Teaching at an ashram school in a small village in Kodagu/Coorg gave me a lot of opportunities to implement outdoor education and understand the benefits and challenges of implementing it at the curricular and pedagogical level. While this experience gave me insights into the life of adivasi students and challenges they faced at school because of the stereotypes and social hierarchies in the society (explained in my previous blog), it also gave me opportunities to really understand what it means to implement 'place-based learning'.
To begin with let me explain place-based learning, it means:
'Using the place as an educational resource. It not only involves being in the place physically, but also using the place effectively, and all its elements in the learning process.'
This is at a pedagogical level, where you use a place in the teaching learning process. At a curricular level, place-based learning would mean using the place as your starting point to determine what I will teach my learners. Simply put, this means I first need to find out where my learners come from, what is their landscape, what is their context when I design and implement the curriculum.
While a Masters course and the research project exposes you to the theory and ground realities to some extent, it is only when you become a practitioner will you realise what it actually means to implement it at a government school given the challenges of resources, and social structures within which the school and the administration operates.
Slowly, as I understood the background of the kids, and their interests, I started tweaking the curriculum to suit their context. Some examples are including their traditional songs in the class and deriving meaning out of that. I noticed that many of their traditional songs were filled with rich descriptions of the ecology of the place. Isn't it fun to learn ecology through songs and through their own traditional songs? Another example includes a project where students developed a guide for the plants in their landscape by collecting the leaves of each plant and providing insights on how the plant is used in the community. As a 'teacher' I was helping them supplement their existing knowledge with other details of the plant that was available out there in the internet, for example, helping them with the scientific name etc. These are two examples of how being with these students helped me gain a better understanding of 'place-based learning' and shaped my role as an educator.
Also, I had always held a dream of being an entrepreneur since a teenager, mainly the effect of reading so many stories of entrepreneurs - their struggles, success, and happiness of starting something on their own. What excited me was starting something from scratch. I love the excitement of implementing an idea, and finding different approaches to make it work. And this is how I started Happily Outdoors, with an idea to give 'nature deprived' urban children opportunities to spend time in forests, farms, and learn from people who live there.
So, soon after my teaching fellowship at Kodagu, I started working on setting up Happily Outdoors. I completely enjoyed designing the activities, and working with children who came to our camps/outdoor learning programme, and local people! The best part was I got to directly interact with parents and listen to their aspirations from the outdoor learning programmes and making those a part of our desired outcomes. I also liked the fact that the same set of kids chose to come back to us each vacation for the outdoor learning programme giving us an opportunity to continuously engage with them and see their growth through our programmes. Here again I used place-based learning to help my learners with urban context gain a better understanding of the ecology of the place, the people, and their culture.
Through the outdoor learning programmes, I could give opportunities for children to have fun exploring the environment, challenge their fears associated with nature for example fear of insects, fear of the unknown in the nature, challenge their own perception of their limitations, conversations to give and take new perspectives from each other, respect and gratitude for people who take care of them when they are away from home, including the environment that nourishes them with pure water, air, and greenery. What I really love about this programme is how children bond with people from the village who work along with us during the programme, developing that mutual respect, love and care for each other.
My biggest challenge has been to reach out to parents in the initial days. We tried giving out pamphlets in malls, in front of schools, etc. but I have realised that only when parents are invested and actively looking out for such programmes only then they actually enrol their kids for the programmes. So it wasn't worth standing out there in the malls, etc. handing out pamphlets because they are not my audience. What really worked for us was word of mouth. Do good work and people will obviously refer you to other parents. And now we have an amazing bunch of parents who truly believe in what we do and support us. All these experiences motivated me to get trained for conducting biodiversity walks and it increased my confidence and deepen my knowledge about different trees in the urban/rural landscapes. And I organised me first biodiversity walk at Jakkur lake for parents and children in Bangalore, and I have written about this exciting experience in my previous blog.
I was able to successfully organise various outdoor learning programmes from 2017 till the end of 2019 in different locations. The beautiful memories that we created with the kids, people of the place, and the nature around us, will always be with us. Sometimes, I still hear from parents about how their kids mention about those delightful moments from their time with us and it fills my heart with happiness. I am grateful to parents who value the experiences that we created for their kids. I will remain indebted to Anand (my mentor), Nikhilesh (my partner), Sudhindra (my brother) and Chaithanya (my brother) who helped me with the very first camp.
In 2019, I joined Dakshin Foundation, where I continued to design and facilitate outdoor learning programmes. Here I was lucky to meet various wildlife biologists, marine biologists, social scientists, and educators working in the conservation space. I was fortunate to visit different research stations like ARRS based out of Agumbe, ATREE field station based out of B R Hills and ANET field station based out of the Andaman Islands. One of my favourite activities include the mangrove walks at ANET. I walked in the mangroves for the first time here, and I know that amazing feeling. I was absolutely amazed at how much I got to learn by being in this ecosystem, no books, or videos or pictures could ever match that first hand experience of standing there and learning from everything and everyone (local staff and visiting researchers) around you. As an educator, when I take kids here, I love to see them walk into the mangroves for the first time, the emotions they go through and observe their experiences of exploring this ecosystem!
Also what I really enjoyed was learning about the social history of this place, the indigenous tribes, the settler communities in the Andaman islands. I was lucky to read about the interesting history of different tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that I had never come across before. I enjoyed learning about it as much as I enjoyed teaching about the it. One of the fascinating stories that I came across was 'The battle of Aberdeen' fought by the indigenous tribe 'Andamanese' against the British. This story helped me understand how the colonial rule managed to destroy the indigenous tribes, the battles that they had to fight against the British as well the prisoners from the penal settlements that mainly consisted of people from mainland India and mostly those involved in the freedom movements. The colonisers engaged the in extensive logging in the islands that was home to the indigenous tribes and Andamanese fought back hard when they saw their home being destroyed by the British and the prisoners. It is so painful to read about how colonisation disturbs, or rather destroys the indigenous tribes, their life and all their history, culture, knowledge, language tied strongly to their land.
I have noticed that history becomes so relevant and compelling when you are in that place where it all happened. The feelings that arise standing at Aberdeen jetty and imagining how the members of the tribe would have fought their battles. All these stories comes alive when you are in that place. So for me place-based learning is an important approach to teaching and learning. I am both a student and a teacher who enjoys learning and teaching through this approach. Everything comes alive, everything becomes relevant and contextual to both the teacher and the students when we learn using this approach.
Moreover so many stories from the past do not find a place in our history textbooks and also as a young learner one thing I found difficult at school was that history was not relevant and neither were efforts made by the teachers to make it contextual to us. So for me it was like something someone did in the past, and why should I learn about those dates and events. And also many things we learn in history are big events, like revolt of 1857 which are off course important, but we do not learn about the consequences of these events on indigenous tribes in a small islands in Andamans. Only after visiting Andamans did I learnt that revolt of 1857 was a big catalyst for our colonisers to use Andamans as penal settlements, and they started using the prisoners for extensive logging that ultimately effected the indigenous tribes. Several diseases that they brought led to the decline in their populations and the colonisers efforts to 'civilise' them effected their lives beyond repair. I became intrigued to learn more about colonisation and its effects on the tribal communities, and their relationship with the land.
At Dakshin, I got the opportunity to facilitate experiential learning programme for college students, that took us around the Western Ghats and helped me interact with members of the tribes like Toda and Soliga. Here, I was facilitating conversations between the students and the members of the tribe, and through this experience I got to learn more about the tribe, their life, their stories of past and present and their aspirations. All these experiences especially those with indigenous tribes, only strengthened my interest in tribal communities and the urge to understand how colonisation continues to effect their knowledge systems and their ways of living. My journey that started with being a teacher to kids from Jenu Kuruba tribe at a government school in Kodagu went beyond outdoor education and experiences at Dakshin only deepened my desire to look beyond outdoor education and ask tough questions on colonisation, social hierarchies and its consequences on tribal communities.
There was a burning desire to do right the injustices faced by them, to share the pain, look for answers together, to bring changes for the better and slowly I started sailing in this direction.. my journey to decolonise. Where will this lead me? Want to know more about this? Stay with me and follow me to the next blog.
