Beyond the school walls
Sumitra M Gautama
As an educator-learner who has spent many years in both urban and rural contexts, first as a teacher in an urban day-school for close to 25 years and now as teacher and principal at a rural residential school for 11, I have seen how a school’s neighbourhood is often the elephant in the campus, that can’t or won’t be seen but permeates it in every way. Schools are often socially isolated spaces, cauterized in many ways from the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they function. Yet, children walk, cycle, drive past varied cameos of their neighbourhoods every day as they travel to and from school. The learning at school has little to do with the traffic, the shops, the people, the communities, the establishments, the natural environments, the social, economic, and political structures that often shape its viability. It is said that it takes a village to grow a child. It takes many villages to run any school – rural or urban.
And yet, the only question – certainly relevant – asked of a parent or school about the neighbourhood in which the child studies is, “Is it safe?” Is it necessary for schools to initiate learning about their neighbourhoods? There are many limitations, and often, no direct or tangible benefit. Neighbourhoods of schools are for quick transitions into cars or two-wheelers or for cycling or walking away.
Perhaps it would be important to define ‘neighbourhood’. While the prominent definition would be the immediate environment of a place, it can be taken to mean the world that surrounds a space of learning, and contributes to it in many different ways. The neighbourhood of a private school usually has hierarchies, inclusions, and exclusions built by what parents – and the school – aspire for. Often, therefore, acknowledged learning is confined to what parents understand to be the academic potential of the school and its capacity to franchise ‘upward’ mobility or visibility for the student. Learning about the neighbourhood often falls into a category called ‘extra-curricular’ learning, if at all, beyond and below inter-school competitions.
It is critical to have an understanding of the dynamic that exists between a school and its neighbourhood. The challenge may simply be explained as an ‘aquarium’ model of learning about one’s neighbourhood versus a ‘Learning like a fish in water’ model – are we in or out of the fish tank?
The soil, the water, the energy, the staff other than teachers, the repair and maintenance systems of a school, are held in common by the neighbourhood. A wide variety of resources and interactions allow for the smooth running of the school on a daily basis. Many of these can be studied and engaged with by all co-holders of the school in many ways. Audits, eco-friendly designs, vegetable and herb gardens, exploring alternate materials for various purposes, energy alternatives, water use management, repair work, waste-management and learning interactions with the neighbourhood are only some of the ways in which a school can and often does interact with its neighbourhood. This could be both institutional and individual. Pathashaala, which runs completely on solar energy, has helped source solar energy for the labour-room and fridge in the village PHC, to ensure 24-hour supply of electricity in these areas. It could be an individual journey, as when an AS-level student understood the issues of farmers through the study of the local cooperative bank and felt the need to design a financial literacy package for them.
It is difficult to acknowledge the scope of learning from one’s neighbourhood if one is selective about acknowledging it. The diversity of a school’s neighbourhood can both be interpreted and factually understood in ways that are enriching and vital for all. Awareness-building is the challenge here. In an urban school, this can be built in a variety of ways. Neighbourhood walks, interviews, surveys, projects, internships, all become possible, depending on the milieu. Many schools do this in different ways, starting with ‘community helpers’ as a lesson in class 2 or 3. There is also the possibility of looking at structures, both civic and cultural, that can be studied and learnt from. Some schools, like the one I teach in, do area studies, and learn about local heritage as well, through projects.
Learners at Pathashaala are regularly taken to Gram Panchayats, and the Thalaivar (Panchayat headman) has come to the school to talk to the children. Children have interviewed the Block Development Officer, to understand how the Block Development Office functions, or have participated in a ‘Know your Councillor’ programme in the city.
Rajamma, an old woman who works with weeding small patches and cleaning the school’s cowshed, is well-known across the school for her knowledge of herbs, and is the most interviewed person for various projects here due to her effective concoctions for minor ailments. A class X project involved building home gardens in some non-teaching staff homes.
However, the deepest learning about the neighbourhood at Pathashaala is osmotic. Children learn by not ‘other’-ing any member of the school community. This is done in two ways. The ambience of learning includes sharing community spaces with the non-teaching staff, who come from the five villages in the neighbourhood. Thus Aanoor, or Vallipuram cease to be alien, outer spaces – they are lived in by people the children and teachers interact with over shared breakfast or lunch. Yes, we all eat together. The other way is shared ‘doing’ on a daily, functional basis. Starting from cleaning dorms and classrooms, rotational work (ROTA) for all – teachers, students, and non-teaching staff – includes participating in dining hall cleaning, cutlery washing, and meal serving, thus creating shared spaces for osmotic learning to happen. It is a culture that is very carefully maintained and monitored for mutual respect and safety. Projects involve active interaction with lived and evolving histories that are anchored in many inter-disciplinary understandings of the life of a neighbourhood. When this is built into the culture of a school, it ceases to be objectification of binaries based on privilege/support, and avoids patronage, while paving the way for a systemic understanding of inequity.
Neighbourhood can also be factually understood as the ‘geography’ in which a school exists. This includes the ‘history’ of the geography, starting from the biome, waterways (both natural and manmade), tree-cover, bird, and insect species, resource-use interfaces, like water and energy audits, as also people and where they live, why they live where they do, the work they do and the natural and human resources they garner to do what they do. Children, today, across the world, are learning through school about decisions made related to local parks, landfills, sewage and sanitation networks and drinking water and where it comes from. They are taught to apply them to their home environments as well. They are learning about a range of alternatives, like solar energy uses, biogas and participate in agriculture-based or related initiatives or afforestation programmes. At Pathashaala, agriculture is the ambience which feeds us. We are surrounded and co-habit the TDEF (Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest) biome with many other species – from peacocks, birds and butterflies, to snakes.
Thus, what happens to the Palar River is not ‘out there’, to be studied. It is erys (irrigation tanks) and water-channels and the flooding that happens during the monsoons and the protracted history of an ancient river that flows next to the school. It is mathematical, science-based, humanities-anchored learning about anthropocentric developmental processes and human life on the planet. Learners’ projects include home-gardens in non-teaching staff homes in the village, measuring optimal water use in rice crops, millet-based menus, and biogas and solar designs. They also learn from the doctor at the PHC in Vallipuram (village next to Pathashaala campus) that treats their minor injuries and ailments. They understand that lifestyle-based illnesses are not rural or urban – they are the result of bad choices people make wherever they are.
Also, children come from the same or different geographies, as do the teaching and non-teaching staff. Children learn from many different schools in the same neighbourhood. Often, in any milieu, they cross each other walking, cycling, and pass each other by, with no contact through many years of study in the same adjacent or neighbourhood schools. They belong to the same future in time, but vastly different futures, as opportunities taken or lost. Over the years, one has seen that these cannot be understood only in systemic ways. The rich or the privileged international school does not necessarily produce the happiest, the most productive, or the most creative citizens. Factually, this is related to what children and adults who work and study at the school bring to learning, the choices they make, the worlds they care about, the futures they create for themselves. These are critical to tag and interface in terms of learning, and interactions that are non-competitive between neighbouring schools do this superlatively well. This throws up a question – how comfortable should learning be? As infrastructure? As gadgets? As what is learnt? There are many possible learnings here as well, if one is sensitive and reflective, and many schools have begun to explore and account for these as well.
Pathashaala has a Kondattam every term, which is often attended by the Panchayat Union Schools in the neighbourhood. There are a variety of invited schools for each festival – a sample list would include Gudalur tribal school, Vedavalli Vidyalaya, Good Earth School, The Pupil Academy, a few Cambridge schools, and the Panchayat Union schools. Students of these schools are given the theme of the festival and projects to prepare – whatever ideas come up for the children of the schools. All schools then come together during the Kondattam – bringing the models/ideas they have, the songs they have written, and then share these with everyone. The chief-guest is usually a well-known figure who has contributed to the area explored by the theme. There are many common activities, multiple forms of communication in the festival. The best ideas, the original questions, do not always come from the ‘privileged’ schools. One boy from Aanoor Panchayat Union school (a neighbour school to Pathashaala), from a 7th class team, had chosen to present energy conversion through cycling. His team had lit a bulb in the community hall of their village using one of their cycles. He asked the chief-guest, “My father is a small farmer, and struggles a lot with water extraction from the ground. Is there any way by which we can cycle and water gets pumped up?” That which is proactive, or related to the community doesn’t come from wealth, or from learning in a textbook. It comes from being in touch with the reality of living and caring to make a positive difference.
School can also be interpreted as the ambience it creates with its collective mind. How fractured is it between hierarchies of ‘learning’ and ‘non-learning’? Divisions created by disciplines? Despite the globalization of cultures, each human being comes with many unique sets of context-based experiences and values. How conscious is school about this, and how is this arbitered as learning?
Here, we come close to the functioning ‘heart’ of a school – its ethos. The values of a school decide whether or not it will relate to its neighbourhood. Awareness building is the key benefit. Children may not be able to ‘act’, or influence action in big ways, though I think we are fast approaching a time when they may.
Pathashaala has undertaken a longitudinal survey (an ongoing long-term study of a selected population) of one of the villages that surrounds it – Vallipuram. Senior school spends two weeks in interaction, collecting and processing data related to the village, and this has resulted through COVID in an interesting set of ‘pre’ longitudinal surveys – with the sample being the students themselves. Not only did this offer students a rich understanding of systemic inequity, it also gave them a clear understanding of what can be done about it at an individual, national, and global level.
Many contexts for community engagement through curricula and projects have been created through neighbourhood interactions at various levels of school. This has helped students see that the diet of Pathashaala, its food culture, which is anchored in millets – is something that most rural children and families have rejected. The romanticized notion of the ‘healthy, eco-friendly village’ remains an urban fantasy. Students also understand at many systemic levels the strength of the farmer when he does not sell his land, and wishes for his son to continue the tradition. Learning from the non-human and beyond human is also linking to one’s neighbourhood – sunset walks to the village, observing livestock as they graze and understanding what is happening to the commons, watching birds, plants, trees, as they are impacted by human development, spending silent time under a neem tree, understanding a fragile ecosystem, battered by unseasonal weather, ‘feeling’ a space that is shared rather than cordoned off as one’s own, and sensing how all living beings are connected – these involve the neighbourhood as well. Perhaps the deepest message that links to the neighbourhood is the awareness that builds respect for another person’s/species’ right to their life and context. Awareness is the deepening of one’s consciousness, an opening out that stretches beyond the limitations of one’s upbringing, which is conditioning and the world view one has inherited. And if education is to have a meaning beyond exams, employability, status, surely, it will have to offer an opportunity to grow sensitive to people whom one could not see till yesterday, the circumstances which are far removed from one’s own experience, a softening of the evaluation of what sometimes seems incomprehensible.
The author is the principal at Pathashaala, a residential school run by Krishnamurti Foundation India. She can be reached at sumitra@pcfl-kfi.org.
