Indian Adventures

Hi Everyone

Greetings from Ahmedabad, in Gujerat, India!

I have been out in India now for five weeks, having delivered workshops to around 350 students and 400 adults. These have ranged from 21 year old automobile deesign student to ten year olds wanting to find their skill set and direction. Clients on the adult front have included Tata consulting and Synergy Electrics.

It has been fascinating offering interactive soft skills programmes here - the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

People feedback that:

1. They really enjoy interactive ways of learning
2. They love the practical tools as they can immediately make use of them in their lives
3. The informal education style makes learning a lot more fun than the traditional "chalk and talk" or " mug it up and chuck it out" forms of rote learning.

My aim being over here is to explore the market for alternative educational approaches and to offer schools, Universities, NGO"s and businesses an opportunity to try out the tools and seminars I have designed.

For the next week, I will be based at Riverside School, providing workshops and coaching for teachers and presenting at the Design in Education conference on the 12th and 13th. I have met with Kiran Sethi, the very inspiring Head here and will be giving you the full low down on their radicaly, interactive and person centered approach to learning. Kiran is one of the experts sharing their wisdom on our films in preparation for The Soul of Education conference, so keep an eye out for that here!

The key points on Riverside, as described by the students:

1. Segregation of play areas for each year group to meet their needs for safety and freedom
2. Self created student led projects including furniture designed from bottles and bespoke personal training programmes
3. Learning demonstrated by various forms of informal assessment including skits, presentations, projects and other creative methods
4. No school uniform and a school co-designed and built by the children, for the children, that resemble their home environment.
5. Focus not just on knowledge, but understanding from which innovation is encouraged.

In ten years the school has gone from 30 kids to 300.

Oh and I was in the paper today, together with 100 kids at the British Library!

Keep in touch!