Edutopia - June/July 2008 - (Page 58)

Fair Play: Puvidham students (above) gather daily for hands-on activities, learning to work together and solve conflicts creatively. Mankandan (above, right) tries out a circus trick. emphasizing self-esteem, conflict resolution, and eco-friendly practices and farming techniques. In their lessons, teachers use Montessori methods and artistic creativity through music, dance, art, and theater. (While the Dreamtime Circus rehearsed, Puvidham children did, too, on an ample stage on school grounds.) The word puvidham loosely translates from Tamil as “love for the earth,” and children learn much of their academics through organic farming, including math (establishing planting patterns), biology (studying the relationships between plant growth and environmental factors), economics (determining the price of a farm product), and language skills (writing about their activities and observations). The school is funded primarily by Asha for Education, a grant-giving organization dedicated to improving basic education for underprivileged children in India, and the Association for India’s Development (AID), as well as individual charitable donations. Students’ families make small contributions on a sliding scale, determined by what they can afford (which, for some, means only time or labor). For children of migrant workers who would otherwise face a roving existence in slums and construction sites, Puvidham constructed a hostel facility, housing about half of the school’s population. Social harmony is paramount at Puvidham, as most schoolwork EMOTIONAL RESCUE is group work, whether it’s simple Find lessons on managing emotions at chores and gardening tasks (chiledutopia.org/social-emotional-learningacross-curriculum dren are expected to water the plants, clean the classrooms, and so on) or group performances. “If they are doing a dance together, they have to be able to communicate without hurting each other, and get the cooperation of a maximum number of people,” explains Meenakshi. Violence and caste-related conflicts are tempered by discussion. A persistent ideology regarding low-caste families once had students refusing to drink from the same glass. Teachers nipped that in the bud, Meenakshi says, by display- ing its absurdity: “You two are breathing the same air! The water glass goes only to the lips, but the air goes all the way inside the lungs!” This fact, she says, “made so much sense to them that we didn’t have a recurrence of those problems. Now, children eat from each other’s lunch boxes and preach to their parents about it, too.” Frequent forays into what Meenakshi calls “silent theater” also help students ⇒nd creative ways to express emotions or enact the social situations they encounter. When teachers ask, for example, “How do you depict fear?” students construct widely disparate scenes—a pupil cowering before a teacher’s stick, for example, or a tree being cut down. “Through that and through discussions about that, we get a lot of other angles into situations that we wouldn’t get in the traditional classroom,” she explains. “How they react to society, how they relate to society—all that comes out in these kinds of games.” Puvidham students have started on a path to social activism through their theater skills, too: Older students write and perform skits in neighboring villages about relevant local and environmental issues, such as land degradation, chemical farming, and water conservation. Ultimately, Meenakshi af⇒rms, school shouldn’t have to be a chore, disconnected from a child’s sense of self. Students’ “reason to be alive and what they want to do in life,” she says, is as much a topic of discussion and re⇓ection as con⇓ict resolution or sustainable agriculture. The weekend I visited Puvidham, which had begun with circus workshops for the children, ended with lessons for us. Students taught us origami, simple phrases in Tamil, traditional Tamil songs, chants, and dances with bamboo sticks and cycling rhythms, a complicated game of spinning tops, and many other skills I didn’t have time to try. They were selfassured, knowledgeable, and, above all, happy. A contented peace permeated the air. There was no sense that these children had ever been, or would ever be, the have-nots. No, I don’t know magic, I told them. What I could have said, I realize now, is, “You do.” e 58 EDUTOPIA JUNE/JULY 2008 http://edutopia.org/social-emotional-learning-across-curriculum http://edutopia.org/social-emotional-learning-across-curriculum

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Edutopia - June/July 2008 Contents UpFront Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of Class Cool Schools Design Young Minds, Fast Times Wii Love Learning No More Pencils, No More Books Tech Without Support All the Right Moves Room to Learn Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jeff Corwin

Edutopia - June/July 2008

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