Learning and Education

Learning processes focusing on ethics, sustainability, equity, and well-being

This section features stories of initiatives to create spaces and opportunities for learning and education that enable continued or renewed connection with the environment and nature, with one’s community, and with humanity as a whole. These are stories of efforts to nurture a fuller range of collective and individual potentials and relationships, stories of unlearning the alienating, individualizing ‘education’ that mainstream institutions have been giving, stories where the formal and the informal, the traditional and modern, the local and global, are synergized. Initiatives ensuring accountability of the state’s responsibility towards citizens in education would also be covered.

Self designed learning at Swaraj University

Swaraj University was birthed in 2010 in Udaipur, Rajasthan as a two year learning program for youth. The focus of the program is on self-designed learning and on localisation entrepreneurship, including exploration of basic business skills redefined within the context of ecological sustainability, inner transformation and social justice.

Beeja Vidyapeeth – Seed conservation initiative in Uttarakhand

A historical description of the Navdanya Seed Conservation Farm and University in Dehradun

School Without Walls, Syamantak, Sindhudurg, Maharashtra

Syamantak’s "School without walls" is a center for experiential learning at Dhamapur village in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, India. Inspired by Dr.Srinath Kalbag, a scientist turned educationist, we formulated a residential commune of students. A process of organic learning run by the students for the students.

Enabling youth towards saving ‘development’-induced destruction.

A programme titled 'Pahar aur Hum: Rethinking Development in the Himalayas' concluded in Himachal Pradesh where 16 youth from western Himalayan states quietly learnt lessons on environmental issues for six days.