Alumni News & Notes
Shweta Anand Arora, Ed.M.'05: What Is and What Should Be
by Lory Hough
It's the name that grabs you first: iDiscoveri, meaning that when a person realizes their full potential -- when I discovers I -- anything is possible.
But what really grabs you about the organization, run by a group of Harvard graduates, including Shweta Anand Arora, Ed.M.'05, is its lofty goal: revising education in India.
"Currently, education in India still follows very old, traditional methods, with one teacher in the classroom giving information to up to 40 or even 60 students in the class, and the students being tested on their recall of this information," said Anand Arora, by e- mail from India. "The purpose of school is to get good marks in the board exams and to be prepared for admission into the top engineering or medical colleges."
Education can be more than that, Anand Arora said.
"What we dream of at iDiscoveri is an education where each child can fulfill his or her true potential, where the classroom is about the learners and not about the teacher, where learning is the primary goal, and the means to reach this builds on children's innate curiosity, wonder, and desire to learn," she said. "The contrast between what is and what should be leads to this need for 'revival.'"
Initially started in 1996 by a group of fi ve friends as an adventurebased self-discovery company for children set in the Himalayas (with programs called Inward Bound and Youreka!), iDiscoveri grew to include training programs for schools.
"They found they were able to do something quite magical with children in these summer programs, and slowly the question arose -- why can't magic happen in schools?" Anand Arora said. "The team expanded to include people with backgrounds in education, research, and psychology -- and the entry into schools began. The goal of the group is to work with schools so that as many children as possible can get access to a more meaningful education."
Anand Arora said her own experience as a student, with 50 students per class, was less than meaningful.
"I was a very good student, but very shy. I didn't do much outside academics, and no one really took an interest in my overall development," she said. "When I finished school, I was somehow unhappy with my education, even though I'd done well by conventional standards. I couldn't pinpoint why."
After college at Delhi University, where she studied psychology, she became a counselor with an iDiscoveri summer program and realized that learning could actually be exciting.
"At the same time, a friend of mine was in England working with a Steiner school and would tell me about the kind of stuff they were doing," she said. "I started reading about innovative practices in education and got fascinated with the field."
Today, iDiscoveri pulls from several educational approaches, including Steiner, Montessori, Reggio, Aurobindo, and Krishnamurthy (Indian thinkers).
"We'd like to make education more experiential, using children's own observation and experience to lead to learning," said Anand Arora, who promotes the program in western India and is also coordinating the set up of a new residential school. "For example, while learning about insects, children in one of our partner schools went out into the fields, observed diff erent kinds of bugs, and studied similarities and differences. They came up with a definition of insects based on their observations, as well as some reference work, and looked at their habitats and eating cycles. They kept a caterpillar in a jar and observed its life cycle and transformation into a butterfly. Because they were involved in their learning, it was fun and more long-lasting than what they would have learned from a textbook."
To learn more, go to www.idiscoveri.com.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Photograph courtesy of Shweta Anand Arora
