A Eureka Moment at the U. of Hyderabad

It's the end of a long day in Hyderabad. We spent most of it at the University of Hyderabad attending lectures from professors there. We took in three fascinating presentations from three excellent speakers, first on the economics of India, next on the women's movement, and finally on the environmental movement. I had to decide between listening to comprehend, and taking notes on the first lecture as I couldn't readily follow the vocabulary, but the economics geeks in our group were beside themselves. I greatly enjoyed the second lecture and took lots of notes, but most of the content will not be directly useful for my curriculum project. Then Professor Sheila Prasad arrived to speak--old school style with notes on an overhead projector--on the environmental issues related to India's development and I could not stop myself from asking questions that derailed her from her planned lecture. Actually, she was endearingly easy to distract, and I kept  looking at the clock because I knew right away that she was going to be the best source yet for the subject I had originally wanted to use for my curriculum project and I didn't want to miss anything she had to offer. Also, I had a very specific question I wanted to ask. She spoke about styles of environmental activists in India, and how the conservation issue is framed. She talked about the competing imperatives of development and conservation, and the necessity of considering the traditional people living in the environment. I asked her for specific examples of how that tension played out and then turned on my voice recorder and listened attentively with my pen down. For fifteen minutes she talked about the history of tribal groups in the forests being dispossed by the British and then again by newly independent Indian state. She talked of the tension between preserving the tiger, or helping the tribal people who had always lived in the same ecosystem with it, about the fishing community or the turtle. She explained that people and animals which had coexisted in the past were now being squeezed into smaller areas of forest and driven into direct competition by industrial exploitation of mineral and other resources. When she concluded sadly by saying that she didn't know the answer, and didn't think anyone did, I was probably grinning like a lunatic. It's not that I am gleeful about the problem. It's that she had just laid out the conceptual framework I needed for my problem based learning unit and pointed me toward exactly what I need to research next. Ok, maybe I am gleeful about the problem, but only because now I have a real-world problem for my students to tackle. And it's a problem that will engage them and challenge their assumptions. For an American fourth grader, particularly a very bright one, the issue is black and white: save the tiger, save the turtle, stop the mining. But with the unit I plan to develop they will have to try to unravel the gordian knot formed by the strands of environmental conservation, traditional human human interaction with an ecosystem, and economic development. I love it.