Community as Textbook
The field programme
Our founding research programme asks a question we think the education debate keeps missing.
Most schooling treats the community as context — the place the school happens to sit in. We are interested in settings where the community is the curriculum: where local water, local histories, local ecologies, local livelihoods and local elders are the material children learn from and contribute back to.
The claim we are examining is larger than place-based learning. It is that learning and living are not two activities but one continuum — and that education is worth doing insofar as it improves the quality of life for the learner and for the society they are part of. Place-based learning is where that shows up most visibly. It is not where it ends.
Our first field partner: Aram Thinai
Aram Thinai is a Chennai organisation working at the intersection of climate change, local livelihoods and eco-social justice. Their premise is what they call Localised Climate Resilience — climate action built from the local landscape and the community’s own needs, rooted in local knowledge, local livelihoods and the local economy.
We did not go looking for an education partner and find a climate organisation by accident. Read that definition again and it is the same claim this programme is testing, arriving from the other direction. They argue resilience cannot be imported — it has to be grown from what a place already knows. We argue learning cannot be imported either. Their Youth and Civic Engagement work, which teaches through experiential platforms rather than instruction, is where those two arguments meet on the ground.
So that is what we are studying: what happens to young people’s learning when the curriculum is the wetland, the livelihood and the neighbourhood they actually live in. Not whether the model works in the abstract — but how far this way of learning meets the idea of community as a textbook, how wholesome it is, where the possibilities for betterment lie, how much work remains, and whose work it is.
The study connects to Reading the City, our place-based reading pilot, which asks a version of the same question from a third direction: what happens when the text a child reads is the street they live on.
Terms were agreed before fieldwork began. Aram Thinai see everything before it is published, and the learning belongs to them as much as to us.
The programme is in its first phase, with field sites in Chennai. Further partners will be named here as agreements are signed.
If you do this work
Your practice may be the evidence someone else needs
If you run a school, a learning centre, a collective or a community initiative that is doing something that works — and it has never been documented, connected to a pedagogy, or made legible beyond the people already in the room — we want to talk to you.
Being documented is not a favour we do you, and not one you do us. It is a partnership with terms set at the start. You keep your voice, you see everything before it goes out, and the learning belongs to you as much as to us.
We are not coming to assess you. We are coming to understand what you have built well enough that someone else can learn from it — and to be useful to you along the way, because seeing your own practice described carefully by someone outside it usually shows you something.
Tell us about your work →
Why we do research at all
Most research sets out to prove something. The question is who decided what was worth proving.
Whoever funds the question has a say in what gets proven. That is not a conspiracy — it is just how the money moves. And it means some of the most important findings never see daylight, not because they are weak, but because they are inconvenient. A finding that would make a profitable thing go stale rarely gets a second round.
There is a second problem, and it is quieter. To be certain, research narrows. It isolates variables, controls conditions, and strips a phenomenon down to the part it can be sure about. That discipline is real and we respect it. But life does not arrive in controlled conditions. When we only ever look at fragments, we design fixes for fragments — band-aids that solve one thing and create two more, each of which then needs its own band-aid.
We are interested in relational effectiveness: what actually holds, in whole settings, over time, with real people in them.
So our research does three things differently.
We look for what is already working, close to home. The instinct in this sector is to import — a model from elsewhere, a framework from a different context, a solution shipped in. We think the more useful move is to look in our own backyards, find the practice that is quietly succeeding, understand why, and make it more effective and more visible.
We look at wholes, not fragments. A school, a neighbourhood, a family, an ecology — these are not separable and we do not pretend they are. Seeing the thing whole is what allows you to name the problem accurately. Naming it accurately is what allows you to tend to the cause rather than patch the symptom.
We are explicit about where we stand. All research carries a position. Most research hides it. We would rather say it plainly: we are looking for evidence that alternatives work, because we believe the mainstream has run out of road and people need proof of concept, not more critique. That is a stated position, not a hidden one — and it is exactly why our method has to be tighter than most, not looser.
There is enough complaining. What is missing is evidence you can act on.
How we work
Qualitative work, held to a standard
Data matters to us. So does the question of who is telling the story, and what kind of story is getting written — and we hold that under the same scrutiny as the findings themselves.
What a study involves. Depth interviews and structured surveys. Repeated field visits, not a single drop-in. Observation of practice as it actually happens. Review of what already exists — curricula, artefacts, children’s work, prior documentation. A case study built over time rather than assembled from a site visit and a phone call.
What we watch for. Not how many people performed a behaviour. We are interested in the questions that linger after the project ends. Whether a child pauses before buying something, or before dropping it in a bin. Whether that pause is becoming less rare. These are slower signals than a headcount and they are harder to report, which is precisely why almost nobody reports them.
We say what we did not find. If we spend months at a site and the pause is not there, the questions are not lingering, nothing has shifted — that is a finding and it goes in. We look actively for the instance that does not fit, not only the one that does. A study that surfaces nothing but confirmation is not credible, and practitioners can tell.
We are honest about the ceiling. One school will not transform a neighbourhood. A handful of children will not turn a city. We are not looking for that and we will not claim it.
Positionality is declared, not buried. Every output states who we are, what we came in believing, and what changed.
This is documentation, not evaluation. We are not scoring anyone, and we are not producing a judgement for a funder to act on. We are working out how a piece of practice is different and what can be learned from it. Where we notice something that could be stronger we say so directly to the partner — and in our experience organisations doing this kind of work want that, because continuous learning is already how they operate.
Terms are set before we start, not after. What gets published, what stays private, what each side can use and how — agreed in writing at the beginning. This is a partnership, not extraction. Our partners are not subjects.
On children. We do not publish images of children. We publish their work, and their first names, with consent. Consent is obtained for everything, from everyone, before anything goes out.
Where the findings go
Research that stays in a PDF has failed
We do not yet know every channel this work will travel through. What we know is what we are not doing: filing it as a report and calling that dissemination.
For now the findings go where our thinking already lives — essays on this site and our monthly report on Substack. A podcast follows later this year.
Beyond that we are still working it out: a community circle around a finding, printed flyers in the neighbourhood it came from, an art installation at a gathering, a piece of theatre. Those spaces do not exist yet, and building the capacity to disseminate that way is part of the work rather than an afterthought to it.
If you have a channel, a stage, a wall or an audience that this belongs in front of, tell us.