“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 orientation is a passionate exploration of what it takes to reawaken our attention and to re-wild learning itself.
I am dedicated to the work of transforming the way educators 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 phenomena – so that the subject matter, rather than the textbook or lesson plan, 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 the making of teachers and students into problem finders and problem changers. It employs and deploys ecologies of learning and teaching as research.
My work is in transformative education, teacher education, and educational inquiry. I am dedicated to transforming learning-teaching, curricula, and educational environments. My on-the-ground understanding of education draws from over 20 years of diverse teaching and leadership experiences in the USA, UK, and India (including my work as School Director at an international, nonprofit, secondary school in England). I hold a BA (Hons) in Physics, MAs in Education and Philosophy, and a PhD in Education.
As a professor in education, my interests span transformative education, critical exploration, situated learning, grounded theory, ethnography, context & interaction analysis, systems dynamics, school renewal, and teaching as research orientations.
My current teaching, research, and fieldwork hold the question and promise of what it looks 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.