Circular School Eco Club

We got 20 new registrations for this session, which brought our total to around 85, so our first step was to find another place to conduct the sessions. After deciding on the terrace, we tried an interesting new way to keep things slightly more quiet - 1 minute of complete silence. Every single student rose to the challenge.  Excitement after having completed 1 minute of silence Now our next step was to separate all the students into groups. To do this, we went over all the drawings from the previous class. We asked the following questions, "How many of your creatures have more or less than 2 eyes?", "How many of you drew animals with tails?", "How many of your drawings have more than 3 legs?", and "How many of you drew tongues or trunks?" This allowed us to divide the students into 4 groups of around 20 students each. They sat in rows according to their groups. We then walked down the rows looking for the most interesting drawings, and once we f...

Right from the first draft of the curriculum, we knew that we would want our first sessions to be on 'Self', to understand the students more, and to get an insight into their worldview, the way they approach nature and waste and what their backgrounds might be. We started the first session with 74 students in the classroom. 5 more students had registered post the event. This is a pretty big number, as you can imagine. To begin, Vishal asked the students to try and guess what he was going to draw on the blackboard, and then proceeded to draw a mythical creature with the body of a duck, the talons of a bird of prey, the snout of a dog and the webbed feet of a frog. The students went wild trying to guess what it was. Some shouted "ALIEN!" very enthusiastically, and, perhaps more interestingly, one student shouted "HUMAN".  After Vishal finished his masterpiece and labelled the different parts of the creature along with which animals they belonged to, we divided...

On Saturday we had the opportunity to finally introduce our Eco Club to the students of Fr. Agnel High School, Pilar. After deliberating on what we should focus on and how we should deliver it while keeping it informative and interesting, our co conspirator, Vishal, thought of the perfect idea - bananas. Everyone loves bananas, everyone eats them, everyone has them at home.  So we thought of a presentation entirely around bananas. The idea was to explain circularity using something as fun and simple as the humble banana, and hope to create a session that would make the parents, teachers and most importantly, the students, excited about our 3 month programme on circularity in food. Slides from our Eco Club presentation: from left to right, "How would you use a banana leaf?" and "Have you eaten a banana flower before?"  We started off with a short introduction to the Eco Club, and then proceeded with our banana session. We first distributed locally sourced bananas as ...

Using resources in their rawest forms, so they may go easily back into the environment. Learning from traditional practices how to live slowly, as a part of nature instead of as an audience to it. I think it's important to understand the fundamental systems that have created an environment that necessitates sustainable development. What is development? Why do we need it at all? Why is it that whenever we talk about sustainability, it is in the context of sustainable development? Can development in the current context ever be sustainable? For the past two centuries we've developed and developed and developed, and arrived where exactly? What is the difference in our lives between now and 1922? We can get places faster and we have more place to go, we can communicate faster and we have more things to communicate, we can cure more diseases and we have more diseases to cure. Nothing has changed. As a society, we're going nowhere. The sum total of our 'development' in ter...