RE-IMAGINING EDUCATION WORKSHOP
At Swaraj University, Tapovan Ashram, Udaipur.
August 14th to 19th, 2021

 
“If we want to truly re-imagine education, we will have to re-imagine ourselves and the lives we are living...”
 
As their legacies, operations and assumptions become more available for scrutiny, traditional schools are becoming less meaningful and more problematic. The idea that children are meant to be enclosed in buildings, removed from their immediate contexts, policed and pressurized to rise to imposed standards, branded and certified, and then released into a world that awaits them, is disconcerting – to put it mildly. In short, we need to listen to our children again – and, in the same gesture, find our way home. We have new response-abilities: to co-produce learning sites where our children can be free to do their work with the world, and to invite new ways of un/learning together that privileges play, community, ‘slow’ rituals, and earth-honoring practices.
 
But what does that look like? What about conventional education seems problematic? What haunts schooling in India and in most so-called ‘third world’ nations? Can the education system be reformed or does it have to be dismantled? How are we being enabled to counteract the colonial legacies of schooling, and what forms do these ethical responses assume in the specifics of our localities? What kind of radical educational practices and experiments are happening and possible now? What are the possibilities and shadows we need to explore in ‘unschooling’ practices? How can you start re-imagining education in your community? And much, much more.
 
In this workshop, leading social and educational visionary Manish Jain will host unlearning conversations and exercises around reimagining education, experimenting with possibilities for alternatives, and learning to meet our children – whose magic and work we desperately need today.  
 
This workshop will be very useful for those trying to build new learning spaces in their own families, communities, schools and alternative education spaces.
 
 
About the Facilitators:
 
Manish Jain <manish@swaraj.org> is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse knowledge systems and cultural imaginations. He is one of the leading global voices for the unschooling movement. He has served for the past 20 years as Coordinator/Co-Founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development and as co-founder of Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Swapathgami Walkouts-Walkon network, and the Ecoversities Network. He has edited several books on Vimukt Shiksha (liberating learning). Prior to Shikshantar, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative. Manish worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in the belly of the beast. He has been trying to unlearn his Master's degree in Education from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics, International Development and Political Philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 16 year old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan.
www.shikshantar.org
www.swarajuniversity.org
www.ecoversities.org
 
 
(Online guest) Dr. Bayo Akomolafe considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. “To learn the importance of insignificance” is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive and completely partial.

Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. He sought to apply himself to the extremes of his social conditioning, his faith, and his eventual training as a clinical psychologist – only to find that something else beyond articulation was tugging at his sleeves, wanting to be noticed. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”

A lecturer, speaker, and proud diaper-changer, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a feminist ethos and inspired by indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. In short, Bayo has given up his longing for the “end-time” and is learning to live in the “mean time”. In the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers. His greatest vocation is however learning to be a satellite orbiting his greatest gift, his goddess Ijeoma, and knowing the blessings of her gravity. He speaks and teaches about his experiences around the world, and then returns to his adopted home in Chennai, India – “where the occasional whiff of cow dung dancing in the air is another invitation to explore the vitality of a world that is never still and always surprising.”
www.bayoakomolafe.net
Jinan Kb
www.kbjinan.in
 
Contribution:
Like many places across India and around the world, Swaraj University is experimenting with rethinking our lifestyle and our relationship with ourselves, our work, our resources, and our communities. We are questioning, challenging and experimenting with our set notions of money. So, we welcome you to join our experiment and explore your relationship with money.
By participating in such workshops you are, in a non-monetary way , supporting and encouraging such learning spaces to thrive and stay alive. You are, in a beautiful way, taking forward the larger movement of reclaiming our learning.
However, it is important we all contribute and take care of the needs of the place and meet the actual expenses for hosting such a workshop.
The suggested contribution for this workshop is 7500/-. By contributing this, you would also, partly, be helping those who find it hard to access these spaces due to financial constraints.
 
Please feel free to forward this invite to your friends, family, networks that you are part of and people you feel would love to be part of such a workshop.


Please call Harsh at +91 9958311401 for any details.
 
Regards,
Team Swaraj Uni.