Interview with Kiran Bir Sethi,
Founder, Riverside School, Ahmedabad, India
At Riverside School, Kiran has developed an innovative educational environment that focuses on “nurturing a spirit of curiosity and opportunities for exploration in a safe space within the spirit of community.” The Design for Change School Contest is a global movement designed to give young people an opportunity to express their own ideas for a better world and put them into action. India Future of Change (IFC) in conversation with the spirited lady about her many endeavours.
IFC: What would you say is the philosophy of your school?
Kiran: Well, Putting common sense into common practice.
IFC: What drove you to start Riverside school?
Kiran: Post becoming a mother in ’91, I strongly felt that something was seriously wrong with the schooling system. It really was a personal response to a situation that was just not good enough.
FC: What is Riverside’s approach to education?
Kiran: Over the last 10 years we have been able to look at how children learn and I think my design background allows me to understand the user better. So it’s a very design centered and a human centered approach to education. The moment you make a program human centered whether it is for a product or service or anything else that you do, the result lends itself to better outcomes.
IFC: So have you set up your own curriculum?
Kiran: At Riverside, we have built a curriculum which is child-centered but the child, his parents and the teachers are all equally important partners.
We have our own curriculum till grade 8 after which we transit to the Cambridge board which is the IGCSE, which is a lovely process oriented board. So it allows us to do the kind of work we do in the early years. In fact this year my first grade 10 will be taking their exit exams.
IFC: So you will see how your experiment has played out over the years?
Kiran: No, we see it anyways. For the last 6 years we have been taking the ASSET which is a bench marking exam that is taken by over 2000 schools in India.
IFC: What is a typical day like for a student at Riverside?
Kiran: I don’t think there is a typical day, but there is a framework by which the day pans out so it’s really time tabling not subjects as much as time tabling Relationships, Relevance and Rigor. We don’t have a 40 minute period system but we have a time when they all enter school and two lunch breaks. Our younger children come to school at 8 and leave at 3 and my older students that is from 8th grade onwards they come at 9:30 and leave at 4:30 so that becomes a day at school and within which children set the agenda for what they would like to learn through the day. For eg - right now my Grade 2 is designing an audio tour for the city zoo. So half the time they are actually at the zoo.
IFC: You have a customized teacher-training programme?
Kiran: Yes, we have a very intense teacher training professional development program for instance at Riverside we have 50 days set aside just for professional development. So in that time there is a lot of emphasis on pedagogy, theories in process, in mentoring, in practice, in demonstration.
IFC: Future plans with Riverside? Any plans of opening more such schools?
Kiran: There is none. I have never really thought about. The fun part of Riverside is there have been a lot of firsts. Like I said design for change is probably the largest movement of design thinking by children. We had the India partner meet on 4th and 5th of March and this year we are planning to take design for change to 60,000 schools in India. So that itself is exciting.
IFC: Could you talk about design for change and how it started, give its history and background and where it has reached now?
Kiran: Design for change started in 2009 and I designed this idea to get children to use a simple framework of feel-imagine-do-share. Initially, it was just in India and we reached out to around 30,000 schools. And then in November 2009, I spoke at TED and that allowed design for change to go global in 2010. We then were able to reach 22 countries and 2,50,000 children.
The whole idea is how you get children to be inspired by stories done by children and can children become other children’s role models. And DFC is one such self approach to tell children that they can.
IFC: How do you encourage sharing of ideas?
Kiran: At Riverside there is a huge emphasis on documenting through narratives which are covered as power point and written documentation. For DFC all of it and more is available on the website, all the stories are also uploaded on youtube.
IFC: On a personal note, what is it like working with children?
Kiran: I think probably, working with children allows you to restructure and challenge the way you think. I think that’s what they’ll ask you to do. Students teach you here, it’s not the other way round.
www.schoolriverside.com
www.designforchangecontest.com
www.aproch.org |
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Kiran Bir Sethi is the Founder-Director of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India. She is also the founder of ‘aProCh’ - an initiative attempting to make our cities more child friendly, for which she was awarded the Ashoka Fellow in 2008. Currently, she is promoting the world’s largest “Design for Change” contest, which has over 22 countries participating. |
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