The journey – on track and off!
I don’t know how the journey began or where… somewhere one got the sense of a road, the horizon, one’s feet drifting, moving, struggling on changing surfaces!
My family had a big hand in shaping the basic matrix on which pretty much everything else emerged. Most of my schooling was in Delhi with a few years in London. Delhi University where I studied all my degree courses had a huge influence on me. English Honours (B.A.) and M.A. from Indraprastha College followed by B.Ed and M.Ed from the Department of Education in Delhi University, opened many dimensions. I am grateful for the exposure, insights and training I received there. Besides degrees from reputed places really help at times!
I chose to be teacher because I felt a sense of resonance, as if I belonged to the world of education. After three decades I can look back and thank myself for heeding intuition to take up teaching. Much was in formal, progressive schools with international curricula (IB/IGCSE) and some with national (CBSE/ICSE). Experiencing various positions in schools across India - from student, to teacher, to coordinator, to principal, to founder in various places has been a rich and rewarding journey. I have particularly enjoyed teaching TOK (Theory of Knowledge), literature and language games. I share these and more with teachers now.
Getting ‘off-track’ was perhaps the most interesting and enriching experience… I left a ‘regular’ job to volunteer in an educational world which seemed to me walking into a parallel world! I found an experimental school (Mirambika, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi) with no exams, uniforms, fixed curriculum or promises. I stayed there for over three years, did some teacher training, went back to mainstream, raised schools and programmes and was then called to set up schools and organize teacher education programmes that bridge worlds of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternate’. Auro Mirra International School, Bangalore is a living model of that effort. Here the experience of setting up IB schools and programmes, along with experiments in non-formal education has helped tremendously. I gave the school twelve years of life and then moved on.
I write for the sheer love of writing. Yet, books have happened. There's a lot that is sitting quietly with me and has been put 'out there' yet. Perhaps it will reach out and leap into the world at some time. Poetry, photography, tea, moon… there are influences around us that don’t always shout out loud but mingle in you quietly and you start living them. I share some of them here... But the best is yet to come!
© Harvinder Kaur. All rights reserved.
