Small gestures with big impact
“It’s a gift,” says Jyoti Thyagarajan, long-time educator, currently NGO founder-director, and perennial adventurer. “What happens in the classroom is unpredictable, and it’s magic.”
Jo – as she prefers to be addressed – was in Hyderabad recently to flag off a project in Telangana government schools (more about this at some point in the future) that her Bangalore-based NGO, Meghshala, is implementing. Jo’s long career as a teacher of physics and mathematics has taken her across three countries and given her the opportunity to interact with a large number of students. She had many stories to tell, but this one stuck with me. A student she had taught several decades ago was visiting Bangalore and asked to meet. In conversation over lunch, he casually remarked that she had saved his life. Thinking he was just being overly dramatic in that moment of nostalgia, she insisted that she couldn’t have done any such thing. He recalled that one day, when he was feeling particularly low, overwhelmed by a sense that life just wasn’t working out, Jo had walked past him in the hallway and casually rested a hand on his shoulder. In that moment, he said, he knew that things would be okay because he wasn’t alone.
We had been discussing how much a teacher does, and can do, in ways that go so much beyond the imparting of a curriculum. And this opportunity to be an agent of change in a child’s life even with the smallest gesture is the “gift” that she was talking about. As it happened in this particular case with Jo’s student, this opportunity presents itself, often in ways invisible to us, practically every day. While this may be true of any occupation to varying extents, for those of us who work with children and young people, it’s what gives our work special meaning. And that impact often does not become apparent to us, if at all, until many years after the student leaves our classroom.
Of course, there are outcomes we expect in the short term – content understood, skills gained, and that sort of thing. But teachers do much more than just transmit content and build skills. The classroom, and by extension the school, is also a place where children learn how to be, to grow into themselves, and form relationships with each other and with the world they inhabit. The climate that a teacher builds in the classroom can feed into both curricular learning and social/emotional development, and when those work in tandem, that’s when the possibility of magic is created. This issue of Teacher Plus relates to quite a different kind of magic, however – that which is made possible by taking a design approach. This is a very special issue curated by design educators and designers Siddhi Gupta and Amitabh Kumar from the Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Looking at design education broadly and through the experiences of those who have pursued design as a career, the curators have put together a package that will challenge and inspire us to think differently. We’d be curious to know how you respond to the articles in the issue.
