“You cannot teach anybody anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves.”

The Program

Kaaya Learning Centre runs a Kaaya Forest School that offers a structured, wholesome, and ecological approach to outdoor, experiential learning. The Kaaya Forest School complements traditional educational opportunities provided in school environments by engaging students through a variety of hands-on learning experiences and interactions in a wooded/natural environment.

Forest Schools focus on creating a learning space to affect a genuine, experience-based relationship with nature that encourages and enhances student’s life skills. Life skills, whether formal or informal, are not learnt in a vacuum; and the adaptive and positive behaviours that these skills trigger are greatly influenced by the environment in which individuals live, learn, and act.

We propose to build this life skills component in the student’s growth trajectory at the Kaaya Forest School. The School, located in natural setting in village Tilwari, offers a combination of short-term and long-term programs for exploring and appreciating nature, rural life, and its regenerative processes to the group of students and schools.

Kaaya Forest School offers following programs to school-age and college students

Level A: Curriculum linked outdoor learning camps for school children (duration: 1-5 days)

• School children experience varied hands-on, process-oriented journeys by completing three learning modules on Agriculture (seed journey), rural life (milk journey), Forest & water (soil journey) in real village settings.

Level B: Project-based residency (Duration: 1 week to 5 weeks, during summer and winter breaks)

• Students are asked to narrow down to their topic of interest and work in teams on projects that involve real time planning and execution towards solving a local problem.

Level C: Independent “live projects”, internship, and dissertation (Duration: Up to 6 months)

• The students are assigned a “live project”, which involves integrating the lessons from his/her respective subjects of study and its application in resolving practical real-life problems and projects.