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Udaipur as a Learning City
Udaipur as a Learning City (ULC) is comprised of many processes to regenerate the local learning ecology. We see the city is a living organism, with natural, cultural, spiritual and physical elements, in which people are active co-creators of meanings, relationships, and knowledge. ULC aims to support these by re-valuing and re-connecting the diverse spaces for deep learning within the city and surrounding villages. It stands in direct challenge to the funnels of schooling and colleges, by reminding us that real learning requires actual, authentic spaces to ground our selves in. The city provides a variety of contexts for expanding our consciousness and bolstering our capacities to appreciate our strengths, address problems and build trusting friendships. ULC is an open invitation to people of all ages and all backgrounds in Udaipur, to explore ways of living and learning that are more balanced, more meaningful, more just and honest for them. The four major principles or process-goals behind ULC are:
- Developing our own visions and practices of Swaraj in Udaipur.
- Appreciating the unique strengths, capacities, potential, talents, skills of each person.
- Building feelings of caring and connected communities.
- Challenging unjust, dehumanizing institutions, attitudes, structures, plans, etc., particularly those related to urbanization and globalization.
These principles came out of a few years of dialogue with local people, and were articulated by volunteers at Shikshantar during the process of conceptualizing ULC in the year 2000. Given the openness and the spirit of the principles, they have not led to debate, but rather have inspired the community’s imaginations to make them manifest in practice. They have been, and continue to be, integrated into each activity that emerges under ULC. Such activities include:
Intergenerational Community Reflections and Dialogues: Festivals have traditionally been potent opportunities for deep reflection and social engagement. With this in mind, ULC has hosted interactive dialogues on both local and international festivals, such as Rakshabandhan and TV Turnoff Week. Posters, cooperative games, discussions and hands-on activities are combined to explore the meanings and life-actions of such celebrations. Public dialogues are also supported both by hosting conversations/events on prominent issues, like water conservation/restoration and pedestrian-friendly roads, and by screening thought-provoking films, like Baraka and Modern Times. Producing a variety of community media not only helps Udaipur citizens to critically and creatively look at present problems with new perspectives, but it also builds friendships across boundaries. For example, despite a strong national and international trend toward Hindi and English, ULC offer opportunities for reflection and conversation in Mewari (the local language). This enables a more dynamic sharing of peoples’ stories, songs, proverbs, etc., which in turn de-institutionalizes dialogues and takes power back from professionals and experts.
Unlearning and Uplearning Workshops: These particularly relate to critical media awareness and creative expressions -- people making their own music, dance, dramas, films, puppets, masks, sculptures, especially using so-called ‘waste’ materials. The underlying intention of such workshops is to actively nurture peoples’ capacities to say ‘no’ to the consumeristic, competitive and compulsory institutions/ attitudes/ behaviors/ structures that enslave us, and to instead organically construct spaces and relationships that do serve them. Such workshops predominantly occur within local neighborhoods and are hosted by families at their homes, in empty lots or temple spaces. Questions raised during such workshops include: How can we share our feelings, stories and ideas through our own expressions? How are our creations different from the readymade world of mass media? What do notions like beauty, leadership, success, freedom, justice, peace, security etc. mean to each of us? What are our creative capacities and power (beyond institutions), and how do we unleash them to make the kind of life we want?
Natural Living in a City: ULC is currently exploring ways that city-dwellers can reconnect to their hands/bodies and to nature, through organic farming on their rooftops, rainwater harvesting, solar cooking, herbal gardens with medicinal plants, spinning cloth and other such efforts at home. Natural living efforts also give city people a chance to ‘get their hands dirty’. The soil and the sacred get reconnected in the most basic aspects of human life, like health, food, water, clothing and shelter. These processes enable city folks to link local culture with spirituality and the physical ecology; for example, the wisdom in Mewari is intimately connected with an ethical lifestyle and natural balance, which are essential for challenging urbanization.
Learning Exchanges: ULC seeks to move beyond NGO/Government institutional boundaries and agendas and directly involve local artists, organic farmers, artisans, businesses, healers, etc. in questions and experiments related to regenerating urban life. It also encourages youth who are not interested in school or college (or those who want to change their career) to create their own meaningful paths of living, livelihood and learning, by trying out exciting apprenticeship opportunities. We encourage people to reclaim their own learning processes by building their own learning webs (diverse networks of co-learners and spaces) around the city.
These different elements of ULC are geared towards regenerating the cultural commons. They stand in direct challenge to the violence of Development, Progress and Modernization, which has severely devalued local people and their knowledges and experiences and has led to high levels of dislocation, isolation and alienation. We are trying to revalue those things which are important to our collective well-being but do not have direct economic value to the State or Market. The activities of ULC are entirely off-line, as internet use and access is quite limited in Udaipur. People meet face-to-face as needed, depending on the activity (whether a publication in Mewari, a rooftop garden, a theater workshop, etc.). No separate building has been especially constructed for ULC; rather, we have chosen to creatively utilize what already exists: peoples’ homes, local neighborhoods, public gardens and parks, art galleries, temples, ashrams, businesses, or local organizations’ offices. ULC focuses on families and diverse communities. We recognize that intergenerational learning is key if wisdom is to emerge and profound action is to take place. All of this ensures that the Shikshantar movement, even in Udaipur, extends far beyond one space – and therefore steers clear of the isolation and marginalization that face many alternatives to education.
People join ULC either through an existing activity, which has been initiated by the interests and questions of others, or by sharing their own curiosities to start something new. It is self-organizing, and the core team of Shikshantar plays a role in fleshing out, supporting, and deepening the emergent activities. This is why the work of ULC is so broad and deep, spanning everything from vermicomposting to anti-globalization campaigns to learning with local artists. Many people join in ULC for this spirit of bridge-building, border-crossing, intercultural dialogue and relationships. We ask people to freely share what they have with each other in the spirit of gratitude, thus aligning with an ancient Indian principle against the commodification of knowledge.
This is a fundamentally different orientation from many other learning city projects in the West, where the focus is on expanding technology (computers and internet usually). In those cases, the definition, purpose, means, and ends of ‘learning’ are often rooted in the military-industrial paradigm of development and rarely ask questions about the direction of this paradigm. ULC is also very different from the popular notion of public-private partnerships, where ‘public’ only refers to government bodies, and ‘private’ only to corporations. ULC is trying to transcend these categories of public and private and to appreciate and integrate the authentic concerns and strengths of local people. In other words, in Udaipur as a Learning City, individual people and intergenerational relationships are the starting point -- not abstract ideas, pre-determined projects or results-based indicators. ULC enables us to be alive to surprises and to feel a constant excitement in journeying into the unknown.
Over the last six years, we at Shikshantar have been astonished and inspired by the directions ULC has taken. We have realized that the more closely we work with individuals and families in neighborhoods rather than with formal institutions, the more motivated and invigorated we feel. Also, it is more self-sustaining than forced plans or formal arrangements. For example, our interactive dialogues in public spaces have been very effective. These are at a human- scale and have enabled our network of children and families to expand (much beyond normal NGO circles). Our resourcefulness with space and materials has also inspired and reminded people that they do not need a lot of money to do wonderful things in their lives and community.
Shikshantar Andolan
Layers upon layers upon layers — like a crisp red onion (grown organically, of course!) — is a good way to understand Shikshantar Andolan. Our personal learning community of learning activists and volunteers are nested in the larger local effort of Udaipur as a Learning City. Both in turn are connected to and continuously invigorated by friends from three other growing translocal networks:
- The Learning Societies Network: Beginning with the question, “If not a schooling society, then what?”, this network seeks to break the monopoly of education experts by engaging the unusual suspects in the dialogue around education and development: artists, parents, farmers, activists, craftspeople, business folks, youth, elders and more. It focuses more on conceptual questions around the nature of human learning, policy options for learning communities, tools for dialogue and various experiments happening in the world. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/lsdialogue.html
- Walkouts-Walkons Network: Also known as the Swapathgami Network (one who makes his/her own path and walks it), this collection of people are engaged in exploring individual pathways outside of institutionalized structures, attitudes, lifestyles, products and much more. They actively challenge the existing label and connotations of ‘drop-out’. Rather, they are walking out of the Readymade World and walking on to endless possibilities of their own and other friends’ creation. The network features many non-commodified learning resources and apprenticeship opportunities. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/walkoutsnetwork.htm
- Families Learning Together Network: A group of families from around India are interested in learning and living beyond the boundaries of factory-schooling, home-schools, mass media and other forms of institutionalization. They are exploring dynamic notions of ‘family’, of joint families, of friends and families, of adults and children learning from each other. They believe that families can be foundation for learning and sharing skills, ideas, practices, love and friendship. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/familieslearning.htm
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