So now there is a lens for anyone keen to do gumboots installations (: Visit it, leave your comments and be inspired(I hope!) to use gumboots to write and create fun photos with a message. Or you might simply like to be inspired by other forms of footwear.
From the Baha’i World News Service
DASDOI, UTTAR PRADESH, India, 18 June 2008 (BWNS)
At first glance nothing about these eight people would tell you that they are founders of schools.
They come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds. One was a high-school dropout, another a TV mechanic, yet another a village “doctor.”
Nor is it always easy to guess – at first sight anyway – that what they are running are schools. For example, Ram Vilas Pal, the TV mechanic, shares a property with his brother – part of the land is home to a cowshed, the other part home to the school.
What is common to all eight is their passion for social transformation and their conviction that school is the place for this to happen. Indeed, as the soft-spoken Mr. Pal says, in India people often expect this from a school.
“The community and the family depend on the school to create a responsible citizen out of the child,” he said. “When a child is found misbehaving, people ask him, ‘Is this what your teacher teaches you in school?’”
At a time when many young people leave their villages in search of jobs in the cities, these eight – all but two are in their 20s – have chosen to stay back and help mold the next generation. And they are doing it without large investment and without making tall promises to parents.
Most of them set up their community schools by seeking the help of the villagers for land and basic furniture and by employing educated but unemployed rural youth as teachers. In return, they promise to provide good overall education for very modest fee (for a high school student, for example, it might be 50 rupees, or US$1.25, a month).
For the villagers, this is a welcome alternative to the existing state-run schools which charge no fees but where standards are so dismal that, as one parent put it, “you will find eighth-standard children who cannot count from one to 10.”
Today there are eight of these community schools spread out in villages in the Kakori, Banthra, and Kharagpur blocks of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. They are not far from Lucknow, the state capital.
Some of the schools, like Vinod Kumar Yadav’s Glory Public School with 160 students, are doing well. Others, like Mr. Pal’s Nine Point School in Dasdoi with 73 children, are barely breaking even. Still others, like Brajesh Kumar’s Covenant Public School, are in urgent need of help. (For next year, Mr. Kumar plans to move his school to a different location.)
Assistance from FAS
Helping all of them chart their course and stay afloat is the Foundation for the Advancement of Science (FAS), a nongovernmental organization based in Lucknow.
FAS assists the schools by training their teachers, guiding them through difficult times, and even providing salaries for one or two teachers when the going gets tough. It is also preparing a new, innovative curriculum for use in the schools.
It was this foundation – after years of experimentation with setting up rural educational initiatives that were self-sustaining and self-sufficient – that spearheaded the establishment of the community schools.
“We had worked with many tutorial schools in Uttar Pradesh that were externally funded and that eventually failed. This made us realize that the solution had to come from within the village, with the villagers using
mainly their own resources,” explains an officer of FAS.
For the community schools, he said, FAS started out by looking for individuals with the motivation, the vision and the willingness to struggle and persevere. Itself an NGO inspired by Baha’i ideals, it did not take the foundation long to find these individuals among the educated but unemployed
Baha’i youth in the villages surrounding Lucknow.
The people working at the foundation knew that the young people were going to face an uphill task in setting up the schools, but they also knew from past experience that such a struggle brings with it a sense of ownership. As one of them put it: “Setting up a school in a village is a difficult job that requires both commitment and great effort. When these youth suffer for the school, their resolve is strengthened and their attachment to the school is intensified.”
Parents’ point of view
A man named Sunderlal, sitting outside his hut, is asked why he sends his son – who is beside him playing with a bicycle tire – to Brajesh Kumar’s school. His answer is immediate: “Because children of his school are good and respectful.”
This becomes a common refrain among parents and villagers when asked about the community schools.
Mr. Kumar explains why: “Our whole reason for starting these schools was not just to provide better quality of the same thing that is available everywhere but also to give something new and much-needed in the form of moral education.”
All the schools use a curriculum developed by the international Baha’i community for the moral education of children and young adolescents.
Mr. Kumar, who holds a master’s degree in education that presumably could guarantee him a comfortable job in the city, says: “I could have done many other things that would give me more money and involved less effort. But here I am doing something not for myself but for the village as a whole by bringing about moral, social, economic, and intellectual change.”
The community schools are faced with the same social problems that plague rural India, chief among them the caste system and discrimination against the girl child.
C. Bhagwandin, a member of the gram panchayat (governing council) in the village of Dasdoi, confesses that caste differences initially posed a barrier to sending his daughter to Mr. Pal’s school.
“Since he was of a different caste, I was initially reluctant,” Mr. Bhagwandin says. “However, seeing that his students could really read and write, that they behaved well and since the only other option was to send
her to a school in another village, I decided to overlook this fact. And I haven’t regretted my decision.”
Teaching values
In all the schools, the message of equality and the need for mutual respect is instilled from the earliest stages using various techniques, including incorporating the arts into the curriculum.
For example, “we have found that the most effective way to teach these values to students, is through the use of skits and songs,” says Mr. Yadav.
Discrimination against the girl child is dealt with through a more proactive approach, given that these are areas where traditionally women do not leave the home, much less receive an education.
“We visit the homes of parents in the village and talk to them about the importance of sending their daughters and not just their sons to school. And after a period of patient counseling, they understand,” explains Mr. Pal.
Right now, perhaps the most important challenge before these young entrepreneurs is to keep their schools profitable. Problems include spiraling costs, regular defaulting in fee payment, and children being
pulled out of school to be used for agricultural labor.
While the owners will continue to seek solutions, FAS remains confident of the overall potential for the schools to become successful educational institutions and to bring about palpable social and cultural change in the villages. Indeed, the foundation already has plans to help 20 more unemployed young people start such schools in Uttar Pradesh.
How the schools operate
A common challenge for the schools is to provide classes for all ages with only a handful of teachers.
Ram Vilas Pal explains how he addresses this at his school in Dasdoi: “Depending on how many students we have in different standards, we put them into groups. For example, we put nursery and kindergarten in one group, students of 1st, 2nd and 3rd in another, 4th and 5th standard students in another, and finally there is a group of high school students.
“Each group has one teacher. The method she follows is to teach a lesson to students of one level while students of other levels in the same group are given class work to do…. Thus we manage by alternating between assigning class work and teaching lessons.”
Also, he says, they try to balance difficult subjects with easy ones. In the group, when some of the students are working with a difficult subject – mathematics, for example – the others are given something easier so that the teacher can devote more attention to the first class.
Article, by Arsah Vafa Fazli, Bahai World News Service.
This one looks interesting. Thought I’d post it here for readers of my blog who might like to attend it.
Presented by The Australian National University, Craft Australia and the National Museum of Australia
Venue: National Museum of Australia, Canberra
When: 6 – 8 March, 2009
The conference will be held in association with the exhibition
ReCoil, Change & Exchange in Coiled Fibre Art curated by Margie West
Selling Yarns 2: Innovation for sustainability is a conference that addresses contemporary Indigenous craft and design practice. It draws on the outcomes of the first Selling Yarns conference held in Darwin in 2006 that looked specifically at contemporary Indigenous textile practice.
Selling Yarns 2 builds on the previous conference by presenting success stories that demonstrate innovation and new directions in Indigenous craft and design practice. It will highlight the work of Indigenous makers from the south eastern region of Australia and parallel the directions in practice of urban Indigenous makers with that of artists in remote communities. The conference will be held at the National Museum of Australia in March, 2009 in association with the exhibition ReCoil, Change & Exchange in Coiled Fibre Art, curated by Margie West.
The aim of the conference is to demonstrate that through cultural practice a dialogue can be had that draws all interested parties together for the benefit of a rich and sustainable Indigenous culture.
A call for papers is now open. Download the Call for papers information sheet 
Topics of interest include:
Papers: We invite Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners, researchers, academics, buyers, collectors, curators, business and arts advisors to respond with a 300 word abstract addressing the conference themes.
Workshops: We invite proposals to run workshops to build skills, increase awareness and appreciation, share information and develop understandings of new developments and sustainable practices.
Email 300 word abstracts to papers@…
For enquiries, contact Louise Hamby on (02) 6125 8986 or Andy Greenslade on 0412 774 343
Email workshop proposals to workshops@…
For enquiries, contact Valerie Kirk on (02) 6125 5833 or Adam Blackshaw on (02) 6208 5230
ARE YOU AN ARTIST, WRITER, PHOTOGRAPHER, COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT WORKER OR MUSICIAN EXPRESSING YOUR SPIRITUALITY IN ART
Then visit www.creativesoulsconverse.wordpress.com I am looking for an interview with you, which can be done over the internet. I am looking for artists and writers whose work I enjoy, who think art really can make a difference. I am not interested in typing in set profiles but more in a conversation about how you incorporate spiritual values into your arts process and product.
I will gradually get permission to also post the interviews I have done over the years onto this site as well so they are accessible at one point. I’ll post links to those artists works I really enjoy to go with their interviews. When possible I’ll interview people in person if I happen to be passing through their area, but I want to take advantage of the global nature of the internet.
If you wish to be part of this project please let me know where your work can be viewed on line and I’ll get in touch with you if your work looks to fit this theme.
I have just found out about squidoo lenses and they are quite fun to create. My first one is under construction and I chose to do creative thinking. For my topic I chose the 6 hats of de Bono but wanted to extend that to look at lots of different kinds of hats and how they might inspire creativity. I also wanted to look at different kinds of headwear from around the world and the different ways in which colour is used.
Perhaps some of the posts here might also become lenses as that way I can extend the topics and include amazon recommendations and other things more easily in the posts. There are just so many creative tools out there on the internet and so much to learn!
To find out more about this topic go to More than 6 Hats
Part 1. The Bestowed Spirit Animal
Someone said to me once that we choose our spirit animal and she chose the spirit of the kookaburra. Sometimes though our spirit animal choses us. It follows us, connects to us, or is even inherited.
My mother said that the Bird of Paradise is what we take care of because it is the totem we have been given by our village. Yet I think of the vain male Bird of Paradise and nothing speaks to my spirit. When I think of the plainer females who are watching the display of these male birds I reflect on cultures where the women serve in the background and their men do not appear to give them freedom. I don’t want this bird to be my spirit animal.
But then I think of the glorious feathers, the way another species of it is on the flag a yellow emblem placed on black and red, and how they are hunted down for their beauty and need to be protected I am sure there is a connection I have a responsibility to remember. More I think of women who say that even though on the surface it looks like the men have all the power it is not actually the case. They are changing the future. They are running their villages more and more.
I am sure that we can choose the animals we love regardless of what we have been given to take care of, but we need to remember those that choose us. Perhaps this is how some great conservationists feel drawn to lions or to gorillas. For my part I have never seen the Bird of Paradise that is my inherited totem. Yet I acknowledge it as a part of my identity- something that chooses me.
Part 2. The Embraced Spirit Animal- coming later.
(Totems are often given in traditional cultures. The animals are the responsibility of that village or tribe and are incorporated into art. A totem as well as being something you are a custodian of is something to tell stories about, and in some cultures you may not be allowed to eat it. Many creative writers chose to give a character the qualities of an animal – to make them mouselike, cat like, etc for the purpose of creativity.
Today the modern conservation movement asks people to adopt koalas, whales, dolphins, tigers and in fact any endangered species and to care for them. Is this a revival of the tradition of totems being applied to modern needs.
I think about the idea of the totem and what it means to people and am reminded that some once thought of people who had this belief as pagan and unspiritual and as little more than animals. Rather I think it is more that many Indigenous people had not forgotten their connection to caring for the earth, its animals and environment. to be continued…. a Bahai perspective on all of this- I think I will need to do some research and continue that discussion in another post.)
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Gumbootspearlz Exhibition June’s Poetry Space Reviews of Pearlz work Bahai Quotes Celebrate Dad Childhood Dreamings- Exhibition New York Times Book Review Paulien’s Gallery
