Creating Spaces by Facilitating Reflections

Highlights from the Samuhik Pahal Journey

There is often an unfortunate and artificial divide between spaces for doing and spaces for learning and reflection. In the context of the social sector, this generally maps on to the CSO vs University divide. However, this need not be the case. Civil society organizations working on the ground, for instance, are often well positioned for knowledge creation. They are also often well placed for testing the validity of knowledge coming from other sources on the anvil of practice.

‘Samuhik Pahal’ started with this simple premise – to co-create a space for learning and reflection that is built by the CSOs, belongs to them and is meant for them – to meet their needs of sharing and learning.

We believe that the process of writing creates a space, between one’s work and one’s understanding of it. This space is critical to hone the abilities of reflection and critical praxis. Things become clearer as one writes and writing becomes a process of learning. This is a critical aspect of knowledge creation in any domain.

We started this journey in the middle of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with the goal of assisting the work being done by our partners grappling with the crisis, by being a space in which reflections can be voiced, resources can be pooled and insights can be shared.

Now we are into the third volume of Samuhik Pahal. To a large extent, the contributors for the various issues (26 and counting) have been from our partner organizations. The process of iterations between various drafts revolving around reviews, feedback and conversations have helped us deepen our engagement in these relationships.

A significant aspect of this process has been the process of guest editing of specific issues involving our partners. For instance, the nature education issue of Samuhik Pahal was guest edited by Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) and ArtSparks guest edited the issue on art education.

In Samuhik Pahal, we have also regularly shared resources. These include listicles of books and TLMs, and technical tools that can help us all deepen our practice in the education domain. These include resources developed by partners, as well as by other organizations across the globe.

Samuhik Pahal, and the voices it tries to mobilize, similarly, have not been limited to Wipro’s education partners network only. We have consciously invited voices from outside the network, and from beyond the CSO space from academia as well. We endeavour to engage with other communities and groups and create conduits of sharing across selfcreated silos.

This need and desire to go beyond silos is reflected in the choice of our themes as well. As a reader of the journal, you might be aware that each of our issues focuses on a specific theme. Sometimes this is a sub-domain of the field of education, e.g., social science education or mathematics education.

However, we have also picked up crosscutting themes such as inclusion, capacity building and impact assessment. A third kind of foci has been the ways in which we intervene in the sector; a good example of this is the issue that focused on learning centres as a method of intervention in education. We hope that by looking at such cross-sectional themes and tools of intervention critically, we develop an integrated perspective on issues of education that often dovetail into broader societal concerns.

The past three years have been a learning journey for all of us here in the Samuhik Pahal team. In this issue of the periodical we share with you articles selected from the two previous volumes that we believe will help us all in reflecting on our practice and renew our faith in why we are in this together.

The diversity of the themes and of the contributors that we have included in this issue of the periodical is representative, hopefully, of the collective work that we do. ‘Samuhik Pahal’ is after all, a journal of our collective action.