A journey of Learning from Life

In our current education system, generally policy makers decide what to teach. They prepare "capsules' 'i.e. syllabus, which are fed to the students. These capsules are fixed and do not include cultural nuances. This pre-determined character of the capsules from the provider’s point of view creates a one-way flow of knowledge. There is no space for inherited culture from the taker’s point of view.  Here, we refer to inherited culture as knowledge passed down generationally through practices, habits and the community's own ways of knowing. In John Holt’s words, the present education system "damages children and ruthlessly suppresses their creative urges and individual identity.`` It's a universal truth that each and every learner is unique, but by casting them in the same mould we lose their potentiality and the education system loses its diversity. 

When we started interacting with the Lodha community (a hunting tribal community living in the borders of West Bengal and Jharkhand states of India), we realized that their lives revolve around the rhythms of nature. This is in clash with the smartphone culture of the city. Their own methods and practices are deemed unfit for modern life.  In disregarding their inherited knowledge, we also disregard their identity. Moreover, Covid19 immensely increased the use of technology, making educational achievement even more discriminatory and difficult for marginalized communities. This is an inherent limitation of the present system. We strongly feel that there is a need for both acquired and inherited knowledge, and a living interaction between the two with mutual self respect.  However, at present there is no institution to the best of our knowledge that  conceives such a system involving both.

We believe that monistic flow of acquired knowledge or from a top-down approach cannot be a real education system. We rather propose an alternative pedagogy that begins with a qualitative enquiry of the everyday life of indigenous communities - their habits, rituals, food, occupation etc. From their way of doing things we try to find patterns, mathematical and scientific, using their expressions: rhythms, voice, stories. We then provide structured definitions and concepts that they can relate to their lives. 

In this way, we fulfil the incompleteness of their inherited knowledge with our acquired knowledge and the incompleteness of our acquired knowledge with their inherited knowledge. 

Let us illustrate this with two examples. During summer months, temperatures rise to 45-46 degrees Celsius in these regions. Drinking water becomes too warm to be consumed  in the absence of machines like the refrigerator. Lodhas keep filled-up bottles inside large buckets that are also filled with water. This mechanism keeps the bottled water cool. From this everyday applied knowledge, we can introduce the concepts of heat, temperature or heat transfer. This process of learning from doing is not new. It is an old method that we learn things by doing them. Some of the proponents of this practice include American educator John Holt, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Thakur and social scientists and critic Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. They have made a lasting impact on us.

In another instance, we have seen that majority members of the Lodha community build their own houses. Most of them are huts made out of mud and bamboo. While working with them, we observed their measurement techniques. They use their body as a unit for measuring, such as hand, foot etc. Based on this small unit, they enlarge it using rope or branches of trees and use them for building their huts. Following this, there begins a learning process where we explain to them the need for standardization  such as one hand is equivalent to 1.5 feet– a measure that's invariant across all persons,  place or time. 

In our mutual exchanges, we learn to question our assumptions as well. We have seen that the Lodhas collect firewood from the forest seasonally. But the wood they collect in the monsoons often get wet. We could not resist sharing with them our acquired knowledge  of ‘savings’ and the need to save for future use. However, they responded by saying “let us think about today’s collection first, we can think about future problems later”. Instead of seeing one perspective as superior to the other, there is an exchange of perception. While on one hand the need to save is addressed, life without savings is also considered, drawing its roots from Buddhist philosophy of the Ashtangic Marg (eight fold path).  There, Buddha preaches savings to be seen as a source of greed, which can be extrapolated two millennia later to the observations of Karl Marx that accumulation of capital leads to war. 

In a nutshell, we work to preserve diversity, similar to the variety of species in nature, but on a different scale and from a different perspective, by participating in a two-way education process through exchanging viewpoints in the style of living and mode of thinking.

Our solution serves some of the most remote marginalized indigenous communities whose distinct culture is in threat, in the face of modern educational goals. Since our method is a two-way process of knowledge exchange, we learn from them too. 

First, since storytelling is one of the effective means to learn and understand, we tell them stories from history, mythology or fantasy. We have observed an increase in their memory power and imaginative skills within a short period of time. Our society is in need of creative individuals and our initiative has given this space to them. Respect for other cultures is an implicit gain as well, as we belong to different socio-cultural backgrounds. Indian society is marked by ethnocentrism, prejudice towards other cultures, religion and steep class, caste divisions, and mainstream education system does not mitigate this problem. 

Second, the Lodhas have a daily routine, pattern and monotony. These can be observed in their music, work, building houses, cooking etc. But now, a new phenomenon of “choice” is slowly entering their daily practice. We are now observing that they apply “choices” in different matters of life. New practices have become part of their lives that we have made possible  through various activities. For instance, story narrations by us in the evenings, book-reading sessions and painting practice.  The outcome is a seamless mix of their own practices and ours into an enriched learning process.

To narrate the story of a young member of the Lodha community, Chandan Shabar now attends Biswa Bharati University (Shantiniketan, West Bengal) after a long journey with us for over six years, and specializes in Fine Arts. Chandan spends his days grazing cattle, fishing, solving Rubik's cube and sculpting. He does not like Mathematics and plays video games, is a passionate photographer and supports us in farming. His education so far, is a blend of formal and non-formal learning with us. 

Fourth, the Lodhas have a stronger voice now. Through theatre practices and games, we have created a verbal expression with them through language. In their culture, Lodhas use words instead of structured sentences to express their point. They now speak their mind with more clarity. 

On our part, we are trying to live a life closer to their culture and learning new things everyday. We fetch drinking water from the well, and filter it using traditional techniques. We experience the use of firewood in cooking (instead of non-renewable LPG). We chose a different form of living by staying as close as possible to nature, that is to say, simple and natural ways of doing things. 

The foundation of the kind of education we believe in, comes from life and living. Six of us have been working with this thought in mind for the past decade. The decision and choice to build our lives (with tribal communities) in the lap of nature and far from the city began since then. In the words of Devi Prasad (an eminent Art Teacher in Shantiniketan and Sevagram, Gandhiji's ashram), “the so-called modern civilization is becoming more and more materialistic in its relationships, between human beings and between human and nature”.  We believe that nature is the Master of masters , and over time we started forming a team, one by one, around this axis of thought. Our team comprises individuals from diverse backgrounds. A college professor specializing in Artificial Intelligence, a sociologist with rich experience in qualitative research, a mechanical engineer with several years of teaching experience, a theatre specialist who has conducted over a hundred workshops across different social groups, a farming specialist who has been researching on local natural and organic farming practices and a conscientious common man who knows farming, fishing, house making, cattle grazing etc. And they all love what they do. They do it with passion, but do not know where to stop learning. The team members have combined formal and informal ways of learning and exchanging ideas as a means to teach community students the importance of both.

This philosophy of education as inseparable from nature took us nearer to the curved design of nature, removed from the right angular city layout. We believe in Fukuyoka’s words that “instead of offering a hundred explanations, would not practicing philosophy be the best way?” (From M. Fukuyoka’s, One Straw Revolution). A decade back we bought a piece of land in the Jhargram district of West Bengal, close to a Lodha village. We have started building a hut now, after political unrest had stalled our work in the past few years. Now we are very close to the community people, in person and in spirit. Because of this physical proximity, we have already started formulating techniques and content for use. There is a long cultural history since ancient India in which learners and their guide live in the same place. It was seen in the famous Nalanda University where both the students and teachers lived in the same region. So this is how we think we are well positioned to deliver this solution.

We are all products (not students or humans) of the mainstream education system. But over time, our team members have learned that there is something valuable in the traditional way of life, which comes to us in the form of serendipitous encounters, new perspectives and worldviews which is more than life as we think of it,  and that it must be told. MIT is a pillar in the world through which novel and innovative ideas are respected and encouraged. Judges of this Global Challenge and academics of this institution are also well aware of the educational inequalities of our present times. So we are determined that we can share our story  on this platform. We want to tell you more about our experiences of learning  through the calmness, beauty, rhythm of togetherness and humility of this community which will create another vision of life unknown to us. Through our interactions with the Lodhas, we infer that this process of mutual exchange as a form of education can be applied to all marginal communities whose distinct culture is under threat.  

Therefore, considering MIT as a well wisher, we are keen to share our version of the ideal learning process, which we hope MIT would surely be interested in. Though we understand that we will be merely treated as a competitor, we still hope our ideas will be discussed for a sustainable world and for our Mother Earth.  

• Team

Unique and unparalleled blending of formal and non formal expertise, ranging from farmers to sociologists, street theatre workers to data scientists, with their previous experiences can certainly help to innovate new ideas during critical decision making moments. 

• Unique Application of Artificial Intelligence

Analyzing the several ways of living, the nature of participation in social gatherings through the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help to understand the volume of inherited knowledge already stored there within. However, the innovation lies in the human reactions to this knowledge with an objective to explore the several possibilities consciously by not using the AI, which undoubtedly will limit it to the ‘capsules’ designed by the policy makers.       

• Interaction through the process of Theatre and other Improvised Performances    

The process of theatre will help to become more expressive both physically and verbally. Improvised performances through the celebration of different local festivals, drawings, musical activities will nurture these expressiveness also. Performances prepared solely by themselves can help us to understand their psyche, through the dialogues and body language, thus helping to sketch a unique syllabus.

We believe that through this process, the rigid barriers between us and them will start to disappear.    

Our fundamental goal is to make the learners more expressive as the conventional system naturally oppresses their expressions. We hope to achieve this by making them a part of the community life, which we are also trying to explore. Instead of a classroom structure, we will be trying to create an environment in which learning becomes as necessary and important as other activities of daily life like cooking, farming, hunting, fishing etc.

In continuation with the same objective, we believe that the Storytelling Process can be applied to strengthen the learner’s expressions, imaginations and improvisation skills. Within  one year, we expect that the learners will be able to create stories of three to four minutes generated from their own experiences, which ultimately will lead to a development in their speaking and listening abilities.  

As our community living space will be open to different organizations or individuals to conduct workshops, the set of interactions taking place within the community and outside of the community will certainly make the learners more expressive. 

Impact Goals for Next Five Years

• We believe that the learners, presently living within the community, will become creative enough  and can also guide other learners through the same process. 

• A continuous and fluent sharing of our knowledge with respect to the daily lives (learning, farming, fishing, hunting etc.) within our community will take place which will help both of us to gain expertise. The learners will flourish in terms of acquired knowledge i.e. realizing the existing science behind all their daily activities and thus applying the same for some kind of change; whereas we will become efficient with their knowledge of hunting, fishing etc. 

• We hope that the social barriers and class divisions which definitely exist between us and them will be reduced to a negligible amount in these five years.    

• A course structure will be developed to understand how to address inherited knowledge to design a new learning process. 

• The variety of data collected from the several forms of interactions inside and outside of the community will help to understand the community in a much better way. The analysis of data will lead to conceptualizing a scientific way to address many other problems that exist within the learner ethnic communities. 

The different modes of interactions that take place will lead the way to the completion of these goals. Interactions and observations on daily life, active participation in social gatherings, note taking and most importantly living as a community will be the methods to achieve them. 

Our learning process will be a festive act of togetherness. The eagerness of the learners to express themselves and their increasing involvement with us and with each other will be the measuring mechanism. This includes but is not limited to organizing public events that comprise diverse groups of people, through musical performances, dramas and other group activities.

Let us say, we start this process with a plan to organize an annual community festival every year. If the learners come forward and participate, we will organize other such activities that include them. Then we’ll believe that this process is working in the right direction. 

Once all the learners, who are initially able to express themselves through stories, become willing and creative enough to guide others or to perform in other groups, we will consider that we’ve reached close to the impact goals.  We will also conduct weekly meetings to discuss issues that need to be resolved. Each of our participation will be a definite measure of progress in this direction.

Our theory of change differentiates itself from mainstream popular understanding and use of the binary categories of “traditional” and “modern” in the education system, in which tradition is seen as primitive and outdated whereas modern is the ideal way forward. Our theory of change seeks to visualize a new journey towards internal philosophical developments of each individual, by blending inherited and acquired knowledge.   

The specific parameters are 1)  the cultural context 2) the two sources of knowledge - theirs and ours and 3) arriving at concepts, theories and techniques. The process we apply is to learn by doing, while living in a collective ambience. The outcome we hope to achieve is a decentralized, community-governed and non-hegemonic education system.

Over time, we have observed, interacted and carefully thought about the necessity and use of technology. One of the core technologies that will act as the driving force behind our journey towards a both-way learning and teaching is theatre games. Games developed by Clive Barker, Viola Spolin or Augusto Boal over the past century can be a rich repository to involve the community and engage them in story-telling or self-expression. 

A simple storytelling technique begins with a clap and a corresponding non verbal sound that has to be made immediately. 

• after a few attempts, one has to include any action such as a jump, laugh or shake, along with the sound. 

• a few times into this, one shifts from sound to word utterances with every clap, followed by corresponding body movements. 

• after accumulating a series of sounds, words, actions and body movements over several claps, the individuals will have to form a story using those. 

• then they choose a tune to fit within the narration. 

• then they find a space of their own, which is closely connected with their stories.

• They decorate this space naturally and thereafter create a moment of celebration by performing it. 

The other technology that our learning process depends on is set rather on the back-end of this process. With several traits like memory, ability to apply logic, abstraction or multi-tasking thought to be the basis of learning capacity of a person, different blends of each of these traits are in fact required for different activities such as painting, acting, cognition or puzzle solving. We will employ Artificial Intelligence to map the natural traits of learners to the various skills they possess, and use association rule mining to derive a complementary list of competences that could be achieved with the certain skill set of the individual learner. For example: if a Lodha boy is good at hunting (one of their natural activities practiced still today in a skeletal form), he should be having an excellent reflex, advanced control of hand and finger muscles, keen power of observation and quick decision making ability. This set of faculties, are incidentally also required in painting. From this we can try to see if the learner can slowly get interested in this new activity– leading to a better all round development of the personality as a whole.

Our work entirely stands on the principles of diversity, equity and inclusivity. We have highlighted this from the beginning. Our work begins with the assumption that educational inequality has widened immensely and marginal cultures are losing their identity. By removing ourselves from our urban and privileged positions and creating a new space for learners in a remote place, we envision an alternative learning system which will not be dictated by any power structure or market.  Moreover, our core methodology involves participant observation, interaction and a two-way learning approach, which is also a mechanism to mitigate social disparities.

We believe education cannot be treated as a service or as a commodity. So we do not have any plans of making profit from this process. But in order to sustain ourselves and expand the scope of our work we have a growth model, that is working with the help of our well wishers. 

We have a methodology to sustain ourselves by our own farming process. Apart from sustaining our needs, the surplus farming products are sold to the villagers. The space where we are living is suitable for conducting all forms of workshops, over and above theatre or education. Any other organization or individual can use this space for their workshops, which gives us a diverse form of interaction and monetary benefits also.  

As we will be sharing our lives with the indigeneous communities, the variety of data collected is analyzed to generate newer and modern models to solve other important problems like developing low carbon housings or the mechanism to provide several modes of care for different indigenous communities existing all over the world. 

The blending of inherited culture and acquired knowledge gives birth to a self sustaining process of education, which is comparatively new and unique to learn. We will be providing courses to conceptualize this phenomena, which is different with respect to the different communities. And this is how we intend to develop a new learning model, which is not limited to the four walls of school, thus developing more and more knowledge centers distributed all over the world.

For becoming financially sustainable, we have the following plans: 

• The space, where this collective will exist, will achieve self-dependency through its own farming process. 

• The learners along with the facilitators, will create new and unique handmade household items, artefacts which can be also sold at village gatherings or fairs.  

• As our idea is entirely based on living close to nature, the space can be rented out to similar minded travelers/seekers with a certain monetary value.    

• We will be conducting many workshops with other communities/collectives to share our ideas, where monetary transactions will be involved.

We have faced financial problems from the beginning and have been trying to find ways and means to achieve financial sustainability. Presently, we are focusing on farming. We cultivate more than eight types of vegetables along with some members of the Lodha community in our farm which meets our primary requirement. Apart from this, our friends and well wishers have also contributed financially as a community-funded seed grant. 

Our friends generously gifted us two bi-cycles, and a house is also being developed with the support of our community. Some of our team members are in salaried professional fields, and they also participate in securing financial sustainability from their earnings. This is also the first step towards the degree of involvement that we hope to achieve through this - mainly at the levels of individual, community and organizations. 

Currently, our team members and other individual friends provide the maximum share in sustaining our initiative, but gradually we want to reach a stage of sustainability in which communities we work with can utilize their learning to improve their production capacity, and we are able to replicate it in other communities with the help of organizational support.

Therefore, we believe there are three ways to sustain financially: produce for consumption, involve the community’s inherited cultural practices and purchase necessities from our income. This is a blend of both traditional and the modern way of sustenance. While we can reason that the third way (through personal income) always gives more than the other two, we envision our new journey through community generated sustainability, where the insecurities, tension, fear and depressions associated with the modern lifestyles would not exist or at least it will be reduced.