Learning and Sustaining Agricultural Practices in Rural India: The Dialects of Cultivating Cultivation

336 Pages·2021·9.526 MB·English

by  Karen Haydock, Abhijit Sambhaji Bansode, Gurinder Singh, Kalpana Sangale

International Explorations in Outdoor
and Environmental Education 7
Karen Haydock
Abhijit Sambhaji Bansode
Gurinder Singh
Kalpana Sangale
Learning and
Sustaining
Agricultural
Practices
The Dialectics of Cultivating Cultivation
in Rural India
International Explorations in Outdoor
and Environmental Education
Volume 7
Series Editors
Annette Gough, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Noel Gough, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Editorial Board
Peter Bentsen, Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Susanna Ho, Ministry of Education, Singapore, Singapore
Kathleen Kesson, Long Island University, Brooklyn, USA
John Chi-Kin Lee, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
Justin Lupele, Academy for Education Development, Lusaka, Zambia
Greg Mannion, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
Pat O’Riley, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Chris Reddy, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Hilary Whitehouse, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia
This series focuses on contemporary trends and issues in outdoor and environmental
education, two key fields that are strongly associated with education for sustainability
and its associated environmental, social and economic dimensions. It also has an
international focus to encourage dialogue across cultures and perspectives. The
scope of the series includes formal, nonformal and informal education and the need
for different approaches to educational policy and action in the twenty first century.
Research is a particular focus of the volumes, reflecting a diversity of approaches to
outdoor and environmental education research and their underlying epistemological
and ontological positions through leading edge scholarship. The scope is also be
both global and local, with various volumes exploring the issues arising in different
cultural, geographical and political contexts. As such, the series aims to counter the
predominantly “white” Western character of current research in both fields and
enable cross-cultural and transnational comparisons of educational policy, practice,
project development and research. The purpose of the series is to give voice to
leading researchers (and emerging leaders) in these fields from different cultural
contexts to stimulate discussion and further research and scholarship to advance the
fields through influencing policy and practices in educational settings. The volumes
in the series are directed at active and potential researchers and policy makers in the
fields. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor:
Claudia Acuna E-mail: [email protected]
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11799
Karen Haydock • Abhijit Sambhaji Bansode
Gurinder Singh • Kalpana Sangale
Learning and Sustaining
Agricultural Practices
The Dialectics of Cultivating Cultivation
in Rural India
Karen Haydock Abhijit Sambhaji Bansode
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Kalpana Sangale
Gurinder Singh Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
ISSN 2214-4218 ISSN 2214-4226 (electronic)
International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education
ISBN 978-3-030-64064-4 ISBN 978-3-030-64065-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64065-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
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v
We dedicate this book to the farming family:
Namdev, Prabhavati, Bhimraj, Smita, Pratik,
and Pranay.
Series Editors’ Foreword
Passage O soul to India!…
Not you alone, proud truths of the world!
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science!
But myths and fables of eld—Asia’s, Africa’s fables
The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,
The deep diving bibles and legends,
The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
(Walt Whitman, 1870)
This book invites readers to undertake a metaphorical ‘Passage to India’ – not so
much the ‘passage’ of E.M. Forster’s (1924) celebrated novel, but rather of the Walt
Whitman poem that inspired it. In 1869, Whitman was himself inspired by two
history-making events, namely the completion of the American transcontinental
railroad, connecting the USA from East to West, and the opening of the Suez Canal
joining the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, which allowed transportation and
trade between Europe and Asia in record time, without navigating around Africa.
The canal promised to change the face of world commerce, but it also extended the
possibilities of cultural exchange between nations (see Harsharan S. Ahluwalia, 1983).
In ‘Passage to India’, Whitman celebrates the canal’s construction as both a feat
of engineering and a triumph of the human imagination. The ‘facts of modern sci-
ence’ alone are not enough to explain the project’s completion. By directly address-
ing the ‘proud truths’ and ‘fables’ in parallel with the ‘far-darting beams of the
spirit’, ‘deep diving bibles and legends’ and ‘the daring plots of the poets’, Whitman
brings ‘modern science’ into perspective with the ‘elder religions’ and expresses his
admiration for both.
Learning and Sustaining Agricultural Practices: The dialectics of cultivating
cultivation in rural India relates a very different ‘Passage to India’. This volume
discusses the authors’ understanding of historical dialectical materialist science and
explains how and why their observations, learning, and work on the farm led them
to see science as a process of doing and working, even as many educationists see
ix
x Series Editors’ Foreword
science as a ‘body of knowledge’. But it is much more than this. It is very interdis-
ciplinary. It is an example of a participatory case study. And, as the authors note,
‘different parts of the book will be useful to people who have more specialised
interests, which may range from rural school education, or science education, to
skill training, agricultural development and sustainability, indigenous knowledge
and multicultural education, philosophies of science, and political economy’.
We also see this book as epitomising the changes in orientations from environ-
mental education to education for sustainable development. While this volume is
about education and relationships with the environment, it is much more.
Early conceptions of environmental education were focused on the quality of the
environment and quality of life for humans. For example, the Belgrade Charter
stated that:
…the foundations must be laid for a world-wide environmental education programme that
will make it possible to develop new knowledge and skills, values and attitudes, in a drive
towards a better quality of environment and, indeed, towards a higher quality of life for
present and future generations living within that environment. (UNESCO 1975, p. 2)
In 1987 the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development,
also known as Our Common Future or the Brundtland Report, included what is now
frequently quoted as the standard definition of sustainable development: ‘Sustainable
development is development that meets the needs of the present without compro-
mising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ (World Commission
on Environment and Development 1987, p. 43). This report marked a turning point
for the environment movement and environmental education in that subsequent
United Nations’ meetings moved to reorient environmental education towards edu-
cation for sustainable development. Fast forward to 2015 and the United Nations’
adoption of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development that included 17
Sustainable Development Goals. The goals address issues confronting the majority
world such as poverty, health, income, agricultural sustainability, food security,
educational opportunity and achievement – all of which are addressed (and prob-
lematised) in this volume.
We are especially pleased to introduce Learning and Sustaining Agricultural
Practices as the first volume in our series that wholly arises from a ‘majority world’
context. As David Cheruiyot & Raul Ferrer-Conill (2020, p. 9) write:
‘Minority World Countries’ (North America, Europe and Australasia) and ‘Majority World
Countries’ (Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) are terms increasingly used in
place of the misleading ‘Global North/South’ or reductionist ‘West/Rest’.
We also prefer ‘majority world’ to the largely inaccurate, outdated and/or non-
descriptive terms ‘developing’ nations and the offensive ‘third world’. Since the
early 1990s, the communications cooperative New Internationalist (www.newint.
org) has used ‘majority world’ to describe this global community by reference to
what it is, rather than what it lacks, and also to draw attention to the disproportionate
impact that the largest economies in the world (variously known as the Group of
Seven/Eight countries), which represent a relatively small fraction of humankind,
have on the majority of the world’s peoples.
Series Editors’ Foreword xi
‘Majority world’ perspectives have been included in previous volumes in this
series. In Green Schools Globally, accounts of green school movements were pro-
vided from China (Yu and Lee 2002), Hong Kong (Tsang et al. 2020), India (Sharma
& Kanaujia 2020), Israel (Tal 2020), Kenya (Otieno et al. 2020), Mexico (González-
Gaudiano et al. 2020), South Africa (Rosenberg 2020), Taiwan (Wang et al. 2020),
Turkey (Taşar 2020) and the Western Indian Ocean (Copsey 2020). In Education
and Climate Change: The Role of Universities, David Rhodes and Margaret
Wang (2021) discuss how to develop leadership capacities that help students in
Israel and Palestine address climate change, Lina Lopez Lalinde and Carrie
Maierhofer (2021) look at ‘Creating a Culture of Shared Responsibility for Climate
Action in Guatemala through Education’, Ashley Bazin and Christelle Saintis (2021)
discuss building climate change resilience in Haiti through educational radio pro-
gramming, and Natasha Japanwal (2021) discusses a climate change curriculum for
out-of-school children in Pakistan.
We hope this volume will encourage others from majority world perspectives to
contribute to this series. We also hope that this volume will reach those for whom
the research is important – those in rural school education, or science education,
skill training, agricultural development and sustainability, indigenous knowledge
and multicultural education, philosophies of science, political economy, and those
engaging in ethnographic and case study–based research. We can all learn from this
work as we struggle with understanding sustainable development in the major-
ity world.
RMIT University Annette Gough
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
La Trobe University Noel Gough
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
References
Ahluwalia, Harsharan S. 1983. A reading of Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’. Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 1(1): 9–17. https://doi.org/10.13008/2153- 3695.1002.
Bazin, Ashley, and Christelle Saintis. 2021. Rezistans Kimatik. Building climate change resilience
in Haiti through educational radio programming. In Education and Climate Change: The Role
of Universities, ed. Fernando Reimers, 113–136. Cham: Springer.
Cheruiyot, David, and Raul Ferrer-Conill. 2020. Pathway outta pigeonhole? De-c ontextualizing
majority world countries. Media, Culture & Society 0163443720960907. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0163443720960907.
Copsey, Olivia. 2020. A regional approach to eco-schools in the Western Indian Ocean. In Green
Schools Globally: Stories of Impact on Education for Sustainable Development, eds. Annette
Gough, John Chi-Kin Lee, & Eric Po Keung Tsang, 403–418. Cham: Springer. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978- 3- 030- 46820- 0_22.
Forster, E.M. 1924. A Passage to India. London: Edward Arnold.
González-Gaudiano, Edgar, Pablo Á. Meira-Cartea, and José M.  Gutiérrez-Bastida. 2020.
Green schools in Mexico and Spain: Trends and critical perspectives. In Green Schools
Globally: Stories of Impact on Education for Sustainable Development, eds. Annette