Towards a Curriculum for ‘Belonging’
“Which are the three main rivers which flow through Chennai?” I’ve asked this question during various interactions with educators and students in schools and colleges in the city. A large majority cannot name Adyar, Kotralaiyar and Cooum, the hydrologies around which the city of Chennai grew. Nor can most of the public name ten common trees they see in their surroundings. This is not to criticise children or people of course, who learn within and fit into existing social constructs. Most mainstream schools follow a centralised education curriculum. A committee in Delhi sits and decides what children across a diverse landscape like India learn in their classrooms - from Tamil Nadu, to Rajasthan, from Assam to Ladakh. The result of such an educational structure driven by the interests of the free market, and large corporate employers, is one which psychologist Allen Kanner reveals - that children by the age of 10 can recognise over 300 brands and logos. But not trees, rivers, insects, and aspects of the biosphere, land and people we actually have a relationship with. These are structurally not part of conversations, our imagination or the predominant experiences of a city-school going child. Perhaps we underestimate the contribution of mainstream schooling and university towards the different global crises present in the modern world.
Pinar, in his book ‘Curriculum studies in India’, describes how the pedagogy followed in most of the country is geared towards ‘producing efficient test-takers and efficient, docile employees’.
I find the core problem with formal education is that it practices a pedagogy of ‘ex-habitation’. Not inhabitation. It trains us to ‘exhabit’ - by which I mean to ignore the connections we have with our unique landscape and live as external entities, users, consumers. Pinar, in his book ‘Curriculum studies in India’, describes how the pedagogy followed in most of the country is geared towards ‘producing efficient test-takers and efficient, docile employees’. Land then becomes a surface to make profit, not a living home to belong to or have undetachable roots in. I’ll give an example of an inhabitant versus exhabitant world-making. I have been travelling along the shoreline of Tamil Nadu a lot during the past few years, to document coastal biodiversity, local knowledge of artisanal fisherfolk and threats to these landscapes. A trawler net which scrapes the ocean bed, catches and kills every living thing in the water is an ‘exhabitant’ creation. It is neither practiced nor made by communities who live and ‘belong’ to the coast. Rather it is used by entities that come to the sea purely for commerce. ‘Inhabitant’ creations you will find among small scale fisherfolk – small boats, catamarans, nets woven specifically for mackerel, squid, sardine, a system of seasonal and temporal bans on fishing, practice of traditional fish aggregating devices which replenish their waters. These are knowledge-systems and inventions which have emerged from ‘belonging’.
We are seeing a curious phenomenon as the Covid pandemic clutches cities and shakes them by their foundations. It is the deep-seated state of denial in which conventional education has lodged itself into. Private and privileged schools and universities are putting in every effort and cost to continue teaching the same old things in the same old fashion but having now jumped into a virtual medium – for children who can afford it. While the pandemic itself has been scientifically attributed to the lack of respect for ecological integrity - it doesn’t seem to have instigated a reimagining of what then is important to learn about and experience, to inhabit and belong to the land.
I emplace my work as an educator primarily as a wisdom-seeker. To shift away from an education system we have inherited from a colonial vision, we have to seek wisdom elsewhere. How to ‘inhabit’ is more or less at the core of the philosophies and living principles of indigenous communities who have lived in their lands, forests, rivers, mountains, coasts in deep reciprocity for ages. And this exists also in the hundreds of counter-streams and alternative spaces/practices which have emerged in India and across the world.
Relational Education
Sonam Wangchuk, the founder of the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, often tells the story of how a centralized curriculum made no sense to the children of Ladakh – something he went on to change and revolutionize. Even the alphabets they learnt, he would say, would refer to objects and places entirely absent and alien to the Himalayan landscape. SECMOL (Student’s Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) and HIAL, started by Sonam, are not conventional institutions, but are places to pursue practical, environmental, social and traditional knowledge, values and skills. The campuses are solar powered and solar heated; students learn ancient Ladakhi songs, dance and its history alongside modern academic knowledge; and the campus is largely maintained and run by the students. In 1988 when he set up SECMOL its sole criteria for joining was failure in the Class 10 examinations. At the time 95% of Ladakhi children failed these exams, which Sonam attributes to the sheer irrelevance of the curriculum they studied to their environment, culture and lives.
Circle of Relationships highlights how learning can be based more on our relationships with ourselves, our land, place and people.
Centralized schools and universities function in a way to create what we can call ‘irrelationships’. The hacking away or the artificial masking of our existing inextricable relationships with our land, place, people. I see broadly five different kinds of ‘irrelationships’ conventional education perpetuates – irrelationship with oneself (mind, body, inner self), with community and society, with Earth/biosphere/land, the irrelationships between subjects/disciplines and the major one between its idea of ‘learning’ and actual engagement and participation with the real world. The Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, wrote a couplet 2000 years ago, saying ‘True wisdom grows when our lives/learning is in direct engagement with the real world’ (Kural 426). An artisanal fisher boy on the coast of Chennai by the time he is between three and five years of age begins to accompany his father, uncles, and siblings on their boats into the sea. The ocean, weather, sky, tides, dolphins are his most important teachers. Second-hand knowledge from books and screens simulating reality are far less so.
The ocean, weather, sky, tides, dolphins are the most important teachers to a fisher boy like The Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar rightly said, ‘True wisdom grows when our lives/learning is in direct engagement with the real world’.
In her essay ‘Land as Pedagogy’ Nishnabeg writer and educator Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers us an educational philosophy from her first nations’ community for the times we live in – Akinoomage. ‘Aki’ is land/Earth. ‘Noomage’ is to seek guidance or draw wisdom from. This principle asks us to see the biosphere we are part of, as a source of essential wisdom and deep direction, radically differing from the capitalist colonial perception which commodifies and de-animates it. Tewa educator Gregory Cajete, in his profound book ‘Look to the Mountain’, underlines this as one among the 24 principles of indigenous education. He says, “Observing how things happen in the natural world is the basis of some of the most ancient and spiritually profound teachings of Indigenous cultures. Nature is the first teacher and model of process. Learning how to see Nature enhances our capacity to see other things”. What could such a principle lend and mean for a contemporary school?
First is a need for a ‘relational education’; place-based and land-based. This means, that in an extraordinarily diverse country like India, a centralized curriculum is an eco-cultural erasure. There needs to be, instead, a hundred different syllabi and curricula sensitive to and rooted in place, geography, and culture.
In the vision of Marudam farm school in Tiruvannamalai, ‘First and foremost, nature education is a way of life rather than something being learnt as a subject’. A prominent part of their curriculum is for every child to spend half a day every week on the Tiruvannamalai hill. At Marudam, as in several other alternative institutions like Bhoomi College in Bangalore, Puvidham school in Nagarkoodal - growing one’s own food is a core philosophy towards a curriculum based on relationship with land and community. The Farm2Food Foundation is another great example, which has helped set up nutrition gardens for over 446 schools in Assam. This is perhaps the key practice needed in education to reverse a consumerist culture, which lies at the centre of the climate crisis. At Tolstoy farm, where Gandhi’s vision for swaraj shaped itself, he practiced and urged people to grow their own food as a political statement and value. Now an Anna Swaraj movement grows strong in different parts of India - through the work of Navdanya, Deccan Development Society, Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture and many others - to unshackle our dependence for food and seeds on large corporations. Not the least of this is the recent farmer protests at the capital against the farm laws, which were drafted to further push the privatization of food in India.
Growing one’s own food is a core philosophy towards a curriculum based on relationship with land and community.
The name given to the philosophy practiced by the indigenous people of ancient India is Lokayata. Lokayata translates to ‘people’s philosophy’ in Sanskrit.Their living principles integrated spirit, intellect, and physical labour, with equal value and honour. They celebrated community solidarity. Historian Debiprasad Chakraborty writes about how Lokayata rejected the caste-system and religious hegemony, millennia ago. Their resistance brought widespread recrimination of them by Savarna societies. This philosophy can speak vast wisdom into the present times – ecologically, socio-politically, spiritually. But most importantly it is a bottom-up materialistic belief system (Bin Kamal, 2020) – that is, its sacrality is meshed in the material/sensorial world of water, air, forest, land, animals, and plants. The sacred was the immediate and integrated physical reality, not an abstraction beyond this world or in an afterlife. This year, I introduced some Adivasi folktales to the elementary children of my school, published by Adivaani. Adivaani is a publication house started by Ruby Hembron who herself is from the Santhal tribe. Reading these stories one comes to understand how story-telling, folklore and ways of creating knowledge is different when one lives as an inhabitant in one’s place. The living creatures, the insects, the skies, the rivers are a part of one’s extended identity. One’s sense of selfhood stretches strangely and vastly beyond single entities into the intricacies of one’s geography and native ecology. In the creation story of the Santhal tribe, Has-hasil birds (Geese) bore the first humans in their eggs. Earthworm, turtle and the deities made the Earth together. In a Nimari story, the first human couple originate from the clay inside a crab hole. In a Melghati folktale termites lend God the mud from which humans could be made. In Gondi cosmology, Earthworms are the eternal protectors and custodians of the Earth. The Great Andamanese believe that bamboo, among their primary toolmaking materials, birthed humans from its culm. The word for first human in their language - Phertajido - means 'born of bamboo'. In another Andaman folktale called Jiro Mithe, seabirds were once fisherfolk and the ancestors of their people.
Learning through folktales- Story-telling, folklore and ways of creating knowledge is different when one lives as an inhabitant in one’s place. The living creatures, the insects, the skies, the rivers are a part of one’s extended identity. One’s sense of selfhood stretches strangely and vastly beyond single entities into the intricacies of one’s geography and native ecology.
Reciprocal Learning
A colleague was telling me recently about her experience in a reputed University in Hyderabad where she did her Masters in Women Studies. Her learning about the subject, she said, was rather minimal from her professors. She learnt most from conversations and the experiences, stories, pain, and wisdom exchanged during her interactions with her batchmates and other students, who came from a wide range of social backgrounds. This was also the experience of her friends and in resonance with my own life experiences as well. Learning, in most cases, is a reciprocal act – an exchange, meeting, sharing, interaction. Very rarely an instruction. But this is a prevalent myth in formal education. I see this as a generic phenomenon during the workshops I do for colleges in Chennai. In the presence of their professors, students are silent and very reticent to participate or share their view. In their absence, more often than not, the sessions are livelier. Hierarchy creates passivity amidst learners, while egality fosters proactive participation. Interestingly, in the Maori culture, Ako means both ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, and emphasized that the teacher isn’t the fountain of knowledge but that every being is an equal participant in the vast conversation of learning. This idea is a shift in the political axis of education. Knowledge making happens within, and is influenced by its socio-political contexts. The problem with vertically constituted institutions of knowledge – which means that it is latently fixed that one kind of knowing is superior to another – is that it is practiced and controlled by those at the top and imposed upon those at the bottom. Moreover, they become rigid and stagnant, highly resistant to evolution. They get written in stone and scriptures and then very often live on far beyond their relevance. A horizontal knowledge-making-sharing culture creates a participatory and spacious soil. Healthy knowledge-systems are egalitarian fields of reciprocal learning. They are constantly evolving, moving forward, questioning, rethinking, shedding what has lost relevance, preserving what is timeless.
The whole history of sociological research in India shows that unequal power relations is the strongest facilitator of injustice. Vertical/unequal power relations – between students and teachers, senior and junior employees, children and adults, men and non-men, between castes or different groups of people, creates the right political soil for many forms of harassment or violence in schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces.
So, what does egality look like, in a learning atmosphere?
The School for Democracy or Loktantrashala in a village called Badi Ka Badiya in Rajasthan grew out of the experience and learning of people’s socio-economic political mobilisation. It came about through the efforts of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan started by Aruna Roy. Its vision is to enable ordinary citizens to assert their rights and use democratic spaces to access constitutional guarantees; including workers’ and women’s rights, the right to information, the right to work.’ SFD provides specialized courses such as ‘Indian Constitution’, ‘Public Policy’, ‘Social Activism’, ‘Caste and Discrimination’, and ‘Law and Poverty’. It also has a programme dedicated for young and upcoming activists called the Democracy Fellowship programme – which aims to support initiatives and efforts of grassroots activists, groups and organisations, in the broad areas of governance, participatory democracy, accountability, and empowerment of marginalised communities within a constitutional framework.
Manish Jain, the co-founder of Swaraj University, identifies careerism and degreeism as one of the major detriments of university education, in the coerced pursuit of which young people are disconnected from real world issues, and from building capacities to engage with them. This is largely because most institutions of higher education are designed to create employees for global corporations and industries – massive ‘exhabitant’ entities. He says that moving away from degrees and certificates is an important step towards ‘reducing the power and control that centralized institutions have over our lives’. Swaraj university follows the Khoji system – where the learning experience of the Khoji (meaning explorer in Hindi) is self-designed around creating learning journeys, diverse experiences, apprenticeships, and peer to peer learning. In 2018 Swaraj also started the Jail University in Udaipur Central Jail. Its purpose is to help inmates explore their passions, gain practical skills, and re-ignite self-esteem, leadership and life vision in the face of the numerous challenges of incarcerated life. The inmates are invited and supported to design their own personalised learning programs based on their interests and needs.
Pathashaala is a residential campus under the Krishnamurti Foundation India, where I stayed and independently did my high school and degree through distance education while also working there, over 5 years back. The campus is solar lit, designed with earth conscious architecture and has only dry toilets. The community produces not a single drop of black water (water contaminated with human waste) because of this.What is also beautiful about it is its culture of egality. There are no teachers and students here. There are only educator-learners and learner-educators, and this applies to all the members of the community including the non-teaching staff, kitchen staff, farming staff and so on. During mealtimes, meetings, discussions, all of the community sit together, eat together, and live together through the daily activities of the school. Such a cross-pollinatory culture I learned to value later on when witnessing marked systemic segregations in several places which not just perpetuated social inequality but didn’t have the knowledge-sharing and collaborative thinking which cultures of egality fostered.
In any living system a deep ecological principle which is indicative of its health and resilience, is diversity. The same could be said about human society as well. Inclusive spaces host a diversity of people, capacities, and perspectives. Egality also implies systemically creating space for multiplicity and self-discovery. I am learning through my interactions with senior children in grades 11 and 12 that their energy and resourcefulness is phenomenal without exception when their education is linked to the expansion of their social identities and discovering one’s authentic self. Maria Montessori echoes this in her Erd-Kinder philosophy for adolescent children where girls and boys live in a residential campus, work with the soil and engage in its everyday upkeep and management. This practice has been there in the Muria/Gondi and Naga tribal societies , for centuries. The tradition of the ‘youth dormitory’ has been at the centre of their culture – known as Morungs among the Nagas and Ghotuls among the Gonds. Here adolescent girls and boys live together and practice the transition into adult life, taking up responsibilities in the community and upholding its cultural values.
The role and the power of egality in the evolution of a community’s collective intelligence, are reflected in many examples. It allows learning to happen in multiple directions.
The National Inclusive Children’s Parliament is a brilliant initiative by Pratyek – an organisation working towards protecting and promoting children’s rights in India. A crucial way in which they are doing this is by creating a platform for them to speak and to be heard – acknowledging that young people have agency, voice and important perspectives and ideas to share. In 2020 this children’s parliament told the Indian government after it had released its budget that it was not just important to grant children in India ‘Right to Education’ but to actually allocate funds for it, pointing out that the budget for child education in India had been decreasing.
‘Reciprocal Learning’ also means to recognise the intrinsic capacity of children and youth as change-makers in society. The pandemic situation was capitalised by Indian authorities to pass controversial laws and clearances – for the ‘ease of doing business’ – at a time when the public could not protest. These were the 40 NBWL clearances in protected areas, the Draft EIA 2020, anti-farmer laws, mining law amendments, and so on. Massive dissent to the centre’s capitalisation of the lockdown was largely spearheaded by youth movements across the country - like Fridays for Future India, Yugma Network, Adivasi Students’ Forum, Let India Breathe, Extinction Rebellion, etc. This daunted the Ministers and public authorities. It made them push policy review deadlines further, cancel some clearances approved in National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries, as well as slap the notorious Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on some youth groups. Through such reactions, communicating that young people were not welcome to be part of the political decision making process.
‘Reciprocal Learning’ also means to recognise the intrinsic capacity of children and youth as change-makers in society.
So, this is a question all learning institutions need to deeply consider. What are all the ways in which we can systemically practice ‘reciprocal learning’? How can we make egality a core value in our philosophy of education, as well as our politics?
Embodied Learning
Evolutionarily speaking, our bodies are forests, are wildernesses. Billions of years ago the ancestors of our living cells decided to live together as community so that they could survive better, express better, do more. Our identities arise from a murmuration of cellular and microbial living entities who have decided in deep-time to live as a community. This is a biological truth. The structure of formal education goes against this – valuing intellect over various other capacities and intelligences of the body – practicing literally a kind of top-down capitalism over it. One more of its myths is that it equates ‘sitting’ to ‘learning’, and ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’. C.A. Bowers is an educator who has investigated how conventional education curricula contributes to our ecological crisis. He identifies as one of the central issues of the dominant schooling system as that of it being purely 'intellectual'. Intellect alone - disembodied - perceives the world as distinct objects, events, entities, facts; not as networks of relationships and reciprocities. Exercise of intellect alone - which is the basis of rote learning - brings about the ignorance of the deep relatedness of the real world.
‘Embodied Learning’ is where ‘knowledge-making’, ‘learning’ is a total visceral immersive action, not just a figment of intellect. Gandhi asked “Why should you think that the mind is everything and the hands and feet nothing? ”K.B. Jinan, the founder of the Existential Knowledge Foundation in India recognizes this and emphasizes on the importance of sensing, being and feeling, far more than ‘knowing’. He says that pedagogies driving mere ‘knowing’ are detrimental to the holistic growth of the human being as then the ‘world’ is replaced with the ‘word’.
What would practices of ‘embodied learning’ look like? This is a difficult question to ask and tackle during a pandemic which has further disembodied our interactions with people and places.
I am part of running the Songlines Farm school programme near Chennai, Tamil Nadu. We call our curriculum the ‘Earth, Farm and Society’ curriculum. One of the principles we hold very closely is the ‘head-hand-heart’ principle. In all the lessons and activities we plan and do, we try to make sure that there is a synergy of head (intellect/reason), heart (affect/emotion) and hand (direct action/application). This falls within our core set of values, which is the wellbeing of the child, community, and the Earth. This curriculum runs from primary school (starting at 5 years of age) till grade 11 and 12 where the programme is oriented towards citizenship, where children learn to use the RTI Act, get familiar with laws, initiate and run campaigns for issues which they are concerned about.
Many years ago, I happened to visit the Vidyodaya Adivasi school in Gudalur, in the Nilgiris. I sat in a class where an Adivasi elder was speaking about elephants and their wanderings in the nearby villages, and how to live with them. He was speaking in the Betta Kurumba Adivasi language. Around five different Adivasi communities live in these forests. The philosophy of the school closely integrates Adivasi culture and knowledge systems with its curriculum – through learning stories and songs, handicrafts, farming, foraging, cooking and other life skills. The instruction is also in one of the Adivasi languages, and teachers are required to learn them to teach here. I remember learning two songs here in Paniya language, which I can still sing. The Cuckoo forest school in Singarapettai, Tamil Nadu and the Imlee Mahua school in Balenga, Chattisgarh, function along similar principles, integrating Adivasi wisdom and their way of life, into a contemporary school atmosphere. Vigyan Ashram in Pabal, Pune, and ‘University of Life’ in Sindhugurh, Maharashtra, are two other institutions whose thrust of learning revolves entirely around ‘doing’ – learning to build things, repair, grow - in direct contact with real life situations.
Rarely is a holistic pedagogy able to enter mainstream schools and sustain itself. But a beautiful example of this is the ‘Happiness Curriculum’ put together by the State council of Education research and training, Delhi, for all the government schools in the capital. Its intent was to address the fact that India was among the world’s least happiest countries – ranking 133 out of 155 according to the World Happiness report of 2018. The syllabus is from kindergarten till Class 8 and includes regular lessons and activities every week to develop skills of mindfulness, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, reflection, interpersonal relationships, kindness and so on.
Learning from these many ‘reimaginings’ can expand the spaces of learnings and work we create - integrating our heads, hands, and hearts. What social constructs would this reimagining shift? What would be the ones we’d have to shed and let go, to learn to belong and live as inhabitants? These are the significant questions we need to ask ourselves, in the journey towards a robust curriculum for Belonging.
Towards a Curriculum for ‘Belonging’ considers the wellbeing of the Earth, Child, and Community to be the central educational values. It involves Place-based and Land-based learning – curriculum that is deeply rooted in local ecology, landscape, and culture. Egality and horizontal learning interactions are key processes in the structures of schools and universities. Syllabi actively inculcates values of democracy, social and ecological justice. It has deep respect for different kinds of knowledge systems; various ways of knowing, seeing, and meaning making. It integrates the head-hand-heart in all disciplines. Head (reason, intellect), Hand (action, application), Heart (affect, emotion). It respects diversity – diversity of learning styles, social backgrounds, identities, expression, interests, etc. Intersectionality and inclusivity are the core value of learning institutions. Learning is not in abstraction but in direct contact with the real world. And it works towards dissolving the 5 irrelationships created by and prevalent in formal education.
Written by Yuvan Aves
Illustrated by Avinash Karn, Sarwari Begum Sameema Parween, Rahmati Khatoon, Sajiya Bushra and Saleha Sheikh from Studio Artbole
Yuvan Aves is a writer, naturalist, educator and activist based in Chennai. His interests include reimagining an Earth-centric and child-centric education in schools, the reciprocity between languages and ecologies, and ground-up processes of change and politics. He writes on topics at the intersection of ecology, education, and human/more-than-human consciousness. He is the author of two books, recipient of the M.Krishnan Memorial Nature Writing Award and the Sanctuary Asia Green Teacher Award. He is currently traveling and documenting stories of biodiversity, people and change along the Indian coastline
Studio ArtBole engages with rural artists and is a space of creative learning, open dialogue & collaborative painting around lived experiences. Founded by Avinash Karn, an artist from Ranti village, Madhubani, Bihar – the ancient region of Mithila where women have been practicing the ritual art of painting for a long time, the studio has chosen to take up Madhubani's eloquent art form to greater heights.
Sajiya Bushra is 18 years old and always wanted to learn Madhubani Painting but hesitated to join a class since drawing figures is frowned upon in her community. With her parents’ support, Saleha is not just learning to draw but is also using her art to address social evils like domestic violence in her village.
Sameema Parween from Sheikh Toli near Ranti village believes art is a powerful tool of transform societies. She is 19 years old and loves to dance and paint.
Sarwari Begum from Madhubani is 20 years old. She and is interested in tailoring and painting along with reading books on history.
Rahmati Khatoon lives in Sheikhtoli near Ranti. She is 22 years old and often paints to be part of social reformation of her community.
Saleha Sheikh is 17 years old and paints for fun. Her background in tailoring and as a mehendi artist often influences her paintings.