by Anil Bhattarai
from The Kathmandu Post
It is slowly sinking in among a small but growing number of people that the current education system is highly dysfunctional and is not adequate to address the social and ecological challenges of our time. However, very little thought has gone into exploring the reorganisation of educational process and how physical landscapes of schools could be actively incorporated in teaching-learning process.
Last week I suggested that a creative parent could engage a kid in the learning process both at home as well as outside -- such as while taking her to school, working in the kitchen garden, exploring neighbourhoods, or even while watching television. Often all it requires is asking them questions or telling them stories. Many in fact do that without realising it.
One of the pervasive myths of modern times has been that learning takes place mostly in classrooms. This myth is most prominently played out in the way the teachers near-exclusively focus on textbooks in classrooms. Exams are conducted to test the ability of students to memorise textbooks, and exam marks are taken as exclusive indicator of educational progress.
Perhaps this is the reason why both teachers and parents do not see spaces outside the classroom as sites of learning. Most schools get away with largely barren, monocultured, landscapes precisely because of this. The school grounds are either empty or littered with waste papers and plastics. Classrooms are hot in summer and cold in winter. In cities, classrooms lack natural light. The ventilation is bad. In private schools, the imperative to make quick-bucks often leads to cutting down on necessary investment for learning-friendly classrooms. In state-managed schools, the classrooms are built with minimal regard for the need of those who spend long hours in them - the students. Contractors need to make quick bucks, and the politicians and bureaucrats need some cuts.
This is also the result of lack of creativity on the part of teachers. Schools - private, community-managed, and state-managed - could create classrooms and the larger school landscapes as meaningful sites of learning.
Once as a teaching assistant for a course on globalisation at the University of Toronto, I asked students to, first, make a list of items in the classroom - the overhead projector, the desks, benches, their own laptops, their school bags, pens, among others. And then, I asked them to read their “made in’’ labels. Well, expectedly, most items were made in China.
This was followed by speculative discussions on the process through which some of those items were assembled and transported. The raw materials that made up some parts of their laptops perhaps came from African countries, container-shipped to China. Large fleets of oil tankers and vast networks of pipes transported petroleum that fuelled the factories and transportation system in China. These materials were worked on by Chinese workers from the Chinese hinterlands. Once manufactured, the stuffs were then shipped around the world. Thus, just by examining the flow of materials involved in the making of a laptop, we were able to map out the globalisation process.
With an innovative teacher, this could be done right from day care centres for infants and toddlers onwards. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting teaching globalisation to an infant, or toddler or even to a six-year old. What I am suggesting is the landscape - both inside the classroom as well as within the school boundary - could be meaningful sites for the learning process.
Infants and toddlers learn through sensory experiences - through seeing, touching, feeling, moving and remaking of objects. In the name of learning, most of our schools deprive small kids from these experiences as they are made to sit still and listen to their teachers. Classrooms of toddlers and infants are often cluttered with desks and benches that hinder their mobility. They have very little to explore.
For higher-age kids, schools can create landscapes that impart both functional skills such as maths, reading and writing as well as make them explorers of the world around them. As an aspiring ecological designer, I have always been fascinated by patterns in nature - in the shapes and sizes of trees, the leaves, the way water flows, or the patterns on land. For one, teaching numbers could be easily done outside the classrooms. Teachers could ask their kids to collect dry leaves from trees and ask them to do basic counting. They can ask them to make a pile of stones and count them. They can teach addition and subtraction by making different piles and either adding to or taking out some stones. Or ask why certain grass has certain number of petals in their flowers. The empty school grounds could be lined up with new tree saplings. The students could count the number of saplings. They can group them into different varieties - such as fruits, vegetables or herbs. They can measure their growth periodically.
When it comes to organising landscapes for learning, mind often is the limit. One can teach about science by exploring those landscapes. One can teach about society through them. Why do people plant fruits? Who has land large enough to plant them? What do people make out of those fruits or vegetables? Who gets to eat? How is food prepared? Who prepares them at home?
Or we can teach the science of gravity by walking students in the ground and throwing a stone up. Or we can teach them biology by exploring how plants grow, fruits ripe or rot, or by showing them how diverse the natural world is. Well there are many more questions that students can explore while learning from landscapes. By near-exclusively focusing on textbook rote learning, most of our schools have not been able to see making and remaking of landscapes as important parts of teaching and learning process. Let’s also not forget: teachers will be surprised how much they themselves could learn in this process.
Image: Courtesy SCEPTrE Fellows
