Geetha Narayanan

Geetha Narayanan, is the Founder-Director of Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and Mallya Aditi International School,Bangalore. A visiting faculy at Westminster Institute of Education, UK, Geetha has taught on both the Masters and Undergraduate teacher education programmes. She has also been visiting faculty and researcher at the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Project of the MIT Media Lab,USA. An MA (with distinction) in Education from Oxford Brookes University, UK, Geetha completed her PhD in Education from Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Geetha Narayanan has dedicated her life to finding and establishing new models of educational institutions that are creative, synergistic and original in their approach to learning. To know that she worked for many years with Seymour Papert indicates the type of thinking that energizes her work. Geetha talked fervently AbOUT bringing people, technology and learning together within a new conceptual framework.She has been involved in education for the past two decades as an administrator, teacher, researcher,facilitator, teacher educator, and instructional designer.Geetha actively works to empower teachers in India by establishing action research and other participatory initiatives.Her new initiative is called Project Drishya (Vision) and it is a collaboration with NGOs, academics and designers. The project aims to create sustainable livelihoods by empowering and teaching the children of India's growing urban poor communities.

Geetha's primary focus areas are Co-conceptualising and building a networked and open institutional space that merges the contemporary art practices with design thinking and new digital technologies.

For over 25 years she has been Ideating, advocating, conceptualizing and implementing new pedagogical forms ( such as studio labs, the interim semester) that enable and support a more integrated and less balkanized form of art and design instruction; one that is acceptable to both students and teachers in The INDIAN context.Developing and implementing programmes that BLEND design thinking, problem, project or place based learning with new digital technologies Developing business models that sustain a creative community of students and faculty through the conceptualization, development and implementation of various forms of educational entrepreneurship Collaborating with the curator and artist Dr.Clementine de Liss on the Indian part of what Clementine calls her Future Academy Art and Research project. The Future Academy was an artist’s endeavour to create platforms for discussion on the nature and forms of future academies that fostered new artistic practices Commissioning and creating an exhibition of Indian new media art called “TANA BANA” This allowed a wide range of artistic practitioners to collaborate with young undergraduate students in the creation of works of new media arts.

Visioning and creating a Centre of Experimental Media Arts where artists in residence work alongside with students on developing new and emerging forms of artistic practices; practices that intersect traditional disciplinary boundaries such as art and science and developing a Centre for Educational Research,Training and Development that will enable artists and designers to engage proactively with the community through museums, schools and by creating art in public spaces.

Education

  • Ph.D. Sheffield Hallam University,UK
  • M.A. Oxford Brookes University,UK

Research Interests

  • Instructional Design
  • Media Art
  • Digital Technologies
  • Pedagogy
  • Product Design
  • Experimental Media Arts

Quotes

  • ...For educators such as those of us who have convened here at the symposium today, choosing a path to the future involves an understanding of the changing nature of knowledge, of understanding the critical difference between information and wisdom, and of recognizing that experience is perhaps more vital to the creation of true memory than rote learning of pre-selected and prescribed content. For educators such as those of us who have convened here at the symposium today choosing a path to the future involves not just reconfiguring the relationship between teaching and learning, but doing it in a way that creates links, flows and networks that resonate with concerns that come from the daily and everyday life of the local community. This means making conscious choices about learning and technology.
  • ...By allowing young learners to experience directly in the first person involves more than immersion in real or virtual experiences. One has to find ways of creating mindfulness and expanding the self. This, to me, is one of the greatest challenges of our times.
  • ...We are all familiar with and value the process of creating analytic knowing, of generating the Socratic mind and with it the modern scientific temper. We are perhaps less familiar with the value of primary knowing, which is open and not determinate; which has unconditional value rather than conditional usefulness and forms a vital part of knowing oneself.
  • ...Accelerating change produces conditions of freefall and a culture of immediacy. This culture of immediacy in turn fosters and values fast knowledge which in turn runs counter to the development of both the self and the mind.
  • ...Building institutions has taken up all my time. In all of the above I have been the key player in terms of idea creation, value creation and development of working business models to sustain the innovations.

References

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