Vena transitioned to a freelance consultant role from October 2023 after working with the Nature Conservation Foundation for close to 15 years. She continues heading the Nature Classrooms programme she started in 2018. She and her colleagues collaborate with school teachers and educators by facilitating experiential nature learning workshops and co-designing age appropriate and locally-culturally relevant nature learning modules and activities that can be weaved in as part of the primary school syllabus using relevant education theory and pedagogical practices. She also writes popular articles and conducts workshops, talks, nature walks for adults and children to introduce them to the fascinating world of insects, spiders, ecology and nature around them. Read on to know more about her interests and work.

Can you tell us a bit about Nature Classrooms? What inspired you to launch it?

Nature Classrooms was set up as a project within the Education and Public Engagement Programme of the Nature Conservation Foundation to work within the school system and with educators and teachers in India. Environmental Studies (EVS) is a compulsory and separate subject in India in the Primary sections, and schools and school teachers usually rely only on the textbooks to teach the subject. The content covered in the textbooks and the teaching-learning pedagogical approach is unfortunately often devoid of the wonders and fascinating aspects of the immediate natural world not allowing for the teacher and learner to experience and inquire with locally-culturally relevant examples - all crucial for having a local and relevant connection with nature. An inquisitiveness, fascination, wonder and connection with accessible local nature is always the starting point for children and adults to later become stewards of the natural world. We wanted teachers and educators to not only be introduced to the wonders of the natural world around them and be fascinated and curious by it but also to equip them to feel the need and have the confidence to pass this on to their students.

Being sensitive to the continuous pressures of time and expectations of teachers from school administration and parents, we want teachers to feel like they have the agency to adopt nature learning as part of their teaching. We do this by giving them the choice to adopt and adapt the co-created resources as part of their teaching, and by studying and understanding their needs through workshops, conversations and classroom observations. We also frequently collaborate with other educational organisations and nonprofits working in different domains of education by conducting bespoke workshops for their teacher-trainers on how they can weave in nature education approaches, resources and tools as part of their own education interventions in different parts of the country and ecosystems.   

How does Nature Classrooms enhance the school curricula through its resources? What gaps is it helping fill?

We design our approach and content for our nature learning modules and resources keeping the various school curricula as our baseline. All our modules and resources are open source and adaptable, enabling teachers and educators to tweak content and images to make them ecologically and locally relevant when needed. We have also developed an open source Nature Learning Framework and Pedagogical approach based on our collective and vast experience of being nature educators, through conversations and feedback from educators and using relevant research, literature and case studies from education theory and practice. All these nature education tools are demonstrated and used during our training workshops to enable teachers to practically use and adapt them as part of their teaching content and methodology. We hope that the gap we are helping fill is to get teachers interested, excited and confident about nature learning in their school spaces and to embrace and believe that learning about and in the natural world is as important and relevant a subject as the sciences and math. Our hope and vision is to make nature studies an integral part of all schools and the teaching-learning ethos.   

Can you share a few stories that speak of the impact it has had on children and teachers?

One of my earliest memories was experiencing a teacher having an “aha!” moment when she herself came up with a creative nature learning connection to one of the chapters she was teaching in her class, just after one of our workshops and classroom discussions. Another was from one of our first workshops with teachers from a private nonprofit school. It was wonderful  to experience a small group of school teachers using binoculars for the first time and the delight and excitement from them when they spotted through the binoculars a family of curious owlets resting on a tree stump. This nature experience also led to conversations, and animated debates between the teachers about superstitions about certain animals like owls and their own memories of seeing owls when they were children.    

Another fond memory is from one of the Kannada-medium Government schools we work with, in collaboration with a long-term partner organisation in the outskirts of Bangalore city. The students studying here are children of migrant labourers from different parts of the country. A serendipitous encounter one morning with a beautifully camouflaged dragonfly that had settled on the wall of the school and an encounter with a family of skinks in the cramped and concrete school room and surroundings led to fascinating discussions about their encounters, experiences, knowledge, myths and memories of these creatures from the hometowns they migrated from. This nature class led us to add ‘lived experiences’ of teachers-learners as an important and crucial pedagogical approach and we often cite this example in our workshops.  

What have been your biggest learnings from your professional journey so far?

I have been fortunate to collaborate with people from different disciplines and domains and this has been very influential in my thinking, approach and work ethics. Having at least a few mentors and colleagues who will challenge and provide helpful critical analysis of your work and professional journey is very helpful. Repeatedly going back to reading and practising the fundamentals of your subject speciality is very important especially when you get sucked into multitasking and firefighting during your professional career.  Leading a team of people often cannot only be learnt on the job or thought of as an intuitive process - get training and help through workshops, reading case studies from different sectors and by observing, learning from other people leading and managing people.