What do you keep in mind most about your college? Is it the lecture rooms or the open areas, the amphitheatres the place you had your annual days or the basketball courts/soccer fields/grounds the place you spent hours enjoying with your pals? In a way, what we be taught outdoors sticks with us greater than what we do in lecture rooms.
Rabindranath Tagore established the Santiniketan in 1901, an academic establishment the place college students may be taught within the lap of nature. Actually, instructing was performed within the historical Indian Gurukul system within the open underneath the bushes.
The Northstar Faculty in Rajkot is an try to return to our roots, the place studying will not be confined inside 4 partitions. Impressed by the gurus in historical India and wanting to copy that form of open studying the place college students are linked to nature in each area, Mohit Patel began this college in 2016. Whereas learning at Harvard, the 38-year-old realised that the best way colleges are run as we speak is in direct battle with the best way youngsters be taught.
Set throughout a sprawling 15-acre campus, the varsity has extra outside areas than indoor and lays nice emphasis on local weather and sustainability, that includes built-in water administration methods, an power environment friendly structure permitting nature mild and cooling, and use of pure and native supplies.
Out of the 15 acres, the tutorial blocks solely make up 2 acres. The remaining 13 acres are play areas, cricket fields, swimming swimming pools, athletic tracks, fruit orchards and extra.
Together with designing the curriculum, equal significance was given to the structure, to make sure that Mohit’s imaginative and prescient was dropped at life. It was performed so with architects Shanmugam associates, who ensured that the varsity was ethereal, with a variety of open areas and offered a snug atmosphere for college students.
Learning within the lap of nature
The concept for this college truly started as a category venture in 2012, when Mohit was pursuing a Masters in Training at Harvard College. The venture was on designing a faculty. Mohit checked out it from two views, one being curriculum and the opposite, area design.
“What I considered once I labored on the venture was, how will we design studying experiences? One other essential query I had was how do you match these experiences into an area design? I conceived the venture for a faculty in India and never America,” Mohit tells The Higher India.
After returning to India, he began conceptualising and occupied with how he may convert what was on paper into actuality. After engaged on the curriculum, Mohit joined fingers with the group at Shanmugam associates who labored on the area and constructing design.
Mohit explains that he was clear that the varsity ought to look “nothing like a faculty we’ve been used to taking a look at”. He wished children to spend extra time outdoors the classroom than contained in the classroom.
With this pitch in thoughts, Santosh Shanmugam and Raja Krishnan D, principal architects on the structure agency, began planning the varsity. They determined to return to the roots and design an area the place college students can be taught from nature.
“We began working with the view that while you enter this college, it’s best to get a sense that you just’re linked to nature and open in each classroom and area. In a big area like this, we first began with a small portion, a classroom after which multiplied it throughout the campus. We designed every classroom with gardens on both aspect, to have good cross air flow. Since Rajkot will get very popular, we included small jali screens to chill the air or block the mud,” provides Santosh.
The architects have interspersed panorama in each area potential. You might be welcomed by
Gulmohar bushes on the entrance which create a cover. There’s a central courtyard which is impressed by the stepped wells of Gujarat which serves an area for lessons, performances, and has greenery included by means of creepers and vines. Every classroom has its personal personal backyard and an open courtyard, the place lessons too could be carried out, a la Santiniketan.
By having gardens on both sides, a microclimate is created in every classroom. This retains the temperature decrease than the surface atmosphere. The home windows within the lecture rooms immediately speak in confidence to the backyard.
The steps within the courtyard double up as a stage or place for rehearsals throughout occasions. The open corridors additionally include ample seating for college students to lounge and work together with academics.
The architects have used native, indigenous supplies like Kota stones and native limestones. Their mission was clear: Each area a baby is in should be one with nature, be it a classroom, employees room, the bathrooms, courtyard or the play areas. They’ve inexperienced, vegetated screens on the primary ground outdoors lecture rooms to offer a backyard feeling, and likewise scale back mud.
Each window or door opens out right into a inexperienced area or backyard. The college additionally has a horticulture program that teaches college students the method of rising wildlife, and is aimed to foster a deep-rooted reference to earth and local weather. The fruit orchards provide a hands-on expertise for the scholars with the atmosphere.
A sustainable mannequin for waste administration
The college additionally has a waste administration system for water, meals, and sewage. All of the kitchen waste and meals waste is reused as manure inside the campus. All of the water can be recycled and there’s a Sewage Therapy Plant (STP) within the college. Rainwater can be harvested and used for recharging the borewells.
“The location topography slopes in direction of culvert and stream. So the rainwater is of course directed in direction of the borewell for groundwater recharge which finally goes to the Aji river. We’ve performed this by retaining the topsoil of the campus loamy to supply for satisfactory rainwater drainage. We’re additionally constructing a rainwater assortment and percolation tank,” provides Mohit.
The architects add that they designed the campus in a method the place utilization of electrical energy is diminished. Raja explains that you just don’t want a lot lighting throughout daytime and air-con is used solely in summers. Their design ensures that the varsity is power environment friendly.
“We all the time really feel that structure ought to handle the local weather by design and planning quite than by any mechanical tools. That’s how the constructing ages effectively, feels effectively, feels snug. In a conventional college, you may have corridors and lecture rooms on all sides. Our lessons are designed in modules, so there’s no class which touches one another. A classroom will get mild from each side and is of course lit. Our corridors by no means have to be lit up as a result of there’s a lot pure mild and since it’s open,” says Raja.
Northstar has 500+ college students and 80 academics. Every class has a pupil energy of 20-25, maximising the realm and facilities out there for every pupil.
Mohit’s thought is for youngsters to get pleasure from college. All the things else is secondary, he says. The college doesn’t have exams until Class 10, and college students aren’t pressured into working the rat race of IITs, medical entrance teaching from Class 8 itself. A college, he says, shouldn’t be regarded as a method to achieve admission to a reputed school, it must be a whole expertise of its personal.
“College students must be snug and completely satisfied in school. So long as children are feeling completely satisfied being in class, every little thing else goes to comply with. Studying is a byproduct of being curious, of being completely satisfied, being in good environment. That comes from the academics, our relationship with our friends, the constructing, the atmosphere; with every little thing. We would like college students to be taught, turn into good human beings, imbibe vital pondering. Education in itself is an expertise, not a method to do one thing else,” says Mohit.
The purpose and imaginative and prescient of the varsity is to assist college students ‘discover their true north’.
Raja says that he used to hate going to high school as he was burdened with homework and exams. “Now, I actually need to return to high school and do my education at Northstar,” he laughs.
Edited by Padmashree Pande
