Socioecological learning at Lakshmi Ashram : with an emergent methodology of ethical intercultural research

Abstract

Following the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014), reviews identified a continuing lack of place-based and socioecological learning in culturally diverse contexts. It was suggested that local contexts, divergent cultural voices and alternative pedagogies could provide creative responses to current challenges to planetary wellbeing. This research focuses on one such instance of an alternative educational approach in a girls' school in India, asking the questions, "What is the experience of community/place pedagogy at this school?" and "What is it to be and become in this intercultural space?" Taking an ethnographic approach in a different culture required particular attention to an ethical intercultural research practice. The emerging theoretical field of postqualitative inquiry, with its relational and processual ontology, offered such a practice. The onto-epistemological insights offered by Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze, and then considered in the light of India's own ancient Vedic philosophy, provided an ethical way forward. The research takes the shape of an "unravelling" ethnographic inhabitation of a girls boarding school located in the Lesser (but still very high) Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. Run along the lines of Gandhian thinking on education, Lakshmi Ashram concerns itself with the development of head, hands and heart, activating that development with service in the wider community towards socio-economic and environmental justice. I am interested in the experience of place pedagogy and intercultural space in what presents as a socioecological learning community, porous and responsive to the surrounding environment, villages and region. This intimate research aims to contribute to more culturally inclusive educational imaginaries in a global landscape of initiatives to support planetary wellbeing. It contributes to the field as an instance of an educational community that is socioecological in attending to care of self and others, visitors, communities and the environment. It proposes literacies of affect and ethical intercultural (research) practice, to support the work of other researchers in other educational spaces and times. Accounting for the everyday intimacies of pedagogy in this one place, this thesis aims to provide an impetus for thinking differently about education: at the everyday level of enacting pedagogy in diverse cultural contexts, and in a wider landscape of developing humans able to think-otherwise in meeting the world.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English