HYDERABAD: Urvi Desai and Shreyas Sridharan are climate action aficionados who have decided to take climate education to schools and colleges with their organisation, EkoGalaxy. While Desai comes from an academic background, having a PhD in medical history from McGill University in Canada, Sridharan spent a decade in the solar technology field. Together, they curate programmes and events on climate-related issues. They also organised ‘climate conversations’, a newly introduced theme to the Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF) held in January this year, which was a huge success.
Explaining their initiatives at the school level, Urvi said, “Shreyas and I felt that there was a major gap in students’ learning about the climate crisis. The school curriculum does not allow students to engage in important discussions, while students are experiencing eco-anxiety and social media contributes a lot to this anxiety. We wanted to counter it by teaching about climate, environment and nature with a holistic and integrated approach that includes literature, music, understanding local communities, indigenous practices, etc.”
EkoGalaxy makes enjoyable, collaborative, holistic and action-oriented programmes for students that bring them closer to nature and instil joy in learning as opposed to augmenting the fear of the climate crisis.
Learning with fun
“Our curriculum is tailored for different age groups and involves a mix of concept learning and activities like tree walks, storytelling, music, etc,” said Urvi. They also collaborate with a few European schools. “Indian students do projects with students in Europe live in the class. It helps in cultural exchange, and understanding that while it’s a global issue, the local particularities of the climate crisis can’t be ignored,” Urvi explained. Having finished their first academic year in schools in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, they have partnered with schools in Greece, Ireland and other European countries.
“With this collaboration, we noticed that initially, Indian students were hesitating to interact whereas European students were naturally more outgoing. But by the end of the activity, Indian students too were interacting freely and openly. The growth that we saw was very beautiful. The teachers in Europe were moved because they also had never experienced anything like this. They were talking about the water crisis, earthquakes in Greece, etc,” Urvi said.
Nefeli, a grade 8 student from Greece, spoke about her experience at the collaboration. She said, “I loved learning about the culture of my friends in India. I enjoyed learning about sustainable concepts and practices in India and sharing about our practices here. I made many friends and want to visit India and see Charminar.”
Apocalyptic thinking among students
Urvi told CE that students are quite informed about the crisis but are terrified with the videos they see on social media. “We saw that there was an apocalyptic sense of the world. Children were watching videos which had a very terrifying perspective of the climate crisis. A critical part of the climate talks is finding solutions.
We helped them understand that even though it is a global problem, it affects everybody locally. Building solutions that can help them mitigate day-to-day struggles also interestingly makes the anxiety quite less. This apocalyptic thinking moves all of us into inaction. We’re terrified but also not doing anything about it. Our approach was to bring in the joy element of learning and to notice the biodiversity that is right outside your window,” Urvi explained.
With great success at the HLF, where EkoGalaxy curated some mindful and nuanced sessions with speakers such as Anand Gandhi and Rohan Chakravarthy, Shreyas and Urvi are organising two events with Goethe Zentrum in the upcoming days. “The first event on April 19 at Goethe Zentrum involves Shreyas and I talking about climate action in everyday life. Specific actions that allow us to live a sustainable life.
The idea is to have an imperfect but earnest climate action. Linking to this, is the next event, on April 27. We talk about waste without talking about the waste picker, who is at the heart of the whole ecosystem. Swachh is a three-decade-old initiative in Pune. We have a worker coming from there as well as local workers from GHMC’s sanitation department. This will help us gain an understanding of waste and also the waste pickers,” Urvi concluded.