[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:17] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. We invite you to join us for a special episode today to give you a sense of an exciting project called Educating for the World We Want that we’ve undertaken with three partners: Agastya International Foundation in India, the Center for Artistry and Scholarship in Argentina and the United States, and Thinking With You in Spain.
Juan Mora of the Center for Artistry and Scholarship and Ramji Raghavan of Agastya spoke at our first Saturday Salon on Nature, Place, and Education on January 10th. Today, we’re delighted to share with you their brief presentations. We’ll hold the second and third salons on the same themes on January 31st and February 21st at 8:30 – 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, featuring other dynamic speakers, as well as the chance for extended discussion.
The salons are pay-what-you-wish. You can register through the website, globalconversations.net. That’s globalconversations.net.
The first voice you’ll hear will be Dr. David Penberg, who will introduce Juan and Ramji. David is an international educator working with Agastya. Enjoy, and we hope to see you on January 31st and February 21st.
[00:01:36] David P: Everyone, I am deeply honored to have the chance to introduce our two distinguished guests. And what they have in common, other than their brilliance as visionaries and as practitioners in the world of education, is that they’re also good human beings. And by that, I mean what the poet Rilke calls “having a beginner’s mind.” They’re both astute listeners, they ask thoughtful questions as a way of understanding, and they’re driven by a lifelong sense of curiosity.
Juan Mora, who will be our first speaker, describes himself as an educator, a strategist, and a social entrepreneur who, for over 15 years, has worked in the spaces of public policy supporting educational institutions, building and growing alliances between institutions, all of which is driven by a vision of transforming how young people learn, connect, and shape their futures.
[00:02:45] Juan M: Thank you very much, David, and thanks, everyone. It’s so lovely to have an opportunity to meet in this space with caring folks from all over the world. We have similar concerns, similar dreams, similar work, and, I venture to say, similar fears about what is happening in many parts of the world and to humanity in general, I think. I don’t think we can separate what happens to one group of human beings from what happens to humanity as a whole, and yet I’m hopeful, and I hope that what I bring today is the possibility to share some of that hopefulness. Before I actually start, I’d like all of you to think about, if you will, about what you love most from nature. And you don’t have to say it, you can just thinking and bring it to your awareness. When you think about nature, what do you most love about nature? And this is just for you.
And as you look at the questions that were posted in the chat, perhaps I’ll start with the word reciprocity, because so much of what we do with the Center for Artistry and Scholarship, when we help schools transform, or when we help schools start anew, whether we do it in the United States or in Romania or in Argentina or in Uruguay or in Mexico, and I’ll share some of these experiences. Really, what we bring to the front is always the urgency that we have to do and to be in relationship to each other and with each other. And I really don’t think that anything happens outside of the form or the structure of relationship. And when we think about nature, if you think about it, nature only is in relationship to.
And by the way, when you thought about what you love most from nature, I want you to say that you probably did not think about the human being, because we’ve been so trained to think ourselves separate from nature. I’ve asked this question hundreds of times, if not thousands. I’ve never heard someone say, I love human beings. Not that we don’t love human beings, we just don’t think of us in the context of nature. And I think that in, in some ways has been by design. So when we design schools, I’ll briefly talk about our experience in Córdoba in Central Argentina, we invite people to reimagine everything that a school can be and everything that learning can look like.
So, if schools did not exist the way they do, and they were intentionally designed to fulfill a purpose, what might you imagine a school to be like if you had to start from zero? And that’s usually a starting question. What school would you do today? What school would you do here? What school would you do now? And what school would you do for this group of families and of children? I’m hopeful because, increasingly, more people ask us to help design experiences, and experiences that are rooted in place, and experiences that are rooted in nature.
So I specifically thought that I would share the experience of Umai, which is a community in Córdoba, in really central Argentina, where about 200 families lived together intentionally, and they needed to design a school for about 30 of their children going into first and second grades. And so when we started our work, we took them out to the river and in the most beautiful valley you can imagine, with a forceful river of ice cold water flowing through this valley where they live. And as the adults got together in a circle, we’re planning our design session.
I looked around and all of these kids, the kids that would be schooled, and other kids who were older, and other kids who were younger, were running around. And some were climbing rocks and some were climbing trees and some were creating swords to have sword battles and some were digging in the ground. And a group of kids were teaching another group of kids how to do paper airplanes with the paper stacks we had brought for our design session. All sorts of things were going on.
And so I asked the parents in the group who would be designing the school to just spend half an hour taking notes of everything they saw. And in those 30 minutes, these kids designed worlds, and they destroyed them, and then they rebuilt them. And they learned from each other. And they were running around, and they were sitting down, and they were calm and quiet, but they were also excited and dangerously audacious.
And we brought the session back together and we said, you know, we’re going to design a school for these kids. Whatever we do has to be able to offer a heightened experience from that experience, which they already have. We cannot design a schooling experience that will bring them outside of this beautiful, natural context and lock them inside a classroom to do what we have always done and what we’ve been used to doing. That does not make any sense. And so we decided to look at a project-based expeditionary model. But what we did was something really interesting because there are so many resources in this community.
So we designed a very simple structure where every five weeks kids would go through an expeditionary process. The first expedition was going to be the vegetable garden. No particular reason. We just thought that was a very good starting point. So these kids in first and second grade designed their vegetable beds, and they designed and thought about the plants that they wanted to bring to these vegetable beds, and they did all the work themselves.
And as they were doing this over five weeks, we did some of what the curriculum, the formal curriculum, asks of us. We did some math and we did some writing and reading, but all the words were words that belonged to the realm of the vegetable garden and the natural world, and they were contextualized. And all the math we did belonged to the realm of seeds and counting seeds and weighing soil and doing whatever we could do with numbers in the world.
So at no point did kids ask, why are we doing this? At no point did any of this feel external to the action-driven project they were engaged in. And they finished their beautiful vegetable garden and they presented it to the community of parents and guests. But then, of course, we needed to bring water to the vegetable garden.
So we started weaving, a kind of a macro story that would bring all of these experiences together. So if the first expedition was the vegetable garden, the second expedition would be water. Once water came, with water came the bugs and the insects that ate through all the beautiful plants they had planted.
So the third expedition was insects. And you see how we start weaving something that always makes sense. So then there’s no need to ask, why am I learning this? But rather how do we integrate what we’re learning to where we are?
And I start with this story because it seems to me that in order to understand how to shift our sense of how we relate to nature, we have to be in relationship and feel a sense of belonging to nature. And what we’ve done for centuries in cities and in urban context is to try to put nature out. Initially, we did it physically by building walls that would protect us from all sorts of harms. But I often work through schools, and I rarely find living plants inside classrooms. We’ve left nature out of our learning environments. And it would be, I think, strange, if not completely miraculous, if we all developed a sense of care for something we did not know anything about. And if we don’t spend time in nature, if we don’t spend time trying to understand our relationship, our symbiotic relationship, to nature, I think it’ll be really difficult to create a different sense of belonging, but also of mutual care. Of course, nature doesn’t need to ask itself how it cares for us because it does it all the time. But I think building this relationship in nature is fundamental.
And to close, I think I’ll just say something that Gordon Hampton, a beautiful man who does acoustic ecology, says, is all you need to do in a city is grab a group of unschooled children and take them for a city walk, and all they will point out to and see is nature. They will point out to leaves and branches and ponds and puddles, and they will just see and play with nature all around them. I think it’s really a shift in learning to see who we are and learning to see where we are. That shift will help us understand how to teach and what to teach and where to teach differently.
[00:12:36] David P: Wonderful. Juan, thank you. Thank you so much. I guess for me the three words or notions here that reverberate are reciprocity, ., And the centrality of relationships, and that all connects them to both the natural world, our environment, where we are, our sense of place, and the purpose of schools. And clearly, it is not about isolating and segregating children.
There’s one last thing before we, we go on to Ramji, and that is the term “nature deficit disorder.” Some of us, or most of us, might have heard this. It’s very real, and it has very real social and emotional cognitive impact in the lives of children. And just because you live in a city doesn’t mean that you need to be a nature deficit. Okay, Juan, again, thank you so much for framing around our three guiding questions.
Ramji Raghavan is the founder and CEO and the visionary behind the Agastya International Foundation. He’s composed an extraordinary and important story over the last 26 years of transforming over 172 acres of what was desecrated and destroyed forest, and through regeneration, transformed it into a thriving ecosystem and into one of the world’s great experiential education hubs. It’s my pleasure to give you Ramji Raghavan.
[00:14:09] Ramji R: Thank you, David. A pleasure to be talking to all of you. So my interest and love for nature, I suppose, almost naturally, if you like, because I was sent to a boarding school at the age of five. Not because I was particularly mischievous or anything, but this was a unique school founded by a great philosopher, J. Krishnamurti, who had a mystical relationship with nature. So I spent 11 years in that school, Rishi Valley, and every evening we would all walk up to a little hill and observe the sunset. And, you know, we played a lot of sports and games around trees because there were a lot of trees. So when I started the Agastya Foundation and got this arid landscape, which wasn’t my first preference, I was hoping for a Himalayan meadow, but instead, all I could get was a barren, rocky wasteland, 170 odd acres. And I remember one very hot summer afternoon standing on the land with my father, and he looked at me and said, you look rather disappointed. And I said, yes, I was hoping for a Himalayan meadow and look what I’ve got. And he laughed and he said, listen, old boy, that’s where you come in. Your job is to transform this barren wasteland into a Himalayan meadow. And that was sort of like an epiphany for me. And I said, huh, never thought of that. And I should have, given my background. So I said we need to create an ecological preserve, whatever that meant. And over the years, I managed to attract some environmentalists, conservators of forests, and so on, and they took on the job because this was not just about doing something nice. There was a lot of science in it. And the environmentalist called his strategy “gentle manipulation,” which I thought was a lovely phrase for not just the regeneration of the land, but for regeneration of the mind. And perhaps, you know, in many other contexts. So today we have a campus, besides all the science and arts and experiential learning centers, a large open-air ecology lab with about 600 species of plants, herbs, and shrubs, 70 odd species of butterflies, nearly 600 species of moths. I’m rattling off these numbers to you because we actually had somebody come and study all this and write a few books on what they found. So that’s sort of the ecological transformation.
But the important thing is, how do we get the Agastya staff, the ignaters as we call them, our teachers, and the children from nature? So nature-centric learning over the years has become very important. One, from a purely scientific basis, nature happens to be the greatest laboratory. There’s a lot of science you can learn from it. So, when children come into our labs, they’re very exciting, interesting. Whenever possible, they’re taken outside the classroom, tons of nature around, and they learn chemistry from a pond or from studying the soil, or photosynthesis from doing experiments out there in nature.
Same thing for the arts. We send the students out to observe and then come back and draw from their observations. You can learn math from nature, so there’s a lot of learning in terms of the traditional subjects that one can acquire through questioning, observation, experimenting, making unusual connections in a natural environment.
And then we have the famous eco-walk, morning eco-walk, where an ecologist takes visitors and students on a walk, explaining the medicinal value of different herbs and plants. You know, Indian ayurveda is a very old tradition, and we have developed these concept gardens and an extensive vocabulary and research on the medicinal value of different herbs. So, to make it interesting, we created a giant-sized figure. It’s half man, half woman. It’s probably a hundred feet tall on a hillside, on which we have planted different herbs that are good for those particular organs. So visitors and children can actually walk on these figures and learn in a very experiential way the value of these plants.
The other thing we are doing is what we call [unclear] in Sanskrit. The English equivalent would be forest-bathing. So we have created spots in the forest, which is now the campus, where people can go and sit and just literally bathe in nature and, think or meditate or just keep quiet or listen to the sounds of nature.
So creative learning and creative being are two things that we are really focused on. We are also developing a lot of nature-inspired exhibits. For example, we are building a 20-foot tall termite hill. I’m particularly interested in termites because of the concepts of emergence and complexity and all of that, and I’d like actually the foundation to be a self-organizing system. So I said, let’s investigate termite hills. And then we said, let’s just build a giant-sized termite hill so children can walk in and actually get an immersive experience of what it might be like to, if not be a termite, at least to understand how termites live. So you can extend that concept. And now we are going to also build a giant-sized beehive. Nature-based learning in different ways. Nature-centric learning is emphasized, reinforced all the time.
There is a powerful concept in Indian philosophy called bandhu, B-A-N-D-H-U. At a top level, it’s kind of being a friend. I’m your bandhu or developing a bond at a very deep level. It’s about the idea that everything, every being, everything is interconnected. In fact, in Indian philosophy, almost everything is a manifestation of something divine. Hence, you’ll find in India sometimes people worshiping a rock or a tree, or whatever. And what that breeds is a real connection with the environment. So bandhu is something we are promoting. We’ve called one of our programs for kids who come from far-off places to spend time on the campus, the Bandhu program, to create the sense of interconnection.
The other thing we are doing, or I’m trying to promote, is the whole idea of creating imaginary natural worlds in your mind. You know, create a visualization. Imagine a world. You know, forget about all the problems. What would a dream world be like for you, a nature-infused world? And from there, you get a lot of concepts and lots of ideas, and many of them have been hiding in plain sight. For instance, we are surrounded by rocks, not on campus but near the campus. And we never thought, you know, we could do something with rocks. So now we are going to create a kind of rock landscape where you learn the science of rocks, soil, stones, have rock sculptures, have a rock stage to stage a theater, drama, music, make it a rock immersive experience. So, I will end here by saying we’re hopefully creating an environment when nature is center stage.
And we have a very large outreach program. We reach about six million kids a year across India. So the next step would be: How do we take some of these learnings and distribute them through our distribution channels, mobile science vans and science centers and so on across the country?
So thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about some of the things we are doing here at Agastya. I’m on the campus today. It’s a lovely day. It’s a mist all over the hills. You can hear the birds, and I intend to go out for a walk in the night with my colleague Suresh, who runs the campus. And he said, if we are lucky, we might spot a few wild boar, might see a snake or two. So yeah, that’s pretty much it.
[00:23:59] David P: Thank you, Ramji. Thank you very much. I can attest to the fact of the wild boars and the snakes and the most populated creature, the wild monkeys and wild peacocks. I think that there are so many connections and echoes of what you said and what Juan had to say and with hope at the center and the imagination, and how you as educators create conditions for people to think the kinds of worlds that they would like to inhabit and live in, whether it’s a school, their community. And giving people that, children and teachers, that opportunity really broadens and stretches one’s capacity for thinking in different ways, different pathways.
I think the two words that stand out for me also are this idea of both creative learning and what that actually looks like, and then finally, creative being. And when you raise the eco-walks, Ramji, it is so much about being intentional, observant, and continuously in relationship with the things around you, whether they are living things, human beings, or inanimate things.
[00:25:15] Amy H-L: If you found these presentations interesting, please join our virtual salons on Nature, Place, and Education on January 31st and February 21st from 8:30 to 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. We’ll have diverse speakers and participatory breakouts. On January 31st, the speakers will be Sherry Johnson, Tribal Education Director of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe in South Dakota, Charlotte Hankin, co-founder of Coconut Thinking, joining from Bali, and Deepak Ramola, founder of Project FUEL, joining from California. The salons are pay-what-you-wish. You can register through the website, globalconversations.net, which you can also access through our ethicalschools.org website.
And don’t forget to check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews, including these presentations, to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next time.