Place Pedagogie, Eco-Spiritual Cosmologies, and Cultural Stories: Wisdom from Dharmashala, Nepal

Abstract

This thesis reports the researcher’s emotionally thoughtful impressions of the actions and reflections of a participatory action research project in a public school in the rural located town of Dapcha, Nepal. The community of practice consisting of the university researchers, the schoolteachers, students, school managers, and parents identified seemingly a displaced, and therefore, lifeless school pedagogies as possible constraints of teaching and learning for communal belonging, being, and becoming. To this consideration, the PAR community made an action plan for a participatory and generative model of place-informed lifeful pedagogies for one academic session and worked accordingly. The community passed through the spirals of three different action-reflection cycles in one academic year. It appeared that the school couldn’t ‘romanticize’ on initiating (revolutionary) new model of ‘living pedagogies’ within the long endorsed in-door pedagogical design. Therefore, beginning from the first cycle the teachers began to integrate partly active teaching and learning strategies like inquiry learning, project learning, and outdoor learning (like school gardening) within and beyond the dominant Western ii Modern practice architecture and cultural milieu of the school. As the study progressed, the PAR actions and reflections encountered manifold mess, doubts, and dilemmas inherent in dominant indoor pedagogical approaches which had been long endorsed by the school under seemingly a non-ecological, disciplinary policy climate. The initiation moved ahead with mixed attributes of fear and excitement. There was an excitement that teachers and students were moving beyond the ‘routine- passivity’ of the school. And, there was fear that the model began to challenge teachers’ predefined Western-Modern expectations of being a ‘good’ teacher, students’ predefined expectations of being a ‘good’ student, and parents’ predefined expectations of having a ‘good’ school that prepares their children for the future. The ‘teach and learn for good exam marks’ metaphor of dominant practice architecture of the school, and the schools’ long-established tendency to follow ‘directions’ from authorial expectations of others outside the school appeared as constraints to ‘action’ the ‘talk about’ innovations. Though PAR partly challenged many of the closed, linear, and disciplinary cultural milieus of the dominant practice architecture of the school, and though it partly fostered perspectival shifts among practice communities, the long-established ‘teach and learn the prescribed course to pass the exam’ pedagogical metaphor of the school constrained the innovative pedagogies to fully emerge into the phase of organic continuation. My attentive observation of the dialectical mess within immediate phenomenon enabled me to make some fresh look on why, despite messy turn, many of the innovative (and outdoor) pedagogical models endorsed in the public schools of Nepal couldn’t emerge into the phase of continuation. For example, the PAR team’s engagement in ‘knowing’ the memories, dreams, and aspirations of the place, Dapcha Dharmashala came with a meaning that, unlike linear and disciplinary Western iii Modern pedagogical ethos, the place is relatively characterized by ecological relationality. Dapcha Dharmashala, like every other place, has its own place essential, the place dharma. It is the place dharma, the natural law of emergence, enactment, and transcendence that has possibly held for centuries the cultural continuity of the place. It was likely that when the indoor disciplinary practice architecture of school pedagogies endorsed in this place was not compatible with the long hold ecological relationality, the school, the teachers, the students, and the community, to some extent, began to lose their authentic ground and ethical responsibility towards immediate ecologies. Additionally, it appeared that when the outside prescriptions dominated the practice architecture and the cultural milieu of the school, the school teaching and learning were further displaced. Under such circumstances, many other popular but (anti-ecological) postmodern talks like local, or indigenous, or decolonial arrived as a scornful reaction against the dominant ‘modern’ practice architecture and partly added further messes in school education. Such a ‘narrow’ and binary undertaking of place concerning ‘disregarded others’ was more likely to strengthen ‘enemy seeking’ and ‘overly blaming’ tendencies among school teachers and learners. Despite the PAR team’s efforts, and despite a ‘messy turn’, I observed manifold constraints to institutionalize continuous unfolding of emplaced, and therefore, lifeful pedagogies within the ongoing practice architecture of Janahit School. Though, to some extents, the participatory initiations materialized stakeholder’s shifts in perspectives and practices, the need for continuous negotiations with indoor design and routine behaviors was seemingly disempowering. It made me realize that even ‘participatory’ has some limitations in a way that sustainability (the iv organic emergence and transcendence) of pedagogical innovation is more than human dimensions. Maybe, it needed a deep structural shift in the meanings, the worldviews, and the overall schooling architecture. Thus, rather than making vain attempts to seek life and lifefulness within placeless, and therefore, lifeless school designs at present, looking ahead for ‘ecologically organic’ architecture that goes in harmony with the place essential was seemingly the good option. Thus, the study suggests redefining pedagogical innovation and pedagogical modernity (of Nepal), not as mere ‘Western-European’ standards to get cultural fit into its disciplinary prescriptions, but as something arising from the ‘essential’, the ecological relationality place inherently holds. Also, being self-critical of the apparently non-progressive, hierarchical, and rigidly isolated structures of Nepali communities, the study forwards future possibilities of ‘living schools’ that relatively harmonizes not only inner and the outer spaces, but also the traditional and the innovative. Such ‘living schools’ possibly celebrates ‘pedagogy of authentic lifefulness’. The living school could be a pedagogical means of soul searching- here, now. Also, the journey from ‘school’ to ‘living school’ could be something like being ethically responsible for the essential value one holds, turning homewards, asking the question- what is my (educators’, teacher’s, student’s, parents’, or the researcher’s) dharma-here, now, and thereupon, flourishing from inside-out. If the dominant practice architecture of ‘modern schooling’ is partly non-ecological, displaced, and lifeless, then it appears logical that Nepal begins the journey of emplaced pedagogies from its own place ecologies. Re-defining ‘school’ as ‘living school’, adding in it the age-old Hindu-Buddhist metaphor of vidhya (wisdom) and alaya (place), which together makes Vidyalaya (place of wisdom) could be a possible way out.