Learning Festivals

There is an urgent need to resuscitate learning from the one-dimensional nature of classroom especially at a time when new technologies are making redundant old industries in its place creating opportunities that require wholly new sets of skills, competencies, and mindsets.

The schooling system across India are facing a gamut of issues ranging from school drop-outs, poor learning outcomes, increasing pressures to succeed on students in a fishbowl environment, disengaged communities, obsolete teaching practices and lastly, the absence of a fertile learning environment for a child to reach its fullest potential.

We seek to firstly create high-quality fertile spaces in schools for children to exercise their right to learn and secondly, build the emotional and mental resilience of children to enable them to constantly reinvent themselves in a frequently changing world so that eventually they become decision makers in determining our collective destination.

The action that we exercise on the ground are two-fold:

In order to bring back disengaged communities and school walk-outs who see no benefit in school education, we carry out the Learning Festival (LF). The LF is a massive 6-day community festival that aims to revive the spirit of learning by exposing children to alternative mediums of learning and new emergent ideas such as arts and craft, stitching and embroidery, puppetry and story-telling, toy-making and up-cycling, electronics and tinkering, movement and expression, music and composition. All the learning from LF is demonstrated to the teachers, community members, and local government decision makers in order to re-imagine what learning can be and to again see value in the school as a space for quality learning.

Our second prong of action involves socio-emotional and ethical learning (SEEL). SEEL involves educating the heart and mind of a child and is particularly essential for the well-being of a generation who will undoubtedly face individual, social and systemic challenges.

Since 2017, Kshamtalaya has organized 55 Learning Festivals across Kotra and Gogunda, blocks of Udaipur District, in Kundagol Taluk in Karnataka, and in Delhi.

During the course of these Learning Festivals, we reached out to 5800 children out of which 500 were out-of-school, 2000 community members and 75 teachers and engaged 100 facilitators.

In 3 different Panchayats in Kotra - Mandwa, Khajuriya and Bedadhar, the community and the governance felt the need for a permanent setup of a Learning Festival environment. They identified spaces for Learning Centers to be set up in the community. In Mandwa and Khajuriya, the Learning Centers are functioning and children, the community are participating.

In the next three years:

We aim to co-host 542 LFs across 3 districts of Rajasthan, 1 district of Karnataka and 1 municipality of New Delhi over the next 3 years, reaching out to over 16,400 young children and youth. We aim to create ‘curioser’ individuals and develop their agency to execute actions that lead to change.

• We intend on building a learning ecosystem that empowers teachers with enriching experiences to facilitate learning in schools, and build positive and compassionate relationships with children.

• We envision the community actively participating in building a learning ecosystem where they experience a shift in mindsets, attitudes, and capabilities of all stakeholders and in turn become further invested in learning.

The time is now! INVEST IN THE RIGHT TO LEARN OF CHILDREN EVERYWHERE!