Ash mentioned in a previous post Hunar Ghar, the revised name of our school in India, which is no longer a school but a home of skill and learning, or hunar ghar.

here is the document that will explain a little more.

On Friday afternoon I finally met with Rebecca. We met on the internet and have been emailing each other for a while so we decided to meet up…

Rebecca is our first real Educate for Life volunteer in India. This is not to belittle Rob who was out there with me in 2007, we were friends before so it doesn’t count in the same way. We didn’t know Rebecca before she found us on the internet and decided, without really expecting a response, to drop us an email. We wrote back, as we try to do to everyone, but were particularly interested in her skills as a Steiner teacher-in-training, as Steiner education is something we see great benefit in and are in the process of turning our education into something more similar to that than to standard education.

When she wrote back again, it turned out that she is even better than just a Steiner trained person. What she says about topics close to our heart resonate with us, and we’re really looking forward to having a great, proactive and hardworking person. If you read this Rebecca, no pressure!

Educate for Life takes one step further forward to being a real charity!

After all the exciting goings on while Ed was out here, the past few weeks have been a time to step back and really look at our vision, what it is we’re hoping to do with this project and how we can translate theory into reality.

From this period of contemplation is born Hunar Ghar- the home of deep knowledge and skill- roughly.

The idea is simple, small groups of mixed age group children who gather with a facilitator and engage in projects set around village life and resources. Half their time is spent on ongoing projects such as community gardening and helping with solar cooking, while the other half is spent on short term projects- creating a local play, making their own books etc…

Through these projects they discover their own unique talents, while also learning about the world around them, providing service to their community and also picking up language and numeracy skills.

Over time it’s hoped that more and more of the community get involved in these projects- not just children, creating a village learning environment, in which everyone is happy to share knowledge and celebrate the skills that they have.

The plan for how we plan on how this can be done is still in its early stages and inevitably a lot will have to do with adjusting to reality on the ground, but a rough idea of the concept and how we plan on making it happen can be found in the document attached.

Happy reading, and as always, ideas and suggestions would be much appreciated!

I’m writing this from, of all places, Mumbai International Airport. How India has changed since I came here first 5 short years ago. This afternoon I saw a middle aged woman in a sari power-walking along the seafront boulevard, listening to an ipod. I also saw a police van pull up and chuck a beggar, who’d been minding his own business, into the back and drive off. Clearly some things don’t change; much in India remains a facade, the substance a crumbling wreck they don’t want you too see.

But this is not the case everywhere, I hope. In the last six months real progress has been made with the school, henceforth called Jagriti, in a real, substance based sort of a way. Attitudes are changing for the better and the feel of the village, at times, takes on a new, more progressive air. The charity in itself has had time to grow too, and substantially so over the last month I’ve been here. Ash and I, being in India at the same time and allowed to visit the school, had a great opportunity to get a lot of ground covered but I don’t think either of us imagined it would be as much as has happened. The charity has taken on a new directive and new direction which is in some ways radically different from before, and in other respects – the next stage that was only natural from our continuing challenge to change ourselves and constant self searching.

The path of Educate for Life will only get more exciting from here. I feel truly excited about what we do in a renewed and vigorous sense. With this we also have the great joy of welcoming our first volunteer, Rebecca,  in India who isn’t Ash or I or a friend (well, she is now but when approached us wasn’t) as well as a fleet of new hirings on the horizon and an intent to increase our action beyond the real of Jagriti, so it’s all good!

The last month has changed everything. Ed came out to India, with no particular purpose, just the feeling that something important would come of it. He was right.

Since we first started out, we’ve been using all the right development buzzwords- low cost, quality education, local relevance, replicable, sustainable… It sounded great and felt right and over the past year or so, we’ve been attempting to turn these words into action. What we’ve found is that to many already in the education development sector these words are just that-words- empty, dead. We’ve been facing the challenge of giving them life and meaning, trying to fulfil the promises we made to all the people supporting us (and ourselves), but in doing so, have compromised on each of these values. We’re far from perfect.

On Ed’s arrival in India there was a shared acknowledgement that the prescribed path we’d set out for ourselves was probably far from what is indeed needed and right for the community we’re working with. There are already 1000′s of low cost (concrete-shell) ‘schools’ in India, busily mass-processing students to learn by rote, through fear. These people will conveniently always remain in the subordinate class who don’t need to- and therefore aren’t taught to- think for themselves. To produce something of genuine quality within this system requires investment in your staff, their training and the resources available to them.

The problem with trying to create replicable quality, even if cost isn’t an issue, is this one-size-fits-all idea of development. People are different, cultures vary, children are individuals- what’s right for one community might work for another, but it’s important to take the time to find out if it does.

So in essence we’ve decided to give greater importance to the local relevance and quality of the education we provide, rather than settling for a replicable, bargain-basement project that does little of use for the kids and village.

What does this mean?

The first thing is to move away from the idea of the project being a school at all. It’s now just Jagriti, a project for community co-learning and co-living. This immediately moves things away from learn-by-rote, heavy handed disciplining and very little fun that is associated with school life in India. To further break away from the idea of what a school is to most of the teachers and villagers working with us, we will also break away from the boundaries of the school as a special location for learning, making it a place from which activities of learning together and discovering together are organised, but encouraging many of the actual activities to take place within the village setup. There is a wealth of knowledge and natural resources within the village that would be perfect for organising hands-on, engaging learning experiences around. We will work towards opening the teachers eyes to these, arranging ‘projects’ or ‘workshops’ that cover more than the basic learning needs of children around the existing local knowledge, culture and infrastructure. For older age groups these projects and workshops would be open to the whole community, but with a focus on children’s learning needs, making the learning experience a lot more natural than sitting in a classroom and reading from a book.

The pedagogy needs a lot of work and clarifying, but basically there is more than enough existing knowledge and resources within the community for a great primary learning experience it’s just about bringing learning and fun into what already goes on. Everyone’s a teacher, everyone’s a student, everything is a learning resource, every second is a lesson- we just provide a few people to catalyse the blurring of edges between life and learning.