn a bird on the tree, the third one had drawn the sky above the tree, the fourth child couldn’t take her eyes away from the grass and the mud, while the last child was just busy listening to the birds chirping. Each child looked and engaged with different things around them differently. And isn’t it the same with all of us? We all look at the things around us differently, sense, feel and make varied meanings of what we see, hear and feel.  We are all different and this diversity makes all of us unique in our own way.If we are not so similar, how different are we?

We are like rainforests, a place that thrives on biodiversity. Although rainforests cover less than 2% of earth’s surface, they are inhabited by around 50% of all life on the planet’s land masses. This huge biodiversity survives by evolving in their niche ways and helping each other in the process. Children are also growing, learning constantly.  And to allow them to blossom as unique beings, we need to facilitate a thriving atmosphere like the rainforest. Where each one is allowed ‘To Be’ and to evolve in ways they can carve out their own niche and thrive together supporting and helping each other in the process.

Children enjoy their uniqueness, till we start measuring them with the standardized examination yardstick. Like I did to myself, it is disheartening to see so many children equating themselves to their examination scores and adults equating their self-worth to the money they earn.

Today, I am a homemaker and an educator, but many a times I am tempted to put forth my educational qualifications to ensure I am not considered any less than others. We all are so much more, above and beyond these incomplete systemic yardsticks. We are unfolding with every new experience; we are growing into our own being, our nature all the time.

We experience the world with our senses, make sense of it along with any past memory we hold, and these experiences become our knowledge base.  We need to honour different intelligences, strengths and learning abilities in children. This calls for a Multiple Intelligences approach. Multiple intelligences recognise different ways in which we engage with the world. For ex. Visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic etc. And we each have our own combination of these intelligences, about how we engage and learn. Do schools keep these intelligences in mind when they engage with children?

We do not learn only from  people of the same age. However, we learn from everyone around us. We learnt language as children by listening and copying our family members, we learnt from our grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, their families. The world around us is filled with people from different backgrounds, different places, different traditions, and cultures. Our worlds are full of diversity. And we learn from this diverse and mixed age society.

I wonder as a facilitator how do I facilitate varied experiences that will help children draw out their unique gifts and potentials and build a resilient interdependent community.

Engaging with Processes in Learning

I had experienced learning as a very linear, outcome driven task in my school and college. Hence, last year in the pursuit of reconnecting with my own learning needs and to experience alternate education, I joined Bhoomi College as a Holistic Education Fellow.

At Bhoomi, we started our day with Hands on Learning where we engaged in different activities for an hour. Toiling in the farm, cleaning our learning spaces and making juice for everyone helped me reconnect with my food, privileges, and value dignity of labour in a way in which no classroom or textbook can teach.

Few tools which we were introduced to like Strengths Theory, Belbin Team roles and Multiple Intelligence etc. helped me operate from a space of my strengths, capabilities and learning style, and most importantly value the whole of me and not just few of my CV skills. It made me acknowledge and nurture my uniqueness.

One of major learnings from Bhoomi has been on process perception. Process perception helps one look at things not just from their utility but from a lens of time, space and quality. Say a packet of chips has utility as an object of refreshment but from a lens of process perception, one can engage with questions like where it came from, where will it finally end up, the quality and nutritive value of its contents etc.

Process perception as a tool helped me engage with my lifestyle choices more meaningfully, work with my relationships from a space of understanding and connection and relook at my work choices. My focus has been to see what kind of quality my choices offer and residues they leave for me, my community and my planet.

My bhoomi experience can be summed up as sitting in a Circle Time where I listen to multiple perspectives, acknowledge my feelings and that of others, engage with important issues, listen to hidden stories which wouldn’t surface otherwise and most importantly, learn holistically and then act from a space of agency.

Going back to education and learning, an article I read in which, a US based developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik book title, The Gardener and the Carpenter is an apt metaphor to explain the job of a parent/ teacher shouldn’t be of a carpenter who is chiseling a child perfectly rather be of a gardener who is creating a safe, nurturing environment for a child to explore its potential and the possibilities that the world offers.

References

The Guardian - The Gardner and the Carpenterby Alison Gopnik Review

Holistic Thinking

In 2019-20, I was a Sustainable Living fellow at Bhoomi College in Bangalore. As the fellowship neared completion, for the first time in my life, I felt I did not want the learning to stop. As the fellows put together their year-end presentations, I wondered why I had enjoyed this experience so much more than any of my previous educational experiences. Why did this learning feel so complete?

As I reminisced about everything that we had done during the fellowship, I realized what a beautifully designed curriculum it had been! A truly holistic approach that made learning such an enjoyable process. The word holistic, in its simplest terms, is to ‘look at the whole and not in parts’. Or to give your attention to an entire process, not just focus on the end result. We are awakening to the need to adopt this holistic approach in many fields: medicine, management, lifestyle and especially education.

Today, most of our mainstream education focus on students’ mental abilities, reading and writing skills. There is a rigid curriculum that needs to be completed, a certain pressure when it comes to excelling at examinations and assignments. While this system has been efficient at creating educated people with a set of desired proficiencies, the teaching methods have not paid adequate attention to recognizing and promoting the diversity of talents of every individual. To impart holistic education, the curriculum in educational spaces needs to encompass the mind, body and the emotional well-being of the individual.

At Bhoomi College, diversity was not only accepted but celebrated. Each of us was recognized as an individual with unique talents and gifts. Time was invested on activities that led to strengthening of relationships with each other, which in turn built a strong sense of community within the group of fellows. Learning happened primarily through conversations and exchange of ideas rather than a lecturer doing all the talking. Learning was also collaborative rather than competitive. Everyone got a chance to shine, as each did what s/he was best at. In addition to classroom teaching, our learnings were always paired with hands-on work and field visits.

We had an extensive food and farming module as food forms the backbone of sustainability. Nearly 15 – 20 farmers came in as facilitators to share their experience of what it is to grow food. We went on 3-day visit to a 20-acre farm and actually tilled the land and learnt farming techniques with an organic farmer. When you experience a subject up close you start seeing the processes that are involved in it. And when you feel, you do. You care enough to make an effort. Then it is no longer just an intellectual act. Armed with this awareness, we are more likely to respond to the plight of the farmers and also value the food that is on the plate. As consumers, we will make choices that will not deprive farmers of their livelihoods. Inspired by the first-hand experience, many of us from the batch have started growing food in our terraces and balconies!

This pattern of learning was consistent throughout the fellowship. Be it water, waste, textiles, soil, energy or even communication/journalism. It was primarily making connections, joining the dots and experiencing things ourselves. We were not thinking of grades or exams or who was going to top the class. It’s difficult to top anyone if you sit in a circle and not in rows. There was a lot of rigor required but most of it came from within. Fellows immersed themselves in to aspects of the curriculum that they well felt driven to pursue. Nobody felt inadequate as there was acceptance of our differences and value for our individual abilities.

Isn’t this how education should be, I thought to myself. Should we not focus on creating individuals who are part of the process but in a way that they do not jeopardize the delicate balance of the system? Holistic education from an early age will make us holistic thinkers in all that we do. To think holistically, there needs to be a degree of awareness, curiosity and ingrained compassion. Moulded by this philosophy, it would become a natural state of mind for a person to evaluate the implications of one’s choices in everything that s/he does.

A holistic thinker thinks not only of personal growth, but also on one’s personal relations, on society, on the weakest link in the chain, on the environment, on the present and on the future.

Seeing Beyond the Visible

We are surrounded by things. Take a minute and mentally go through all the things - instruments, utensils, cosmetics, furniture - that you have used since the morning. A minute won’t be enough! We take the presence of things in our life for granted. Need water? Here’s a bottle. Hungry? Buy one of the thousands of immediately consumable products - just open and eat. Need a new dress? Go online and you can order not just clothes but almost anything under the sun. Everything is so attainable, so easily delivered at your doorstep, provided you can afford it of course. This convenience has certainly made our lives easier but it has also made us very reckless with how we treat those very things.

When we look at a piece of furniture, let’s say a chair, we are more likely to see the colour of the cushions on it, the shine of the wood polish, the pillows on the back and the angles of the joints. Now look at a chair in your house and try to see the tree that it came from, the axe that dealt a fatal blow to it, the carpenter who crafted that wood into the chair, the cotton in the soft cushioning of the chair, the field it has come from, the hands that plucked it, and wove it into thread, the loom that made the pretty texture you find oh so comfy, the colours that dyed the textile into the one you see in front of you (perhaps a little faded from use). See the labour and hours that have gone into putting all this together across so many parts of the county, maybe even the world, so that you have a chair to sit on. Do you think you will ever be able to see that chair the same way again? As just an object, one of a set of 2 or 4 or 6?

This is the difference between just looking at something and perceiving an object versus seeing beyond the visible at the processes that have gone into the making of the object. You can take this exercise a step further and think about what happens to the chair after it becomes old and rickety or goes out of fashion or you simply decide it’s time for some new furniture. It goes out with the trash. Maybe a kabadiwala* takes it home, maybe the garbage truck does. It sits in a landfill now. A few decades later it’s still there, the polish on the wood and the dye on the cushions leaching toxic chemicals into the soil, the wood never having a chance to decompose as more and more garbage is added to the pile, the cotton of the cushioning salvaged long ago by waste pickers to get a nominal price for it. Will you still throw it in the trash? Will you now use it for as long as you can, show the rickety joints some love and care and make them sturdy again? Will you at least donate it so that someone less fortunate than you can add some furniture to their little home?

We forget so easily how the things we use and take for granted that the product need labour of dozens of people and was made from raw materials that have taken nature eons to grow. Today, it is more likely that the chair came from a plantation and a machine instead of a forest and a carpenter’s handiwork. This is part of the reason why it is so easy to disconnect ourselves from our things, because everything is mass produced and nothing is special. This makes me wonder about people though, how we see each other. We are all products of a factory-like education system, conditioned to strive to one ideal. Just like our chairs, we have forgotten that we can be special and maybe that’s why it is so easy to not smile at strangers, to not be affected by the cruelty in the world nor be moved by tales of love and joy.

Take a minute and stand before a mirror. Look into your eyes. What would life be like if you were able to see, really see the history, the struggles, the highs and the lows that have gone into making the beautiful human being that stands in front of you?

*kabaadiwalas are people who go door to door with little hand-drawn carts to collect reusable or recyclable items. This is how they make their living, although they are now becoming a rare sight in urban India.

Walking the Talk

My aim of interning with SWMRT (Solid Waste Management Round Table) was to understand sustainable decentralized solid waste management practices in residential communities. As part of the internship I had the opportunity to visit multiple waste processing centres to learn and observe the processes implemented there and the challenges faced in sustaining them. For all the visits I was the only team member there which not only made me solely responsible for documentation and research but also allowed me to explore freely at my own pace and on my own terms. During this journey I interacted with multiple stakeholders; from the ones ideating waste management models to the ones working on the ground in implementing them. It was quite inspiring to know their stories and the persistence required to continue with the projects. The interactions helped me to engage with my fear of conversing with new set of people and pushed me out of my comfort zone while trying to set the ground for establishing connect within limited time. It was encouraging and heartening to observe that with every visit I could be at ease a little more. Over time, the questions I asked and the observations I made evolved which helped me to assimilate information provided in a more wholesome manner.

This exposure and experience has been rewarding not just in terms of the technical know-how of the topic at hand but also helped me grow personally. There was a heightened sense of conscience and empathy by the end of the internship journey for me. Through my interactions with the BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike) workers, I realized that a sizeable proportion of them were migrants. Most of them were into agriculture back home but due to lack of rains and other realities of modern day agriculture, they had ended up in Bangalore, primarily in search of opportunities that could provide them with some income. It was disheartening to see the conditions in which they had to work and how little gratitude was extended to them given the pivotal role they play in keeping our city clean. Sometimes at the cost of their health. All these first-hand experiences made me cognizant of my privilege and how be more mindful of the consumption choices that I make.

I believe that sustainable waste management does not feature highly in our government’s priorities. The hope therefore is the citizens’ groups I encountered during my visits take up the responsibility of coming up with solutions to tackle waste in their communities, implement them in collaboration with BBMP and monitor regularly to sustain them. They should also work with the government to take necessary action and hold them accountable.

Having seen the current state of affairs and the scope of work required in the waste management sector, my drive to create awareness and work has been reinforced and renewed. I was glad that I could bring in the idea of ‘slowing down’ during this internship into my work while being conscious about not compromising on meeting deadlines and commitments. Overall, the internship for a fruitful and positive experience that I would recommend to others interested in waste management.