[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I am Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today we speak with Dr. David Penberg, urban and international educator, author, and speaker, and Adhirath Sethi, member of the Board of Trustees of Agastya International Foundation and author of the recently published “The Moving of Mountains.” Agastya, where Dr. Penberg was a scholar in residence in 2024, is an Indian Education Trust and nonprofit based in Bangalore. Welcome, David and Adhi.
[00:00:43] David P: Thank you.
[00:00:43] Amy H-L: Agastya’s mission, according to its website, is to “spark curiosity, nurture creativity, and instill confidence among economically disadvantaged children and teachers in India.” Would you tell us about Agastya’s programs, especially the mobile labs and labs on bikes?
[00:01:03] Adhirath S: Yeah, so Agastya was set up the turn of the millennium, really 1999. So it’s running on its 25th, 26th year, actually now. With the idea of, as you said, sparking curiosity, nurturing creativity, and fostering a culture of innovation. And it started out with that.
As the program and the foundation evolved, it would also bring about caring and confidence as part of its offering that it brought out to these children. And what started out as an idea for what education should be was gradually distilled into what we now know as the “mobile van program.” In fact, the mobile distribution delivery mechanism that Agastya uses is quite unique. It is a hub and spoke model that has a 172 acre campus in Kuppam in the state of Andhra Pradesh and various science centers spread out across 22 Indian states. And from these science centers, you have mobile vans, bikes. Even people on foot that reach out to the furthest edges, I would say, of rural India are going into the government schools, the even very small government schools with maybe only five or six children, and bringing to them hands-on science learning.
So we have what we call “Igniters,” and their job is to take these low cost science models into the schools and effectively teach kids what it’s like to play with science, you know, to actually handle the experiments, to even, in some cases, break and kind of dismantle them.
And in a developed country, this might not seem like a massive revelation, but what Agastya realized is that children in India, especially in the disadvantaged portions of the population, are forced to do what’s called rote learning, where you are given a textbook and you are told you will have an exam at the end of the year. And all you need to do is memorize what is in this textbook and that’s all you’re going to be asked. And that seemed to Agastya and seems to a lot of people that think about education in a holistic and forward-thinking way to be a very detrimental to creativity, and also keeping these kids in a way that isn’t exactly conducive to them being valuable members as they grow up, in a thinking sense. So the idea was for them to have these experiments to be able to play with science, and that would then spark their curiosity and get them on a path where they would understand the importance of hands-on science education.
[00:03:26] Jon M: You mentioned science. Do you also expose students to the arts?
[00:03:31] Adhirath S: Yes, the program did start as a STEM-based approach, and it was gradually evolved to include the arts, which would include dance and music and the fine arts as well. And Agastya’s campus is quite lucky that it’s quite lush and it, has many centers, you know, dedicated both to innovation of different kinds. We have an auditorium there where kids from the surrounding government schools will come. They will perform. Sometimes we will have art camps and workshops there where they’ll come and get to interact with artists, do paintings, do models, things like that. Some of this stuff is more difficult, of course, to take into the into the schools in the mobile vans. But the campus does offer a rich exposure to the kids who come both for STEM as well as arts.
[00:04:16] David P: So I would just piggyback on that if I could and, and to say that I think there’s great intentionality at Agastya to, despite its origins in STEM, as Adhi said, to not silo knowledge or disciplines, but to provide an experience for all learners. And that means both students and teachers to genuinely see the natural overlap between ways of understanding reality and representing it. So in that sense, it’s a genuinely interdisciplinary learning environment.
[00:04:51] Amy H-L: Would you tell us about Agastya’s teacher training?
[00:04:56] Adhirath S: Yes. Usually the kids that get a lot of the stuff that we talk about, we say we reach five million kids and, you know, we do say that quite proudly. But one of the earliest things that they realized when they started Agastya was it is a chicken and egg kind of situation. You know, children are difficult to inspire, especially young kids, and that doesn’t happen unless the teachers themselves have suitably been inspired. And that’s a difficult thing in India where, as the phrase was coined, teaching had become a profession of last resort. People would go into it simply because there was not much else, especially in the government schools. And so there was a tendency for teachers just to say, well, do whatever you want. They’re not really engaged. Agastya’s teacher training basically took that and kind of split it apart and said, right, if we can inspire these teachers, if we can really infuse in them a sense of purpose and a sense of wonder for the same stuff that they would then need to take to their classrooms.
Then how would that help? And so what that did was it definitely helped upskill and elevate and level up the kind of teachers that we interacted with. But it also created what we call a force multiplier, which is a lot of these teachers left their positions at some point. Or even the ones that came through Agastya, the instructors would sometimes leave, take jobs in government schools and would kind of pass on this idea and this energy that, you know, Agastya would infuse in them and took it along with them as they did.
And so it’s been a big success story. In addition to the kids that we’ve reached – we reach about five million kids a year, I think we’ve touched maybe close to two million teachers in the last 25 years in a similar way.
[00:06:33] David P: I would also say, since I wore the hat of a scholar in residence and much of my work was with the the teacher team, which continues actually virtually to this day, I would caution us to think of it as teacher training. To begin with, I think it has much more to do with the idea of seeing adults as learners. So it’s about teacher development. And part of the beauty and the symmetry of Agastya is that the very same approaches and methodologies towards working with children, namely experiential, hands-on learning opportunities, that are rife with curiosity and questioning, that same modality of instruction and learning is provided to teachers. And teachers are there for week-long institutes, right. And they’re coming from all over India, as Adhi, said. And one of the things that they’re asked to do is to leave behind all of their images and experiences as teachers for the time that they’re there, so that they can actually tap into their imaginations, curiosities, and their visions of what teaching and learning should be, because of course these folks are returning to qualitatively different conditions and environments than they experience at Agastya.
[00:07:58] Jon M: Could you talk a little bit about the Young Instructor Leader program?
[00:08:03] Adhirath S: So the origins of the Young Instructor Leader program are quite heartwarming. There was a time when Agastya was still scaling up. The scale that they were moving or the speed at which they were moving was kind of becoming a little unmanageable. And the few teachers that they did have were starting to sort of feel the pressure and the team was in a sense, falling apart or at least finding it extremely difficult to stay a cohesive unit with all the, you know, kids that were coming through. So a specific fair that was supposed to have 500 children visiting, they were suddenly told there would be 5,000. So overnight this team suddenly had to figure out a way to train teachers and they just didn’t have any. And a group of girls. And I love to say, it’s always a group of girls, that kind of have this idea and come forward and say, hey, listen, let’s ___, and it is been a kind of feature of Agastya that it’s always been that a bunch of kids come and say, hey, listen, we have an idea. If you train us, we can just train the kids in return. And it was a risk. They were quite nervous about the whole thing, but having no other choice, they said, right.
They spent about three days training this group of girls, and it was obviously an instant hit. You know, the peer to peer learning method that Augastya has pioneered in many ways, existed before. But I think they saw real value in using it as a tool for scaling up without necessarily adding a lot of adults, you know, on one hand. And these kids, the girls, came in and offered to be trained. And then, of course, the program was a huge hit. The fair was a hit became, you could say, the first cart, the first batch of kids that I guess they said, well, if we find children that are showing the aptitude, showing the inclination, stepping forward and trying to absorb as much as they can from Agastya, then we have to help them and we have to support them more.
So the YIL program became quite a statement within Agastya. Because we were never about trying to find maybe the next [unintelligible] manager or finding the next Einstein, because that was always Agastya’s philosophy that we want to raise the ocean by a millimeter rather than fill a glass with holy water. That was always the idea, but it was difficult when kids like this step forward to say, well, we do find them, and we have. Then do we just let them run with the program or do we give them the support that they, they require?
And so that has become the YIL program and we’ve seen some wonderful outcomes. We’ve seen the college enrollment rates for YILs being, you know, in the range of around 80%, which is higher than even, I would say, in some western countries. India’s average is about 20%. So you’re looking at a four x multiply in terms of the odds that this child is going to go on and do higher studies.
We’ve tracked many of these YILs. I think, in total we’ve maybe reached about close to about 50,000 of them over the years, and we’ve tracked their progress as they’ve left the organization and they’ve left Agastya’s teaching and gone on to do things. And we found some remarkable things in terms of the professions their parents had versus the professions. These children had this huge shift from the primary and secondary sector to, to the tertiary sector. And so that was the kind of impact that Agastya has been able to provide with its interventions.
[00:11:10] Jon M: What was the age range of the girls who volunteered and said, let’s move ahead?
[00:11:15] Adhirath S: So most of the kids, I guess, are in the seventh to 10th grade age group, so I think these girls were maybe in the eighth or ninth grade, basically. So you’re looking at, you know, 13 and 14 year olds.
[00:11:26] David P: Yeah. Wow. I just to add to this, the YILs is what we would refer to as, I think, the cultivating, the curating of innovators and leaders, and placing a great emphasis on communication skills, self-directed learning, what we would refer to as student voice and agency. I think this is Agastya’s effort to do that on a large scale.
[00:11:52] Jon M: I just had a follow up. So the students who are in the Young Leaders, are they doing this back at their home schools or are they doing this while they’re on the campus or, or both? How does that work?
[00:12:07] Adhirath S: So mostly it’s schools and then they get additional time with the instructors. In some cases they are, yes, invited to campus to spend some time there and, you know, have access to the facilities and the infrastructure on campus. And in some cases, as they grow up and they graduate, they become a part of the night school program. And that is something that has happened, that some of these kids go back to their villages and they may be working there. And they might then volunteer to teach children as part of what we call Operation Masanta, which was, again, Masanta was a girl who was part of the YIL program and went back to her village and they found her one day teaching kids on, on her own basically, using Agastya’s methods.
And so they decided that they were going to sort of scale this out and get it to across the country. So it’s become quite a successful program, and a lot of the YILs do become a part of that.
[00:13:00] David P: If I could add one other thing then, since the science fairs are such a critical part of how the pedagogy and the word is spread. While I was there, they were the facilitators for a science fair, in which at least 1000 children over the course of an entire day visited the campus. So they were manning all of the stations. They were the facilitators, the explainers, and I’m sure that that took a lot of preparation and rehearsing as well.
[00:13:33] Amy H-L: I want to go back to the teachers. And I’m wondering if either one of you could give us an example of what this looks like, teachers actually learning in the ways that students learn.
[00:13:47] David P: Sure. I’ll jump into it. So there was one group of teachers there for week-long Institute and it was focused on, on a new development in Indian education, depending on the state, but the creation of Eco Clubs. And so the issue of beginning to teach environmental literacy, environmental stewardship, climate anxiety, all of the whole cluster of things around sustainability. So this group came. There were some 60 teachers, mostly all math and science teachers, and we spent at least two days doing field work. And that field work entailed going to the local lake, which is in rather grave state in terms of pollution, in terms of a lack of rain. And they did a whole series of scientific gathering of data: doing water sampling, gathering artifacts that were along the beach. They had all kinds of clipboards with forms to document the data. Then came back and broke up into teams, discussed what the experience of doing that kind of field work was like, to have waders to go out into the middle of the lake and to be collecting water specimen and to be working together, calibrating the data.
And then the most important level of conversation: so what could this look like with our own kids? How do we begin to, to provide these kinds of experience with the natural world without a reliance upon textbooks or upon standardized tests? So that was one example.
The other was another day of of field work. Sending teachers onto the campus, and again, we’re talking about 172 acres of forest to collect specimens, artifacts, whether it was leaves, whether it was insects, whether it was taking images of snakes. And to come back then and to talk about what that kind of bio blitz-like experience was like and how to be able to replicate that and how that can create and support a sense of biophilia, of affinity with the natural world for children.
So those were, to me, embodiments of, okay, here’s real hands-on learning, but we’re going to go beyond the experiential. We’re actually going to then go a deeper level and reflect about what we’ve just experienced and done. That’s the kind of exposure that, that I believe that the teachers and now school leaders, by the way, are, exposed to when they come.
[00:16:18] Amy H-L: Wow. And are there parallel experiences in the arts?
[00:16:23] David P: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I have some beautiful images. Part of this workshop was to make short documentary films about the environment. None of them had any prior experience making movies, so there was a group there that were providing the technical support, and they spent those five days on that project of putting together a two minute video of some aspect of climate education or environmental literacy. So the arts, I mean here they were learning to use media and all of the components to telling a story a around a very real and pressing issue.
[00:17:02] Amy H-L: David, you said that Agastya is aligned with Nell Noddings’s ” ethic of care.” Could you talk about how the ethic of care is practiced at Agastya?
[00:17:12] David P: Hmm. I think it’s this overarching web of reciprocity. So reciprocity in regard for the natural world and a sense of regard, and therefore reciprocity amongst learners.
And everyone at Agastya is a learner. I think we all know that one of the most essential non-negotiable components in any learning environment are the quality of relationships. And so a great deal of emphasis, focus, orientation is around how do we exercise kindness and empathy – to children, to visiting teachers, to foreign visitors.
And so that culture of care, that ethic of care that Nell Noddings refers to, it pervades everything that goes on. I guess one last example would be, and correct me if I’m wrong with my pronunciation, Adhi, shraddha, the morning meetings. So that’s circle time, right. And in the best of kindergarten and early childhood and elementary and maybe if they’re lucky middle school programs, you have those gatherings of the community in a circle in which they’re addressing and facing each other and they’re sharing their goal or their intent for the day. And it’s ended by two minutes of meditation. That, to me, contributes to sensitizing a community to being alert, aware of how they’re feeling and how others are also feeling.
[00:18:43] Amy H-L: And what about relationships with animals other than humans?
[00:18:47] David P: I have my own take on that. Yes, please.
[00:18:51] Adhirath S: Well, the, the campus is, is the ideal place to go and see that, and, David would, you know, agree with me when he says that just bursting with, with activity. And a lot of it uninvited in the sense that, you know, we just did stuff with the land. And, if you look at the way in which the land evolved, it was this arid wasteland, which different reasons for that. But the fact remained that they decided at some point that they they had to walk the talk and use creativity, not just as a tagline to sell to children and say, okay, this could, you know, help you guys get better and understand science better, but actually use it as a tool to better themselves in so many ways that anyone who came to campus, anyone who interacted with the organization, would say, wow, they’re living and breathing creativity and not just selling it on.
So when the campus was revived, it was done with a lot of care and with a lot of understanding of what the land needed and as it evolved from strength to strength. So from this arid wasteland to smaller plants, you know, slowly being nurtured back to the larger trees that were kind of protected and given a lot of support with organic farming, with using the right kinds of species of trees planted next to one another. I mean, that level of detail was given. And, you know, to revive 172 acres like that is no small feat. So at some point things started swinging into, okay, the smaller insects have come back. And then now that we’ve had the smaller insects, we’ve had the larger sort of the geckos and the lizards have come back, I. And once they’re here, snakes are here, and once the snakes and the geckos are here, the birds start saying, oh, well let’s, let’s hang here for a second. It seems like a nice place in the middle of all this. And the moment, I mean, any ecologist will tell you, you get birds on your side, then, you know, you’ve really hit the tipping point, as it were, right because the droppings are brilliant for germinating seeds. They, of course, pass seeds far and wide. It just basically is, is the point at which the campus suddenly comes back and, you know, says, okay. And then the, the wild boars and we’ve had leopards and we have elephants coming through the campus. We’ve had peacocks all the time. Just, you know…
[00:20:55] David P: Don’t leave out the monkeys, please, Adhi.
[00:20:57] Adhirath S: Of course, the monkeys. Yes. My dog for example, is sometimes taken to campus and they will hang on a tree and make fun of him in a way that is so audacious that you must think, wow, are these guys so confident? No one’s going to hurt them, that they can just sit there, you know, in a bunch and just, you know, make fun of whomever’s passing by.
So I think the campus itself is fully vegetarian. You’re not, you know, you’re told that there was no meat allowed. There’s of course no alcohol allowed. And I think it, as David said, there’s a harmony, there’s a gentleness of purpose and there is an idea that we don’t reserve humaneness and kindness for, you know, some pockets that we then say, okay, we’re going to just apply it here. We’re just going to let it run wild on this 172 acres and it’s going to feed and breathe. Everyone’s going to breathe it in and take it away with them when they leave.
[00:21:48] Jon M: Hmm. This just sounds so cool. It sounds as though Agastya has a lot in common with the kinds of innovative and democratic approaches to education implemented in Central Park East schools in New York, and that we recently talked about with Linda Nathan and Jonathan Mendonca. What do you see as core or common elements of these programs, even though they’re in very different settings?
[00:22:10] David P: I can speak to that because the dots do need to be connected. These are learning environments that are all about cultivating the curiosity, honoring the intelligence of all learners, and creating then this web of relationships, a learning community. They’re learning communities. And you would find, I think, the same elements at CPE I or II that you would find that Agastya in the sense of joy is at large, teachers are respected as professionals and intellectuals, as thinkers who are learners. Learning is not competitive. It is, in fact, collaborative and it’s all about, it has nothing to do with rote learning. As Adhi had mentioned, it has everything to do with being open-minded and learning to learn. So those are, just on the surface, some of the connections that I see.
And yes, they are democratic spaces because they’re highly participatory. The sense of hierarchy is quite blurred at Agastya. It’s not a top down organization. And I think a sign of the health of any learning organization is the length of time people stay at a school or or a community. And in most cases, people averaged at least minimally 10 years, who are the Igniters and the catalyzers on campus. So that speaks to also that sense of ownership and a sense that you matter, all learners matter.
[00:23:39] Amy H-L: Shouldn’t that be how we relate to one another in our communities and our society?
[00:23:45] David P: I think I would ask that question again, even louder, Amy. Absolutely. You know, it seems obvious to us, and yet the question really is how come there aren’t multiple CPEs and Agastyas in the world of education, formal and informal, or how do we connect those, those wonderful islands of innovation?
[00:24:09] Adhirath S: I think another common thread is trust. I know David touched upon it, but we say it more because a lot of people will say that India isn’t a high trust society, you know, for multiple reasons. When you look at the overall thing, especially when you go to the disadvantaged sections you have, it’s difficult, you know, to speak to someone. Everyone’s always thinking, okay, maybe you’re out to get me, and you know, what’s in it for you?
And when you look at the way that, two things: one is the way that Agastya hired people, you know, and it continues to hire people with this idea that we are not really hiring for the role, we’re just hiring a person. And almost all the senior positions at Agastya were filled by folks who didn’t have anything definitive. There were roles on offer, but was basically the seniors saying, right, we think you are a great guy and we think we’d love to work with you, and we think you’re a self-starter. So what we’d like to do is just bring you in and you figure out which area you want to work on. And that requires a lot of trust, to put your faith in a person and say, I believe that you will find the right path and that that path will help the Foundation. And the other is, you know, when you speak about the breadth of, I guess, their operations, you’re talking about a hub in South India trusting that the guy in Delhi or the guy in Orissa or the guy in, you know, any other part of India, Bihar, is probably going to do the right thing and is going to run the program in a way that is conducive and that is aligned with the rest of the organization.
Of course, we have training for that. A lot of the backbone of Agastya, as it were, is what we call our quality assessment., But leaving people to do their own thing and just saying, well, it’s almost a guerrilla style of attack because every state, every city sometimes needs its own approach. So all you say is right. I trust that whatever you’re going to do isn’t going to bring disrepute to the organization and that it’s going to be done in the right spirit and that you’re actually going to get it done. So that’s a remarkable thing to have at this stage. The number of people there are, to trust that each and every one of them is probably working individually, but also working in this invisible sort of cohesive mesh that Agastya has built.
[00:26:14] Amy H-L: Do you see Agastya as a prototype for a nonprofit, or is it more something you’d like to see in lab schools or something like that?
[00:26:28] David P: I think it is a source of inspiration. I don’t think they’re looking to reproduce multiple, Agastyas. I think that there’s so much to be learned and shared with learning environments like Agastya. What would be most important is to create the opportunities for those exchanges and those dialogues to take place, but especially, Amy, thinking about what is the pertinence and the value of an Agastya in rural India, 8,000 miles away from New York City public schools? How can both learn from one another given the difference in culture and the distance? I think that’s the important thing is less about as a model to replicate, and I don’t think you’re suggesting that. I think it’s one of those multiple icons of what’s possible out there in the world that we in the West, we need to know about it. We need to be talking about it. We need to be connecting with those educators.
[00:27:27] Jon M: Given what Agastya’s been able to do in terms of its growth within India, do you have a vision of what a changed Indian educational system as a whole could look like? And is that a realistic kind of question to ask?
[00:27:47] Adhirath S: The truth is, we are reaching about five million kids a year. There’s still, that’s a very small slice of the pie. And so it’s, I mean, Agastya has this vision of Agastya 2.0 as we call it, to reach a hundred million children by the year 2030. And that might have been a little extended by COVID, but it’s still very much the, the number is still very much, you know, is out there. And we talk about it all the time. And we, you know, haven’t done our sites. And it seems to be something that everyone in the organization really believes that they can achieve. And again, I think it’s fair to say that in private schools in India, and I know very few people have the privilege to go there, a lot of this stuff is done in a sense, hands-on learning is done. Children are encouraged to have more varied experiences in school rather than just learn what’s in the textbook. So I guess there right now is more focused on how do we get, as we like to say, how do you reach the child that cannot be reached? You know, are there children out there who don’t believe something like this exists, or who’s sort of been forced to think that education is something quite mundane and dry? And that’s right now, the mission is to kind of reach those children and tell them, yes, there is another way of learning. And guess what? It’s heaps of fun and you’re going to enjoy it. So.
[00:29:07] Amy H-L: Are there aspects of Augustya’s programs that that schools or districts in the US could adopt or even that teachers could implement in their classrooms?
[00:29:19] David P: I would jump in by just immediately, the model for teacher education is one that we could learn a tremendous about, from not a cookie cutter teacher training, but you know, these are residential week long institutes that is also sustained through follow up. I think that that’s one place in terms of how they’re working with teachers in terms of helping them reimagine how to teach and to learn.
And now the most exciting part for me at least, is now that school leaders are invited into that conversation as well. So that’s one thing that very much comes to mind. I mean, clearly we have deep understanding of what a learning community looks like. And we have those examples, those islands of decency and innovation all over the United States, so it’s not about reinventing. It’s also understanding then how you create an environment that children and adults want to belong to. And I think Agastya understands that very well. And that’s the kind of conversation that doesn’t take place in teacher training workshops per se, but this is as critical and urgent a time as any for those kinds of of dialogues to take place.
[00:30:33] Jon M: What are some of the ways in which you measure Agastya’s success?
[00:30:41] Adhirath S: So this has been something that we’ve struggled with, I would say, as an organization, initially, partly because it was almost, I would say, an antithesis, I would say to what Agastya is trying to do, which was to say we don’t really care about marks. We don’t really care about a child acing an exam. What we do care about is that they enjoy the process of learning and that they bring creativity into their thinking process.
But obviously that is, and a lot of the donors, to be honest, who came to us initially and some of the largest ones, believed that… they said that, look, I’m throwing water effectively into a desert, so you don’t need to tell me that the land is parched. I know it is, and I know you guys have a bucket, and I know it’s going to be a long time before anyone tells me that that the water isn’t needed on that, you know, dry patch of land. But as we got corporatized in the sense that as our donors became more corporate in a sense and had to then go back and tell their management that, okay, here’s a number to work with, or, we started developing ways of measuring different things.
So we did develop a model with one of India’s leading business schools, which tries to capture the creativity, curiosity, innovation, and also the science learning that kids learn. So we do kind of interviews with the children before any Agastya interventions as a control group, and then we do interviews with them after maybe eight exposures or so with Agastya, which is typically a, a three-month period. And that is then kind of summarized and made into a metric that we can then say that, okay, this is the improvement. And we’ve seen obviously remarkable shifts in a simple sort of eight plus kind of exposure. We’ve seen things like, you know, an 8% increase in creativity, a 10, 12% increase in sort of innovative thinking, things like that. And it’s done periodically. It’s done on a fairly large sample set, around 300,000 children I think the last time we did it. So it isn’t as if we are just working with a small group of kids and saying, hey, we’ve had impact. We run this, model through, I know through quite a large and over quite a large timeframe as well. And that allows us in many ways to say yes, you know, there’s an impact that even though we might think, look, any child that you show hands-on science to that has never seen hands-on science before, you don’t need a genius to know that that child has been impacted in a positive way. But this kind of allows us to have a number to back that up as well, which is, which is useful.
[00:33:13] David P: I was really impressed when, I was working with Sony and I don’t know Sony’s title, Adhi, but Sony is a Catalyzer who [unintelligble] develop this really thorough, fascinating tool for measuring the effectiveness of the Igniters going out into the village schools. And so it was this inventory, a checklist essentially of the kinds of virtues and attributes and qualities of learning and teaching that are foregrounded and how it measures up in terms of, of observing that in action. I forget the name of the tool, but I was extremely impressed with what they’ve created.
[00:33:54] Adhirath S: Yes. So I mean, the tool itself, I’m not sure if it has a name, it’s the TQM, the Total Quality or the training program….. And we, and we have what are called IMTs, instructor Master Trainers. So the Igniters within Agastya have to apply for that. It’s quite rigorous and it’s quite competitive. And only a small percent, I think maybe the top one in 20 or something like that, make it to what we call IMTs. And the IMT’s job is then to go into the field, conduct audits of classes, and then come back and then try and work on, okay, fine, where are we falling short? So they give real time feedback to the Igniters on the field, which makes it extremely effective because you’re basically saying, okay, I’ve seen what you’re doing and i’m not going to go back and cloud this with memory. I’m just telling you right now that this is what I believe.
And it also allows them to go back and redefine what we call a “super class.” So Agastya has this almost formulaic approach in terms of, okay, if you want to reach kids and you have only two hours with the children, every minute kind of counts. So a lot of the work that goes in is defining, okay, how much time can you spend? Don’t spend too much time introducing. I guess they’ve just got these little pockets of time. It’s almost, you know, to use a crude example, and I have done this in my book, but it’s like the fast food industry in a way. You’ve just taken, broken down the process into little chunks of, you know, you have to do this and you have about this much time to do this. And then within that, giving them a lot of creative freedom to say, okay, now at this point, you work with the children and you have one hour, but that hour is yours. We’re not going to tell you how to spend it, or, you know, we’re going to give you tips. Largely, you know, use your creativity to reach the children in the way that you think is best, and that’s probably going to work. So it’s an interesting framework, and it’s kind of, again, why I say it’s the backbone of Agastya’s ability to scale up is because it’s allowed us to replicate and largely keep a consistent uniformity, as it were, in the way that the classes are conducted, wherever they might be.
[00:35:49] Amy H-L: Before we close, Adhi, would you tell us about your book?
[00:35:55] Adhirath S: Yes. So we had this idea in, well, in 2019 actually when, because it was our 20th year at that point, to have a book encapsulating the journey thus far. And, you know, I guess there’s basically was founded by Ramji Raghavan, who was a banker in London, and decided to leave it all and come to India and basically plunge into education, without having an idea at that point what that even entailed. And so various situations, various roadblocks, various challenges, along with the other founding members, kind of slowly developed this idea that, okay, we can’t, they wanted to build a school, but then they wanted, decided that eventually they’d take schools out into the country.
So that’s eventually what Agastya became. It was a journey fraught with, as I said, challenges with many, many pivots and the ideation. And then what eventually became Agastya, what became the campus. I. So the book tries to capture that entire story. So it starts literally with, as I said, with the arid patch of land that Agastya once was, and uses that and builds on that to the organization, to the campus, to the organizational design that Agastya chose in terms of how it scales up and to some of the other stuff we’ve spoken about, you know, in terms of the IMT and in terms of how the program was eventually spread across the country.
And it looks at the current situation, which post-COVID, where there was a lot of reshuffling and a lot of rethinking that needed to be done. You’re talking about a hands-on organization that cannot effectively, you know, make physical contact while lockdown, et cetera, was there. So that allowed Agastya to look at the digital space more effectively. And so the book, basically now, since eventually it was finished only in 2023 because COVID came along, looked at the 25 year journey that Agastya had. And took it from the point of, you know, ideation or conception to where it is today.
So, as we say, it’s the remarkable story of the Agastya International Foundation and it captures what I hope are a lot of the stuff that we’ve been speaking about and a whole lot more. And we are hoping that it’s a useful tool that when people read, they might realize the extent to which these folks went to develop and build this world class organization. And hopefully feel a strain of togetherness, a strain of inspiration that they might try and help us in some way. And that’s kind of why the book was written. I hope we can do that.
[00:38:19] Amy H-L: Thank you so much, Dr. David Penberg and Adhirath Sethi of Agastya International Foundation.
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