In 2020, Arundhati Roy, famously announced the Covid19 pandemic as a portal pleading for a reimagination of another world, and ‘ready to fight for it’. Sayan Dey’s book does exactly that in arguing for a decentralised knowledge system which is not restricted within the four walls of classrooms but for a pedagogy which weaves decolonial theoretical understanding with evidence-based praxis from different parts of the world. Dey’s selected stories of various nature-based model education schools throw light on what transformational knowledge systems look like. Using case studies of diverse forms of curricular and pedagogical practices, Sayan Dey in his book Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems, published by Routledge in 2023 gives us a glimpse of what the global call for ‘climate justice’ really should entail. For ‘climate justice’ to manifest, we need to have a different lens which focuses on the inter-dependence aspect of nature with humans which can be found in indigenous teaching and learning systems. Furthermore, as Mpofu, in his post-script explains, ‘green’ is ‘a metaphor of nature as alive and a subject that sustains life and is in conversation, dialogically, with humans’ (p.114).
I learnt that the concept of ‘Greenery’ in the ‘The Green School System’ of Bhutan has varied adjectives depending on the lens you use – natural greenery, social greenery, cultural greenery, intellectual greenery, academic greenery, aesthetic greenery, spiritual greenery, and moral greenery. I will leave it to the reader to read the monograph to reflect upon these beautiful variations of the concept of greenery.
Dey argues for ‘a restoration of human and nature relations’ and asks us to take an objective and critical look at the dominance of capitalist relations with our environment. The latter, fostered by Eurocentrism and progressed through colonialism, envisions nature as an unlimited resource meant for exploitation for human profit, especially those residing in the global North. However, Dey also cautions us to what he refers to as ‘the gatekeepers of the invisible empires of colonialism/capitalism’ whereby one has to be aware of the fact that ‘the existing dichotomy of the Euro-North American colonial oppressor and the post-colonial indigenous oppressed is no longer distinctly visible’. This merging of the two has been made possible with the institutionalisation of the coloniser’s pedagogical patterns, curricular structures, and academic disciplines in the schools, colleges and universities of post-colonial societies.
A personal favourite of mine is the reference to the Barefoot College methodology of ‘de-schooling’ its students from the ‘colonial/Euro-North American’ educational experiences to understand the intrinsic value of being human. Through stories of ‘illiterate’ wise elderly people, Dey shows how these lived experiences contribute to the sustainable development of their local communities. Elsewhere, I have shown that ‘education or literacy was not key to empowerment but understanding one’s context and acting per that was crucial to ‘agency-creation’ for [the] women’[i]. Dey passionately argues, alongside other ‘transformational pedagogy’ educators, for the need to weave scientific knowledge with indigenous ways of knowing and learning.
Many sections of the book are autoethnographic which directs attention to methodological aspects of qualitative research where the lines between the researcher and the researched are blurred. As I have stated elsewhere[ii], when the researcher positions the self within the stories observed, these shared vignettes lead to the production of embodied knowledge through textual encounters for the reader. And that is the strength of Dey’s narrative. The reader, in this case, must rise to the occasion and challenge the dominance of the Western hegemonic model of education shifting curriculum focus from ‘universality to diversality’ and ‘building disciplinary intersectionality’. What Dey calls for is a ‘human-nature coherence’ with a return to caring and sharing as key motivators of social and economic life. A key aspect, therefore, is to revitalise local markets with a focus on what Tim Jackson describes as the ‘Cinderella economy’ which has the potential to pave the path towards social justice. Education, therefore, refers to drawing out the best in children, beginning with learning to make handicrafts understanding not just its mechanics but also the why and how of the process, and the ability to sustain lives locally. There is hope when a state[iii] links its education system to a ‘happiness triad’ (momentary happiness, deeper happiness, and sustainable happiness) where students link textual knowledge of nature with practical hands-on experience such as gardening.
To bring Gandhi back to the centre-stage, through a re-visitation to the central tenets of ‘Nai Taleem’ in the 2020 Indian National Education Policy which, as rightly noted by Dey, was white-washed with a focus on ‘Euro-North American-centric’ pedagogies in post-colonial India, is a very sobering admission of the mighty Indian state to right a wrong. There is hope.
[i] Mishra, Nita. 2021. ‘Affective, Embodied Experiences of doing Fieldwork in India: A feminist’s perspective’ in Empowering Methodologies in Organizational and Social Research by Emma Bell, Sunita Singh Sengupta (eds), Routledge India. Pp. 160-178.
[ii] Ibid
[iii] The Happiness Curriculum project of the New Delhi state ministry of education in this case.
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Nita Mishra is a Lecturer at the Department of Politics & Public Administration, University of Limerick.