DAY 3 | 3 AUGUST 2024
The Many Belongings That Make Us
Facilitated by Sudhanva Deshpande
Do each of us feel a sense of belonging? Is it experienced the same way for all of us? These are some of the questions participants of the workshop The Many Belongings That Make Us by Sudhanva Deshpande were made to tackle as they explored belonging in their everyday lives through theatre games. The first game, for example, explored first impressions, perceptions and biases that imprinted on individual participants. They had to simply write their thoughts on a piece of paper pinned to the back of each participant and this was followed by an exploration of how there were multiple factors affecting one’s judgement.
The second game gauged the diversity of the participants––their thoughts, opinions, social backgrounds, etc. Two corners of the room were assigned for the choices ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively and participants moved to each corner to illustrate their response to Sudhanva’s question. This simple activity stirred nostalgia in many, leading Sudhanva to say ‘Growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional.’
The next few activities focussed on the participants getting to know each other better. This involved activities in pairs, where they had to make up animal calls and communicate with each other through those while blindfolded. Another activity focussed on finding people based on their preference such as those who liked coffee to those who preferred tea. These helped the group get better acquainted with each other. It also prepared them for the ‘Simplest Difficult Game’ where participants had to communicate simply by eye contact and the word ‘come’. The game demanded alertness and focus but most importantly, that participants communicate, simply through eye contact, setting aside the world of differences that separated them. The deeper significance of this game was to think about who we choose to include into our fold and what constitutes this decision. During the final activity of the day, participants were paired up and asked to get to know each other followed by sharing one incident each about an experience that made them feel like ‘they belong there’ and an experience where they felt like an ‘outsider’. As each participant shared their memories, it brought forth emotional responses from their fellow participants forging a new sense of belonging, to that space, to that moment where they could be vulnerable with each other.
Education and the Idea of Belonging
Facilitated by Joyeeta Dey and Angana Das
Joyeeta Dey and Angana Das explored two key issues–how notions of belonging have changed with the digitalization of classroom practices and how students from extremely marginalized communities deal with such practices on a day to day basis.
Dey’s presentation explored how technology could be used in the classroom to foster learning where students could actually interact creatively with the technological tools instead of using them passively. It raised problems like the lack of involvement of school teachers in the procurement of technology for the classroom and the consequent alienation they face when they have to use it. While new education policies are increasingly trying to harness technology to enable learning in the classroom, the social space in which these tools are used are riddled with inequity, which in turn is reproduced by the technology. For instance, when classrooms had to go online suddenly during the pandemic, Dey shared a case study which revealed that most female school teachers were reliant on their sons or co-workers to use video platforms like Zoom or engage with evaluation tools that were made popular at that time. These created fear, anxiety and apathy around technology. The bid towards centralization has led schools to procure softwares which gather and synthesize student data. But these systems are hugely reliant on the labour of the teachers to feed them with data. Dey pointed out studies which demonstrate that this mode of using technology invisibilizes the labour of those who feed data into it for centralization purposes. Questions were also raised on consent and privacy since the data collection tends to be all consuming. Teachers shared their experiences and drew attention to the importance of shifting their attitude towards technology and understanding it as a valid and essential mode of communication in the classroom and not just an additional tool.
Angana Das shared her ongoing research on the ‘happiness curriculum’ introduced in Delhi government schools. She explored the difficulties of implementing a curriculum that foregrounds the mental health of young students in a context where most of them struggle with extreme material hardships. What does it mean to practise mindfulness or reflect on one’s emotions when one doesn’t have two square meals a day? Or when students have to live the rest of the day competing with their peers for marks and fear a future of unemployment and further hardship? Most of the students Das interacted with came from families of urban migrants to Delhi. They live in dingy settlements and their parents have to take a great financial risk in deciding to come to the city for education. In this context, how does one period in a day that focuses on emotional learning help the students deal with everyday stresses? Successful facilitation of these classes often helped quiet students open up in unanticipated manners or broach conversations with their parents that they never thought they could. While a lot of students felt bleak about the prospect of a happiness period in a school life fearing humiliation by teachers and parents, some reported that they benefited from emotional empowerment during these lessons which helped carve out quality time with their parents or even voice concerns or complaints they might have about how the school functioned.
Dey’s workshop highlighted that even digital media can foster a sense of belonging but only when the users feel they have more agency and information about the use and relevance of the digital tool being used. Policies which mandate such use should not valorize technology but foster sensitivity to the contexts in which technology would be procured and used. The digital, therefore, cannot become valuable unless policymakers and designers are sensitive to the social. Das’ workshop revealed that curricular decisions which seek to promote mental health of the students need to remain equally context-sensitive, focus on training facilitators in order to foster a true sense of belonging in the classroom.
Cultural Heritage and the Idea of Belonging
Facilitated by Sumona Chakravarty and Shreeja Sen
When examining heritage what does belonging mean? Whose heritage do we speak of? How does cultural heritage manifest in the pages of textbooks and how does it enter classroom discussions? These were some of the pertinent issues discussed by Sumona Chakravarty and Shreeja Sen in their workshop. Chakravarty first introduced the Delhi Art gallery and its initiatives, outlining how it started as a commercial art gallery and moved to a project towards making art more accessible. In doing so, her work at DAG led her to collaborate with many museums. However, it was also important to negotiate with the space of a museum, an institute which had under colonial rule been demarcated as a civilizing space and continues to be understood by many as an educational forum. What kinds of knowledge does a museum impart? Who are its beneficiaries and should they not have a say in what gets included and left out of the museum? These questions have often triggered a discussion between the idea of the museum and the idea of belonging, which DAG running an itinerant museum and travelling exhibits contends with. Furthermore, it allows them to experiment with the idea of belonging as they introduce their collection to schools, colleges and even repurpose city spaces trying to curate an affective relationship between the viewers and collections.
As a thought-experiment Chakravarty initiated a discussion with the participants on DAG’s Navratna collection, comprising the work of nine artists who under the Antiquities and Art Treasure Act 1972, were recognised as national art treasures. Having visually feasted their eyes on the kaleidoscope of paintings by the Navratna or nine jewels, the subjects of the paintings and distinctive techniques, participants were made to don the shoes of the selection community to understand what went into the selection of the Navratna. Conversations revealed a clear hearkening towards an idealized vision of the past in the choice of these painters as well as a noticeable divide between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art. Participants questioned whether there was an attempt to portray a civilization frozen in time and discussed how the creation of this canon was also enabling what we understand as culture as well our concept of the nation. Furthermore it was shaping what qualifies as art in the first place. This was accompanied by Chakravarty sharing the work of some other contemporaneous artists like Pestonji Bomanji, M V Dhurandar, Chittaprasad, Sunayani Devi, MAR Chughtai, DP Roychowdhury and Gopal Ghose who were left out of the list. She also revealed that the initiative had economic incentives to prevent the export and loss of these artworks. Professor Aloka Parasher Sen, in attendance at the workshop, also drew attention to how the Navratna initiative was a method at defining nationality and had to be located to a sense of belonging at that moment in time.
This experiment, locating the many threads of belonging in the simple act of canonizing paintings was followed by an activity by Shreeja Sen, where she gauged how participants reacted to certain statements like ‘We share a common heritage’. Participants were made to choose between two corners of the room or stand in between the two to indicate their degree of agreement/disagreement. This provoked interesting debates on the difference between shared and common heritage, questioning the idea of heritage and its preservation and so forth. Through an activity participants explored their place as viewers looking at art and questioned if they belonged 'in' the painting. This was followed by a panel discussion by educators Amita Prasad and Tina Servaia where they shared important insights of the syllabi, the use of art as sources in textbooks, some of the issues with using art as source material, the power of symbols in the usage of art, etc. The discussions also greatly benefited from Aloka Parasher Sen’s insights on the classification and categorization of art and its introduction in textbooks.
The reports have been compiled by Amreeta Das, Ishita Biswas and Mayukhi Ghosh. Pictures have been photographed by Pratyusha Chakrabarti.
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