This video is an small example of Native's initial steps in a tiny village of Ahemdabad, aided by GEMS Genesis International School. It highlights how Native forms relationship with it's audiene before designing learning for them.
“In the bid of going ‘mainstream’, what is richly local (or native) is not leveraged enough. There is a visible distance between the understanding of that which is internal, accessible and highly resourceful, and that which is external and commonly sought after. It is in this distance that Native begins and continues to exist, not to bridge it, but to scaffold programmes that turn lenses inwards and facilitate growth that spreads equally outwards.”
Native is an independent, practice based research project, which designs and executes long and short term interventions that engage its participants in thinking and identifying learning opportunities in spaces and practices they are native to, be it their livelihood or the surroundings they inhabit. The idea is to build an interactive platform within the context to elicit deeper understanding of what they do and where they belong, by using what they do and the place they belong to, to acquire more knowledge.
Native began with an aim to identify spaces in everyday lives of economically poor experientially rich people to integrate education; making their act of earning a medium for learning.
Native, as a project, signifies relevance, connection, integration, exposure and empowerment.
Native began as a post-graduate thesis project at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Its was called M.E.A.L (Making Earning A medium for Learning) and it was a successful semester long project, which involved a long research resulting into two comprehensive interventions with two strategically chosen groups of people
- women, who cooked for a living at a non-profit learning centre, DRISHYA, in Bangalore
- children from a community of potters in a village close to the city of Bangalore
Follow the link to read detailed documents of the process of learning with Native
