Nature education as a two-way street

Astha Chaudhary and Dipti Arora
Environment education in its current form is all very well when it is being imparted to students living in concrete urban jungles, but when we use the same approach and textbooks to teach children living with and off nature, it is wanting. Local knowledge and contexts should be included in EVS to enrich the subject and make it more useful.

Thinking – and doing – differently

Soma Chakraborty
Moving beyond just lip-service, this teacher, who as part of a workshop conducted in her school was engaging with the transgender community, decided to help a transgender person find a livelihood.

Re-imagining learning spaces

Vasudha Kapoor
Every intervention in education needs to be planned keeping enough room for the teacher’s and student’s agency. This article talks about experiential learning spaces and opportunities accessible to the grassroots population. Local youth, fresh out of college, with minimal job experience and little or no training in specific pre-teaching courses helped bring out major changes in teaching strategies that improved children’s participation and engagement in learning.

Children, citizenship and poetry – 2

Samina Mishra
Working with children can be exciting, engaging and most importantly educative. In the process of teaching children, adults learn a lot themselves. In part 2 of her article on children, citizenship, and poetry, the author talks about how a writing exercise resulted not just in beautiful poetry but also a richer understanding, for both the children and adults, of themselves and their environs.

Children, citizenship and poetry

Samina Mishra
When children engage with the arts, they are able to express their thoughts and feelings in ways that help them understand their lives and worlds. This article is based on a project that draws upon the author’s work with children in collaborative creative practice using text, image and sound. The project, Hum Hindustani, includes creative workshops with children that are designed around the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Two poems written by two children on the idea of fraternity reflect their thoughts.

How a lake was saved

Seetha Anand
While primarily it is the job of the government to maintain public spaces, as citizens we cannot wash off our hands from doing our bit. Here’s how a group of citizens came together to clean up a lake and its surroundings in Hyderabad.

Rebirth of reading

Suhail Abdul Hameed
Libraries usually serve as a memorable space for avid book lovers who love to just browse and perhaps even read the books that they choose. Everyone has their own experience of engaging with libraries as a space. This article throws light on efforts to create such a space for students in a government primary school in Chhattisgarh.

Lessons in friendship

Meena Sriram
Life lessons are best learnt from real life situations. What started out as a humanitarian project of engaging and teaching the less privileged children during COVID lockdown, ended up being a lesson in life for the privileged teenagers who volunteered to work on the project.

Getting familiar with our fundamental rights

Vikash Sharma
Unless we draw parallels to real life and tell children how they work and how we can own them, fundamental rights and duties will remain mere words in their textbooks. As teachers we have to find ways to show our students that the fundamental rights are something that we are entitled to as citizens of this country and that they are not meant to simply lie in the pages of a book.

Redefining ‘new normal’, one phone call at a time

Richa Pandey
As a community we have now experienced both “normal” and “new normal” education. And while the “new normal” falls drastically short of including the entire student population, the “normal” wasn’t ideal either. Based on her experience of working with students in rural areas over the last year and a half, the author shares how it is time for us to redefine teaching and learning by bringing together the good from all our different experiences.