On Books and Arts

Suggested Citation: Sangita Thebe Limbu. 2020. 'On Books and Arts', Think Pieces Series No. 2. Education.SouthAsia (https://educationsouthasia.web.ox.ac.uk/).

A new library called Junkiri was inaugurated on 5 March 2020 in Kathmandu. In Nepali language, Junkiri means firefly, which has become a rare sight just like libraries in the bustling capital city – thus, the name Junkiri carries a symbolic meaning through its association with light, rarity and hope While libraries are not new, Junkiri is claimed to be the first feminist library in Nepal. It was initiated by Voices of Women Media (VOWM), a Kathmandu-based non-profit organisation, and inspired by their work with young female students in public schools, many of whom did not realise there were books that they could read outside their school curriculum. Set up through crowdfunding and book donations from over 300 individuals, Junkiri aims to create a physical space to house works of women writers and introduce them to young readers especially young girls. The library membership fee is NPR 100 (£0.66 approx.) per year for members of the public, while students get free membership once they provide recommendation letter from their school. VOWM further plans to liaise with public schools, create book clubs and ensure students have access to the library books. During its inception, some of the key challenges that Junkiri team faced include difficulty of finding books by women authors in a male-dominated literary landscape, and battling the impacts of government imposed taxation on books resulting in price hikes, low stocks and restricted imports.

In a context where education is increasingly seen through the lens of employability, initiatives like Junkiri appears to broaden the conventional understanding of school education and learning. In this ‘think piece’, I will reflect upon similar and some other innovative educational initiatives led by civil society organisations in Nepal, and how they relate to the formal education system and bureaucracies of the Nepali state, as well as the wider socio-political context.

Based on secondary literature review, I will analyse some of the art, literary and/or digital works of the following non-government organisations – VOWM, Srijanalya, Photo.Circle, Quixote’s Cove (QC) and Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE), and international development organisation such as The Asia Foundation (TAF). Srijanalaya and Photo.Circle focus specifically on introducing arts into formal education as a method of teaching, storytelling and immersive, experiential learning. Leveraging the low-cost ICT, OLE works to ensure accessibility of formal teaching curriculum in geographically remote parts of Nepal. Meanwhile, through physical library like Junkiri, ‘on-the-wheel’ library such as Book Bus and virtual library like Let’s Read!, VOWM, QC and TAF have respectively focused on accessibility of books and promotion of reading culture. This think piece attempts to uncover some of the underlying visions of education that constitute these initiatives, and provide some preliminary reflections on how they engage with the Nepali state’s education provisions and policies.

Vision(s) of education

By ‘visions’, I refer to the implicit or explicit understandings of what the formal education system is currently like in Nepal, and what it should be or could be. Access is a common theme across all the aforementioned educational initiatives. While OLE is focused on access and retention in formal education system, the rest of the organisations are focused on ensuring access to supplementary and extracurricular resources and activities. The idea that education should be fun, interesting and engaging for students, and not simply about rote learning as it stands, is another recurring theme. The idea of ‘fun’ is of course envisioned in different ways – Srijanalya and Photo.Circle in particular emphasise arts, expression, creativity and hands-on learning; while OLE focuses on low-cost, low-tech laptops to engage with students.

The purpose of education is largely imagined beyond the end goal of employability or entrepreneurship as commonly emphasised by politicians and policymakers. The arts and library-related initiatives in particular focus on self-actualization and lifelong learning through the cultivation of reading, writing and exposure to different forms of arts. Under QC, a collective of poets – Word Warriors (WW) also run poetry workshops for different audiences including for adult women that envision and situate the process of learning and self-expression beyond the formal educational setting.

Organisations like Srijanalaya, TAF and Photo.Circle also imagine education as a medium that should reflect the socio-cultural diversity through multilingualism and multicultural approaches to story-telling and teaching. These visions can be observed in the social justice inspired themes of photo festivals, digital archives and art workshops run by Photo.Circle, and the kinds of teaching resources and books produced by Srijanalaya and TAF. For example, as part of Let’s Read, TAF has translated and published children’s books in four vernacular languages – Nepali, Nepal bhasa, Tharu and Tamang. A quick browse through some of these books reveal their cultural sensitivity and diversity in characters, storylines and perspectives.

Institutional activities and envisioned role of civil society

All the educational initiatives reviewed here focus on formal education, with the exception of Let’s Read (which targets young, school children but it is a platform situated outside formal curriculum and school premises) and some of the poetry workshops run by Word Warriors targeted at adults. The commitment to working with public schools is prevalent across all the organisations. Within the existing education system, all of the organisations work directly with schools and they appear to see themselves in supporting roles.

With the understanding that there is not enough and accessible resources and learning spaces, initiatives like Junkiri, Let’s Read, Book bus and OLE work to address those gaps by creating physical and/or digital spaces where students can easily and freely access books and learning resources. To facilitate better student engagement, Srijanalaya uses the medium of arts, collaboration with artists and teaching resources such as lesson plans for teachers to support them in developing creative ambience in the classroom. To create immersive and experiential learning experiences outside classroom settings, Photo.Circle organises arts and education programme as part of its biennial photo festival where students are given a guided tour of the exhibition and introduced to different forms of arts through workshops.

There has also been collaboration among the organisations. For example, Srijanalaya has worked with TAF to develop multilingual books for children. Only one organisation OLE seems to be working directly with the government department. OLE has liaised with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to develop digital curriculum and learning resources targeted at students and teachers. TAF, on the other hand, envisions its role as not just limited to filling the resource gap in the existing education system, but also creating a sustainable ‘book ecosystem’ comprised of local writers, illustrators, editors and publishers. To that end, it runs various translation workshops and supports the production and publications of children’s books.

Reimagining education through books and arts – some preliminary reflections

Civil society organisations like Srijanalaya, Photo.Circle, VOWM and QC are relatively new and emerging organisations led by Nepali youths based in Kathmandu. Their outreach may not be extensive, but they are innovative in their approaches, and their activities are pushing the conventional formal education boundaries constituted by literacy, numeracy, digital and employability skills. They appear to emphasise self-expression, and creative and experiential learning through arts. Initiatives like Let’s Read by TAF also expands the understanding of self-learning beyond classrooms. It focuses not only on addressing the scarcity of children’s books and limited diversity of content, but also finding solutions to the existing market system where publishing books in local languages is not considered to be a lucrative enterprise.

While all these small-scale interventions seem innovative, and perhaps could act as a model or template for further scale-up, none of the initiatives seems to have directly engaged with the state bodies in relation to curriculum design or advocating for alternatives to the existing model. NGOs like OLE that focus on the integration of ICT in education seems to have gain traction with the government bodies such as the federal ministry, but the kind of outputs that have come out of the collaboration has focused on ensuring the existing curriculum is made accessible digitally using low-cost and low-tech infrastructures. Overall, the educational initiatives reviewed here seem to have focused on how to make the existing curriculum and teaching processes engaging and effective for students, but what actually goes into the curriculum itself or the complex political issues such as school governance, budget management, education policy change are currently left out of the purview.