I've been traveling in India since January 1, mostly for fun, except for two workshops for educators. Well, they were also fun, but not on the usual tourist paths. The tourist experiences were fabulous: exploring monolithic caves at Ajanta and Ellora, visiting palaces, temples and forts in Rajasthan, viewing the Taj Mahal at dawn, and then exploring a recently excavated lost city amidst the fantastic boulder-strewn landscape at Hampi.

In all these travels the vibrant aesthetic of India is astonishing. The caves, temples, and palaces are embroidered with carvings of exquisite designs. Rajasthan is mostly dry as dust and people in the rural areas lead a difficult life, hauling water and kerosene fuel for long distances on their heads. But those heads are wrapped in colorful cloth and the women wear beautiful saris of multiple colors so that you spot them across the dust-colored landscape hard at work. Trucks are painted vividly and the 3-wheeled autorickshaws are decorated with flags, tassels, and garlands of flowers. Even the cows and water buffalo that stroll along the roads and mingle with traffic in the cities are likely to have decorated horns and may have ribbons tied to them. We even saw one of the lovely white cows painted with polka dots. And it's not just a visual esthetic. Music, dance, story-telling are all ubiquitous modes of celebrating, sustaining, and evolving a rich culture. By comparison, the US seems rather rootless and too focused on accomplishing the result without taking time to make the process enjoyable and sensual.

I did have a good time conducting two workshops about Teaching for Understanding and WIDE World. Both were organized by American Higher Education India, which is marketing WIDE World courses in India. They had invited school leaders and teachers from a number of independent "public" schools and networks of schools in Delhi and Mumbai to day-long workshops. I tried to conduct them as a process that reflects TfU principles, so that participants could experience the process and could actually try using the ideas to design something that would be useful for them. This process allowed me to learn more about what these people were doing in their schools and I was impressed. A number of them are using new technologies pretty extensively and involve students in complex projects. I was particularly impressed by a group from the Mahatma Ghandi International School in Ahmedabad. They described a wonderful project, all closely aligned with curriculum requirements, in which students conducted research on environmental issues, presented their findings in a range of performances, and worked with the teacher on a process of defining and applying assessment criteria. The first time they conducted this design, they also required students to prepare to take the standard examinations. The students all scored well but complained about how narrow the practice items and test items were and begged not to have to waste their time on such pointless work in the future. Other participants in the workshop were also impressed by this example. But many of them felt that students would have to be supported and required to take the tests which are the gateway to further learning for most students.

It's been interesting to see that Indian educators wrestle with the same concerns that US educators do. They endorse the goals of teaching for understanding but debate about how much effort to invest in preparing students for exams that don't do a good job of assessing real understanding but that are required to gain admission to further schooling.

What is striking is that all of the attendants at the workshops came from independent schools. Meanwhile, a huge question in the country is how to improve teaching and learning in government schools. The level of public spending for the government-sponsored education system is not enough to provide high quality materials and the presence of a well-trained teacher in many of these schools. Attendance at school is not compulsory and one sees many school-age children along the roads or on the streets during school hours. But one also sees flocks of uniformed students--beautifully dressed in blue and white uniforms with the girls sporting bright red ribbons in their hair--walking along the roads to school. We also saw opening exercises taking place in the front yard outside schools in Karnatika. At one school students were lined up in sharp straight rows singing an opening prayer taken from a Bollywood song. At another, they were sitting in sharp rows in a straight-baked yoga position, with eyes closed. Clearly these students were preparing for an orderly day.

I arrived in Bangalore yesterday and will be spending the coming week visiting with my friends Geetha Narayanan and Shuchi Grover at the Aditi International School and the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology. I've already met with some of the faculty and am very much looking forward to observing and talking with them at the schools.