Networked Learning

When I was preparing to take this trip, I often had a recurring dream. It was more a dream about feelings than specific images or activities, but it was always about trying to make connections among a range of disparate and distant bits. In the dream, I was trying to link people and projects to achieve a goal that none of us could achieve alone. The goal was not entirely clear and the bits to be connected weren't clear either. The dream made me feel excited about possibilities, but uncertain about the nature of the endeavor, and intimidated by its scale. I haven't had the dream since I began this journey, but I feel I am living it.

The first night I arrived in Bangalore, I was taken to a faculty apartment where my friend Geetha Narayanan had arranged for me to stay. Geetha is a visionary educator, deeply informed by wide-ranging reading about learning, philosophy, new media, social transformation, and the arts. She has a talent for making alliances, luring talented people into working with her, and gathering resources of all kinds to build lasting institutions. Geetha is the co-founder of several schools: Aditi International School, the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and the Drishya School for poor children, all in Bangalore. Along with some other powerful women, she formed Aditi, a primary-secondary school, when the other international schools in Bangalore refused to admit Indian children. The school integrates the arts while developing students’ understanding of a high level academic curriculum. Srishti is a 3-year college housed next door to Aditi, where students learn various aspects of design that integrates new technologies through conducting projects that contribute to learning and development of communities. Recently, Srishti expanded to include an additional nearby campus and part of this new campus is a resource center for the Drishya school. Geetha co-founded Drishya in order to provide high quality education, of the sort offered at Aditi and Srishti to relatively privileged students, to children who live in the slums of Bangalore.

I began to learn about the culture and vision of these schools on my first night in Bangalore when one of the Srishti faculty invited me to join a small party of other faculty members at her house. Like most Srishti faculty, Radha Chandrashakaran is a practicing artist. She walked me around her house to show me some of her paintings--wonderful images that combine tribal and ritual images in dreamlike collages. Several of her paintings are inspired by Kolams. These are designs that Indian woman create at the entrance to their houses every morning. They create them by sifting rice powder through their fingers. The rice is an offering to the gods and to the little animals that eat it. The design is supposed to absorb negative energy from those who step on it so they bring only positive energy into the house. Radha learned to make the Kolam while sitting with her grandmother. Little Radha was bored watching her grandmother create the designs, "So my grandmother bribed me, by telling me stories--about Indian myths,” Radha tells me. She loved the stories then, but now she believes that learning about these designs set her on her path as an artist whose research focuses on tribal women’s art. See more of Radha's work on her website Radartist.

As I talked with Geetha and her colleagues, I began to appreciate what Geetha calls “slow learning.” Although many of these teachers are advocates of new technologies and fluent multi-media artists, they are concerned about the emphasis in technologized societies on acquiring and transmitting information as fast as possible. Another veteran teacher at these schools Tara Kini told me about the gurukul tradition of learning in India, in which expert gurus gradually develop their novices over a period of years. The novice lives with the guru and waits on him while observing, practicing, and being coached sometimes for as much as ten years. Slow learning, like slow cooking, is as much about the process as the product and it takes place through many rounds of hand-making, with modeling and feedback provided by a master.

I saw many examples of this kind of slow learning at all three of these schools in Bangalore. I hope to write about some more examples in another post. For now, just to round out this note about networked learning, I will mention that the image at the beginning of this note is from a Kolam outside the Drishya school. It was made by the young students there. I also saw their plans for this design in the room where they study patterns and geometry. Here they mapped out the design on graph paper, tracking the symmetries and recurring patterns that they then transferred to the beautiful Kolam on the threshold. This is only one of many examples of lessons that link the past to the future, ritual to contemporary design, school to community, arts with academics, practicing artists and scholars with school children. I am beginning to see how networks can be formed that connect poverty with privilege in mutually beneficial relationships and that join educators with common interests around the world.