“While our education policies, schools, and habits of teaching continue to be driven by political agendas and ideologies, today, despite the best efforts of our teachers, learning is critically endangered: its spirit tamed and tethered, its habitat shrunk, its resources depleted and its movement circumscribed” Gopal Krishnamurthy, (2015), Telegraph, UK.
My educational orientations are a passionate exploration of what does it take to reawaken our attention and to re-wild learning itself?
I am dedicated to the work of transforming and re-wilding the way teachers engage with teaching-learning (our own and that of our students and communities), curriculum design, and learning environments. My approach is grounded in observation. It invites inquiry. It facilitates direct engagement with scientific phenomena – so that it is the subject matter, rather than the textbook or lesson plan, that is the primary source of authority (e.g. Nature is the primary Teacher). This approach gets teachers themselves looking afresh at phenomena and leads to their seeing new ways to learn alongside students in how and what they observe, think, do, make, and discover. It entails navigating learning as a landscape, uncovering rather than covering a curriculum, and breaking new ground in making sense of the world. It includes making teachers and students into problem finders and problem changers, not just problem solvers. It employs and deploys ecologies of learning and teaching as research.
My work is in transformative education, teacher education, science teaching, and scientific inquiry through which I explore environmental studies. I am dedicated to transforming and re-wilding learning, curricula, and educational environments. My on-the-ground understanding of education draws from over 20 years of diverse teaching experiences in the USA, UK, and India and my work as Head of School at an international, non-profit, secondary school in England. I hold a BA (Hons) in Physics, MAs in Education and Philosophy, and a PhD in Education.
I am interested in ecologies of learning, transformative education, critical exploration, contemplative ecologies, situated learning, grounded theory, ethnography, context & interaction analysis, systems dynamics, school renewal, and teaching as research orientations.
My current teaching, research, and fieldwork holds the question and promise of what does it look like to relocate and reframe our educational, social, and environmental challenges so that solutions emerge from the careful reformulation of problems and questions?
“Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say: ‘This is an oak tree’, or ‘that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come to contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it” Krishnamurti, J. (2010). Freedom from the known. (p. 20). London: Rider.
