this is an ongoing project and the details only reflect the status and reflections as of the last updated date.
As children, we all share a wonder and fascination to the world around us. We question, we react and we respond to the world around us – be it the cutting of a tree, or the loss of a pencil at school. But as we grow, mainstream education and the race for survival strips us of this wonder. We gain a mechanized language created during the Industrial Revolution, we get engulfed in technology, and then looking at the world around us becomes a distinct chore. What does this do to our perception of development, the environment and the interconnectedness of the world we live in?
This evolving framework draws from several thinkers – like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ivor Goodson, Scherto Gill, David Abram, David Shulman, Christopher Uhl – whose work is based in education and experience-based pedagogy. Rooting itself in experiences walking through Bangalore and observing the growing disconnect and the consequent lack of questioning about the de-humanization of cities, I use this process to ask what it means to teach development – an otherwise absent subject – in a school or learning space? The framework is built out of connections between readings, conversations with educators, students and parents, to try and understand how education is perceived and how that perception can be used to frame a pedagogy that is held together by themes of criticality and imagination. The hope from this framework and the resulting curricula is to build thinkers who will add change to a world that is decreasingly sensitive about the living beings (human and non-human) that share it.
This project is an ongoing one. At this stage, the project and research is summarized in an evolving framework that works as a toolkit to imagine and build specific curricula.
The above framework has been created after readings and a series of conversations with educators, students and parents of government/public school systems. It is aimed at students between a middle school and undergraduate level, and can be applied across economic and social groups and backgrounds. The specific composition of students for each curriculum would obviously differ, a single class cannot include students from both privileged and marginalized communities without a sensitization process. This framework also addresses the sensitization aspect.
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While the research began with the goal of understanding how to teach development, the conversations revealed the several social complexities and dynamics which rendered the subject itself moot — how would I teach students to see the full picture of development, if the life they lead is the ‘full picture’? I can’t go to a school teaching students displaced by a dam project, and tell them that planting trees is essential for the environment because for them, planting trees is a solution for far in the future. A home would be most essential for them, but then can I question this saying building more houses right now is damaging the environment?
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The framework is designed to be used non-linearly. It is designed for now, for a curriculum designer to use, by combining individual cards (horizontal, pastel coloured layers) across different themes (vertical, opaque background). The cards when seen in conjunction will frame a program specific to the students that the teacher teaches.