Champions of Change
**People who I have met & who have inspired me along the way**
India
For a major part of a decade, I have now been in the education and development sector. Having worked in India and studied about education in Finland and United Kingdom, I have met some amazingly inspiring people. I am still framing what I believe is the role of education in a student and individuals life. Big or small, these are some of the people who have helped in that process and truly, in my opinion, are champions of change!
Vibha Ranjan
aka my mother. I have learned the most by watching her be and live her life for more than 25 years of my life. Her patience, resilience and unconditional love are attributes I associate with parenting and really, any form of teaching. She used to work as a teacher back in the day and was one of my biggest supporters when I decided to shift my field of focus from business to education and development. This is a little bit from her on Parenting and Education:
Parenting is not just a process of supporting or providing for every need of a child. As a mother and a teacher, parenting has taught me many life skills: unconditional love, taking responsibility without asking, caring, sharing and doing without any expectations. It has made me more mature and responsible person.
People say that parents are the first teachers for a child, but I feel children equally teach us a lot, which nobody notices. This bond is so elastically strong that it gives you space for personal growth and keeps you connected as well.
Rajeeva Ranjan
aka my father. If you know me or have read my rants, you know my obsession with my father. He has been a role model where, through the years, I have seen him indulge in learning and growing as a person. From quitting a safe Indian government job to starting his own business to now sparking his coaching career, he truly exemplifies that learning never stops. He pushes me to ask the ‘tough questions’ that define the future of this world and the way the future generations are going to run it. Now that we live in two different continents, I would give up everything to sit and listen to him share his wisdom over a cup of evening chai.
Education, mostly, as of now, is confined to helping one in getting a job. It does not focus on growing one as a person. It assumes that the finer aspect of life, like love, compassion, caring, nurturing will automatically be learned while one is learning the survival skills in the job market. Unfortunately, it never does and we are left with individuals with a broken image of themselves. They don’t find themselves complete and hence they find the entire world incomplete. They bring dysfunction in the relationship between individuals, the curse of the society. Curriculum as on date does not take into consideration the living, it takes into consideration only surviving and competing. It does not take collaboration into account, the only fact that helps us in living completely and happily. We are social people. The present education puts people against people. Till it teaches us to collaborate, no redemption in education is possible.
Finland
Seppo Pulkkinen
A secondary school principal with more than 15 years of experience, Seppo also is a volleyball and Floorball coach for his school students (he has even coached the Canadian Floorball team), a Ph.D. advisor at the University of Jyväskylä , a former researcher at the Institute of Educational Leadership among other things. He is quite frankly a delightful man with the cutest smile! I had the opportunity to shadow this man for 30 hours across a few months under my master’s program, and he is definitely one of the most genuine human beings and educators I have met. Below is a combination of excerpts from our interactions:
I have been a principal for eighteen years and currently serve as a principal for a school serving students from 7th to 9th grades. Our school slogan is ‘Helping them find their way’. As an educator, I don’t see anything more important. Our job is not to tell students what to do, where to go. It is to help them find who they are, what they want to be and what they want to do with their lives.
The most crucial component of being an educator is being able to identify a person as him or herself. It is hard to meet each one as an individual as well as a group when you have hundreds to students. But at the same time, we are lucky they are all different, that they all are independent persons. Finding the individual in the group is what I do for my teachers and expect my teachers to that for their students, and hopefully it will translate into students doing that for their friends and society.
Leena used to work as a coordinator with the Educational Leadership program and was on my admission interview panel. She has also been my professor and guide through my time at the university. I wish her massive luck and happiness in her new role. This is a little something from her
I have worked with children with special needs, I have experienced young people being lost in the world. Education is not just teaching how to read and write. For me, it is first of all giving self-esteem and seeing everyone as a valuable human being. Education is also giving everyone possibilities to live their lives in such a way that they want and do things what they want. Perhaps you need academic skills to fulfill your dreams but there might be also different skills that education may give you to live your life and find your place in the society. This kind of education, giving self-esteem and giving possibilities to learn, can be done without well-equipped schools.
And I as an early childhood educator also see the value of childhood — my message goes to the ECE educators: we are the ones who support and protect the youngest ones. Let’s be proud of that.
Maarit Vehkala
I have had the opportunity to work with Maarit on multiple occasions, the most recent being the UN conference. She is a bright spot in our (international student’s) daily lives and has helped many of us figure out things so we can focus on our studies. This is a little bit from her, on why she loves what she does:
I don’t have enough words to describe how happy and privileged I feel to be able to work with our young students from around the world. Time after time I am impressed how wise and hardworking people they are. And it’s so much fun to see how they act and grow, they are so fulfilled with amazing ideas!
They remind me that learning is fun J so should education be.
If I had the all the power in the world I would like to declare that education is a fundamental right to everyone. I think I have an opportunity to learn more and more from and with my students. In my opinion we all are here to teach each other and learn from each other.
Veera Tuhkala
I got a chance to work with Veera on the organising team for the United Nations SDG Conference held at our Uni. Though not an education student, Veera is a product of Finnish education system and shares openly about her interest in non-formal education curriculums.
In her words,
In addition to the school and formal education, I´d like to emphasise the role of hobbies and areas of interests in learning and educating each other in everyday life. I think that everyone needs to belong to a community or some kind of tribe to identify his or her features and strengths. This tribe can be a choir, sports team, knitting club, you name it. As school and further education can’t provide skills and capabilities for everything, hobbies offer an opportunity to test and develop many skills for future, set goals together and share tacit peer knowledge. I hope that educators and parents help and encourage young people to find a community where they can feel warmth and appreciation.
United Kingdom
Puja Nair
I have known Puja for ten years now. We both were pursuing a Bachelor program in Business Administration from Pune (India) and have stayed friends since. We both taught for two years (she taught with the Akanksha Foundation), we both were managers after that for three years (we also were flatmates for these three years) and now we both are in London (at least for now). While I moved to Finland to pursue my Masters in Educational Leadership, Puja started her Masters in Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment in UCL Institute of Education. She also has a Masters degree in Education from TISS Mumbai and has largely worked with schools for children from low-income communities, both rural and urban, following models as varied as public private partnerships to affordable private schools. She is passionate about education and social justice.
I sent her some questions to share her thoughts on and this is what he has to say:
One of the questions that I was asked to answer was- As a champion of change, what do you personally believe is required for the world to change for the better? This is a broad question so I am going to write about this in relation to schooling in particular, as the modern school currently remains the most widespread mode of education. Let us assume that the aim of schooling is to bring about social justice to a world that is currently not so. (Often this is not the aim of schooling, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s assume it is) The school works within a network of complex power relations. It interacts with and is mediated by culture, politics, the economy, so on and so forth. Children and teachers operate within these relations, battling questions of who they are, what is right/wrong, what their aspirations should be, what should be taught/learned etc. Schooling is never a straightforward input-output relationship, despite what advocates of standardization might lead us to believe. It takes a certain amount of liberal gung-ho-ness (yes, this is a word, all rights reserved) to assume that once we have children in schools and provide an ‘excellent’ education for all that the world will be transformed into one that is more equal, just and kind. On the other hand, what other option is there? Is subscribing to the nihilist worldview of everything sucks- the world cannot change for the better- it can only change- so what’s the point going to get us anywhere? For me, so far, the way forward has been to latch on to the idea that education is the only tangible way, that I know of, to broaden experience/opportunities and bring freedom to more people. In that, they are able to make choices to lead lives that they think are worth leading. If modern schooling is the mode through which these aims are sought, then the relations and processes within which the school functions must be understood as tenuous and complex. And this is where I think debate, varied views (including those of the nihilists!) and a critical worldview are useful. Having a critical world-view, wherein one is able to question, explore and uncover ideas and practice/actions is key. Another key aspect, for me, is empathy. I think empathy sharpens or broadens (however you may choose to see it) criticality. I believe that we are never truly free, the world will never be more just and that education and social justice cannot be understood until a critical worldview (such as asking- what is ‘x’, how does it function, how do I know it is true, how did it come to be true, how does it place me in relation to others?) is tethered onto or fueled by empathy.
Fareeha Ali Yahya
Who said Indians and Pakistanis can’t be friends? All the more can’t inspire each other. A much younger classmate, I have had a blast getting to know and share experiences with Fareeha. She is a Masters student of Education and International Development at the UCL-IOE, and my course mate for the module regarding the global Education for All movement. She is a person who embodies questioning and learning, though gave me the hardest time as she assumes she is not a change champion. #classic
She is passionate about (all forms of) teaching and (naively or not) believe that education is the key to conflict resolution and peace-building. She has come to UK (like me!) to listen to people’s stories and experiences and to give coherence to her thoughts about bringing social change wherever she travels to.
This is straight from her:
I am no champion of change. But I aspire to be one. I just want to emphasize the understanding that every person wants to feel important and valued. And have meaning in their life. This simple thought can be extrapolated to every individual’s need of feeling that they belong and that they matter.If educational policies, conflict resolution and strategies for peace-building were structured around the acknowledgment of this fact, we could take a step in the right direction. It would mean listening to people and seeking the root cause of their frustrations which more often than not lead to violence. From Eleanor Longden’s TED talk on her schizophrenia: “the most hostile and aggressive voices…needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care.””To me, too many people have a myopic attitude toward education. I cannot stress enough how important indigenous knowledge is for a child’s development, even if it is limited to acquiring one’s mother language. In anthropologist Wade Davis’s words, language is a flash of the human spirit…a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. And in a modernizing world, where hundreds of languages are endangered and more than half feared to die toward the end of the 21st century, cultural preservation remains crucial to protecting unique narratives and versions of reality from around the globe, obviously without the continuation of harmful practices (what is harmful, what isn’t? who decides? how does every society conceptualize progress?) …We need a dialogue between all stakeholders, regardless of the situation and context. One-sided aid and development projects pave the way for frustrated generations of people who don’t think critically and don’t ask questions… because they don’t know what to ask. Children need to question everything. And learn how to fully justify why they believe what they believe in and have sound, reasonable explanations for doing so. And not say they are how they are because someone shoved those values down their system.#rantover
Dina Batshon
Dina is also my coursemate, pursuing Masters in Education and International Development at UCL-IOE. Already in the first time you meet her, you can see that she is a strong personality with a natural leadership way of life. My connection with her was instantaneous as I am drawn towards strong, powerful women like Dina.
She is Jordanian-Palestiniana, born and raised in Amman. She is passionate about learning in general, working with children and youth, working with her hands, culture, reading and film. She is also passionate about Palestine. :)
This is straight from her:
I believe that the world will not change for the ‘better’ without a struggle, a continuous reflective but strong struggle backed up by the belief in the possibility of a better world. But with that, we need to reflect on what a better world looks like, on what struggle looks like, and on what we actually mean by all these terms. A simple and general reflection on a better world would be that it is a just world, where all people and communities lead dignified lives with their needs being met never at the expense of others, and where they are free. Then again, what is justice, what does a dignified life look like, what are needs, and what does freedom really mean. These are things that people around the world have drastically different views of. Maybe a ‘better’ world starts by our continuous discussion and debate of what this world looks like. But what I know for sure is that for the world to change, we need conscious and critical beings and communities, who are aware and critical of themselves and the world around them, aware and critical of the complex relationships and dynamics of power, aware and critical of systems at play, aware of their agency and ability to organise and their responsibility both for struggle but also for solidarity with others who struggle (like them) in different arenas around the world.
When asked about the role of education in the development of our kids, she had the following to say:
When I think about child development I think about ‘learning’ but not necessarily ‘education’. Children need safety, security and affection to develop and grow but they also need to experiment, to play, to use their body and hands, to interact with nature and with peers and adults and most times education systems around the world do not provide this for children. They do not provide rich, authentic, reflective learning experiences. When I look back at my 12 years of ‘schooling’ I struggle to reflect on my learning and growth, and the move and trend today towards early childhood education sounds odd to me. Why is it that learning needs to be structured and institutionalised at such an early stage in an individual’s life and take so many years out of their lifetime when learning can happen everywhere and every day and in much more exciting ways. Is it that parents and the society are not able to allow the child rich learning experiences? If that is the case then I would rather have adults get educated in how to make sure children reflect on experiences and go through rich learning opportunities daily rather than put children through education systems as early as three years old.
Ayu Anastasya Rachman
Ayu Anastasya Rachman is another one of my lovely classmates, currently studying MA Education and International Development at UCL. She originally comes from Indonesia and at the moment holds a study leave from one of the Education Foundations back home. She has always been passionate about higher education governance in developing countries, which stems from her own experience and undergrad study in International Relations, She enjoys discussing global issues over a cup of coffee, participate in Model United Nations conferences, and is a huge fan of Harry Potter as well as an impulsive bookworm.
This is straight from her:
I believe that every member of a society is a social influencer, that each one of us holds a power that can have an impact on our community, through our very own actions. It is important to keep visions high and to have a value to advocate. We shouldn’t be bothered by our material differences because a good cause is a good cause regardless someone’s race/nation/religion.One cause that I am passionate about is Education. I have always believed education is a tool for empowerment. It helps you to better calculate choices in your life, be aware of your potential and to discover or create opportunities. I would argue education does play a significant role in developing the’ human being’. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be treated as a singular approach. Other supplementary factors that affect education are student well-being (health), and supportive environment (security/infrastructure/inclusive society). A good combination of the mentioned factors may boost not only the individual development but also generate greater impact to the society.
