Environmental Education

John Parry conducted an Environmental Education workshop for us ECMers on the Friday of 5th week in the Hilary term.

Just like that, Oxford presented us with yet another opportunity of contributing to the environment that we were not previously aware of.

The workshop ran for the entire day and covered a whole vista of topics. The one thing that really stuck with me however, was how the environment could be used a fulcrum to leverage the capabilities of all members of society. Dr. Parry told us how he had taught a group of disabled adults to take photographs of the UK coastline and upload the photographs online, in order to document coastline recession. Geologists had found these photographs extremely useful in their research. This project had made that band of adults feel useful, and included, in a by and large rather indifferent society. It had changed their lives for the better.

How could I make use of this lesson? Fired, I wrote to ADAPT, an NGO in India which aims to provide an inclusive education to disabled, and abled children. I asked them to give me permission to conduct an environmental workshop for their kids. I hoped that I could, when I got back to Mumbai, after my stint at Oxford, collaborate with this organization on projects to document environmental considerations in Mumbai just like the ones Dr. Parry was conducting in the UK. I felt that by establishing contact with ADAPT and seeing how they ran, I would be able to think of ways I could make my plan possible.

For a long time, I received no reply to my email, and I eventually forgot about it. Time flew on at Oxford and then it was time to go home for a brief 2 week vacation. While I was lolling around the house one morning, my mother asked me what had happened to my workshop plans. I told her ruefully that I had received no reply and that I guess that meant I was stymied.

My mother snorted. 'If you really want a reply, you'd call them instead of hemming and hawing using emails,' she said.

And that's what happened. I called, and found myself invited to give a talk on the environment to about 30 kids between the ages 8 and 16 on Tuesday!

I had the biggest, baddest, meanest butterflies carousing around in my stomach for the next 4 days.

It's all very well, giving a talk to a room full of adults, but talking to children is vastly different! How on earth was I going to convince a bunch of 7 or 8 year-olds that climate change, and the environment were important?

Most of the kids of ADAPT lived in slums. Why would they care about seemingly abstract, existential threats?

I decided, that I had to make my lecture pertinent to their lives. I had to tell them how environmental degradation affected THEM. I decided to focus on environmental degradation that they could actually see in their (and my) home city- Mumbai.

On Tuesday my aunt Del and I left 2 hours ahead of schedule and took a train to Churchgate station. (I had successfully roped my aunt in to give me moral support, and translation of words I didn't know the Hindi equivalent of!) We arrived at the ADAPT headquarters near the Afghan church. I nervously made my way inside the building to meet the Director I had been in touch with on the phone.

The school was charming. It overlooked the sea and had the kind of playground at the back that should feature in every person's childhood.

ADAPT provided Std 1 to 8 education. It also provided vocational training to 17 and 18 year olds. I peeped into the classrooms which were gaily covered with art and craft. I saw a little kid who was mute, typing out an answer to his teachers question on a computer. I saw kids on wheel chairs lustily shouting out encouragement to their friends running around the classroom. I felt a terrible sadness suddenly come over me. Surviving in India is a struggle for even the most able of bodies. After these children left ADAPT, the world would not be kind to them.

I set up my laptop in a classroom. I felt a little silly already. It had been so long since I was 7, that I forgot that a powerpoint presentation was really not the right way to engage a child! I wanted to turn and run. Luckily my aunt put her foot down and I sat down on the mat next to my laptop sick with fear. All of a sudden thirty 7-8 year old kids had swarmed into the room and were clustered around me.

I needn't have been afraid of getting this lot engaged!

As soon as they saw my opening slide (a picture of the earth, from space) I was besieged with questions on all sides, asking me if I had any accompanying music, where India was on my image and specifically where ADAPT was located, and what my name was! I laughingly tried to answer all questions in my questionable hindi.

I wanted to start my presentation by asking the kids what challenges they felt the earth was facing. I didn't want their answers to be limited by the environment.

Unfortunately, the kids were too interested in the satellite image of the Earth itself to bother answering my question. In despair, I tried bringing up a few problems that I thought they would relate to. I talked about the 26/7 floods in 2005. The kids looked at me with blank faces. I realized in horror, that these tiny tots were too young to remember the ravages caused by the floods.

I moved on to the terrorist attacks on the Taj Hotel in 2008. But alas and alack! All they wanted to know was how that image of the Earth had been taken! I felt a deep, violent hatred for satellite imagery.

I pressed ahead. I gave them a brief over view of green house gas warming in as simple a manner as I thought possible. I paused after my explanation for questions. One girl raised her hand. 'Are green houses, the same as polio houses?' she said.

As far as I knew, polio was a disease! Had I not only managed to NOT convey the concept to the children, but had I actually managed to confuse global warming and a disease?! I kept my cool, and asked the girl to tell me what a polio house was.

She told me that she had lived in Uttarakhand when she was a child and there they grew certain plants in structures- that they called polio houses, which looked exactly like the Green House in the photograph I had on my slide. Listening to this explanation, I thought it were possible that the two could be the same. Just to be sure though, I repeated my explanation of what a green house gas was twice or thrice in order to remove any confusion.

By this time, most of the kids were yawning and looking out at their playground wistfully.

'That's okay, Priyanka!' I whispered to myself. 'The worst is over. The green house gas effect hath been explained!'

I moved on to air, water and noise pollution in Mumbai. I showed them images of Mumbai in the past with vast plantations of mangroves which acted like natural sluices and kept the Mithi river clean. I then showed them recent images of Mumbai where construction of Essel World (an amusement park), the Bandra Kurla Complex etc had led to the clearing away of most of the plantations. The kids cheered when I showed them a picture of Essel World and then seemed rather doubtful about how to react when I told them how many acres of mangroves had been cleared away to build it. I felt I was pushing it with that one.

I then told them about Sanjay Gandhi National Park and how encroachment was leading to increased leopard attacks in Powai.

I finished my lecture with a flourish!

I then stepped back and confidently asked the class. 'So who can tell me what they have learned?'
Utter silence.
I panicked. The kids must have seen my face, because one of the boys tentatively answered, 'Terrorism is a big problem?'

I explained the green house gas effect another couple of times.

This time when I ended, I was too smart to repeat my mistake. I asked the kids. 'What can you do about saving the environment?'
I got the answers I was looking for: Using dustbins, public transport etc.

I regained my popularity (which had gone down markedly after the final explanation of the green house gas effect) by distributing sweets to the kids who answered my questions correctly.

I left the lecture feeling that I had aged a decade.

A moment or two in the warm, comforting sunshine and I had jumped on to my next project. I decided to write a textbook on the environment for school children. Anyone who is mad enough to want to collaborate with me, or who knows how one can go about doing something like this is requested to please drop me a line!