Glimpses from a five-day residential workshop for students at Cuckoo Forest School. The workshop is primarily focused on creating an awareness about everyday activities and their unseen implications elsewhere. The primary methodology followed is ‘Learning by Doing’, where all participants get to understand and experience the process of creating food, clothing, shelter and well-being.
“Chhaya: What a pleasure. Doshi, it’s a.. You know, we have had a lot of conversations. Face to face, together, in juries, but also just spending time together, but a public conversation like this brings different responsibilities, and I promise to behave myself, Doshi, unlike normal times.
Doshi: I think it’s a very good idea, Chhaya, to have a dialogue, so I’m very glad that you are in this. One of the things which I always think about is ‘how does a child learn?’. The child will want to open the door, they walk anywhere, they don’t even know, they are not afraid, and we try to close the doors because you know we think that is what it is. And, for me, the school has no doors; education is without doors, without boundaries.
I learned that because I never went to a formal school. Because I did not go to formal school, and I was in an extended family where nobody bothered about children, and their growth, and their behaviour, I lived like a free bird, and I learned about many, many things which normally I wouldn’t have learnt. When you have thrown yourself into a big body of water, or a lake, you swim and you find what you want to find.
So really, education is not only one direction; education is communication, education is talking about attitudes, behavioural patterns, and learning. So, this is really what the school began; new curriculum, new attitude, new behaviour of students, and we all became learners, so even a teacher was a learner, and the 18 year old young kid was also a learning. So this is the first thing that we started…. We could all have tea together; we could go to the canteen together..
Chhaya: So, Doshi, it looks like a completely unstructured way of learning.
Doshi: It is not unstructured; it is a structured thing in order to live within safe boundaries.
Chhaya: Yes, but when there are no boundaries, one is afraid that one might go wrong…
Doshi: How can you go wrong, when you don’t know anything?…. “
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The above is an excerpt from Cuckoo Conversation between Prof.Neelkanth Chhaya and Prof.B.V.Doshi. The words of these mentors, in a way, express the intent of ‘Niyathi’ – a five-day commune of ‘learning through doing’.
As many participants ask, what is the ‘schedule’ of the program? We do not have a rigid system, as the activities happen in their flow. However, there are enough activities designed that keep us all engaged through the day and night. The program is also held at places where the context and environment become the primary catalyst for co-learning.
