Graduate Student Designs Workshop in India
The Indian town of Pithoragarh is nestled in the hills beneath the towering and picturesque Himalayas. Decades ago, Gautam Bisht’s grandmother moved away from this region to seek a better education and more opportunities for her family.
Bisht, who is pursuing his doctorate in learning sciences at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, recently returned to his family’s hometown to make a difference.
As part of India’s National Education Policy 2020, which introduced research at the undergraduate level for the first time, Bisht designed and ran a workshop for 35 students in Pithoragarh to teach research methods to young people.
“It has always been a desire of mine to make an impact where I have my own roots,” he said in an interview with SESP.
Bisht’s research focuses on designing learning spaces where people with different backgrounds can learn by using their own languages and ways of understanding.
He presented his research, "Decolonizing Research: Insights from a Methods Workshop in a Rural Himalayan College in India," as part of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ regular colloquia series, which allows PhD candidates to present their global research.
The co-founder of the nonprofit Sinchan Education and Rural Entrepreneurship Foundation, he is currently involved in research projects that focus on Indigenous education, migration storytelling, and local knowledge systems of the Himalayan belt.
The workshop he designed paired students with a mentor and allowed them to conduct their own research project and present their work at the end. It emphasized elements like multilingual learning, which are important in Bisht’s work. This key idea focuses on valuing and celebrating different ways of learning that are not based on traditional Western ideas or methods.
In the project, which was supported by the Buffett Research Fellowship Program, students picked topics they found interesting; a business student researched local tourism, another impacted by the caste system chose to research caste discrimination.
“From a very personal justification to more social and economic aspects, there was a range in which people expressed why they selected certain topics,” Bisht said.
At the end, Bisht organized a research poster presentation, something very common in universities where research is ubiquitous. However, in Pithoragarh, it was totally new, and none of the organizers “was really aware of how it would unfold,” Bisht said.
Instead of the polite, and sometimes rigid, interactions of a classic poster presentation, Bisht’s students imbued new life into the academic discourse.
“There were some surprises,” Bisht said. “There was a lot of argumentation ... there was back and forth. It was very vibrant ... Then there were also moments where people were like, ‘Let’s collaborate. I have this YouTube channel; you should come on our channel.’”
This project is “very personal and very poetic,” Bisht noted.
“This is part of my long-term vision to continue using my learning sciences studies to do whatever I can do to design learning environments with the community in Uttarakhand,” he said.
Bisht feels that this first workshop helped embed him into the educational ecosystem of Pithoragarh. “I got connected with so many other people who are doing such beautiful, good work in that region,” he said.
These connections will greatly support his future endeavors in the area, as his research is iterative, meaning his team is currently working on how to repeat and improve the project.
This first workshop, which has already touched many lives, is only the “first step of a very long journey” to contribute to the education landscape of the region that is so close to Bisht’s heart.