Driving Paradigm Shifts for Coexistence through School Network Interventions: From Uttarakhand.

About the talk: Dr. Soumya Prasad works with addressing learning systems for science, biodiversity and sustainability education taking a grass-roots approach in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Dr. Prasad and her team have brought together a network of rural schools which have opened their doors to incorporating a hands-on nature-linked approach to science learning under the “Nature Vidya” programs. Students from these schools have dived deep into observing birds, butterflies and other taxa, worked together to spearhead campaigns for waste management within their school and beyond, and also powered shifts towards sustainable lifestyle practices within their community. Over the last year, these change-maker schools from Uttarakhand have also come together to set up powerful performances and exhibitions around sustainable lifestyles and human-wildlife co-existence to diverse audiences. Stemming out from this collective of schools in Uttarakhand is a unique model of collaborations between children, state and non-state actors to drive powerful co-existence dialogues around commons and endangered fauna. In this talk, Dr. Prasad will share the trajectories of their work around nature-linked learning programs in Uttarakhand, and also discuss how we can structure and anchor meaningful community-driven dialogues for co-existence by taking an education approach. About the speaker: Dr. Soumya Prasad did her Masters in Wildlife Biology from the Wildlife Institute of India, and her PhD from the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. She spent two decades researching approaches to address impacts of climate change, invasive alien species and biomass harvests on seasonally-dry tropical ecosystems taking a process-based approach focussed on seed dispersal mechanisms. After a stint as Assistant Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), Dr. Prasad moved fulltime to Nature Science Initiative in 2017 to develop programs for science and sustainability education anchored in Uttarakhand. Dr. Prasad is also a Coexistence Champion, working with Transdisciplinary University (Bangalore) where her work brings together change-maker schools from Uttarakhand to drive ground-up dialogues for sustainability and co-existence.