Using Storytelling with a Vulnerable Tribal Community
Veda Seshan, Gopika Varma and I designed this project. Jahnvi Vegad helped us with the on-field research.
This intervention was designed for the Paniya Community who are a Particularly Vulnerable Tribe. This tribe faces high levels of deprivation in socioeconomic, political and physical aspects. They face many problems as a result of hundreds of years of oppressive servitude due to caste hierarchies and systems. One of the issues that they face is alcoholism as an addiction owing to many historical factors. This project is an attempt to solve this issue through aspirational education. After describing my design, I will reflect on the reasons why it is not a good solution(in hindsight).
This design came as a result of the research that is described in this two-part series that I published. In Part 1: How I was introduced to the Struggles of Tribal Communities in Kerala talks about some facts and figures and presents a general idea about the socio-economic, physical and political conditions of the Paniya Tribe In Part 2: How to Destroy an Entire Community in Three Steps, I go into a little more detail and place them historically and give a little background to what caused the oppressive conditions they live in today
While beginning the design of this intervention, we were still very ignorant and were only scratching the surface of the issues that plague the community today.
This was the output of a 5-week course in Wayanad in Kerala, India in the aftermath of the floods of 2018. After we landed in Wayanad, one of our facilitators on ground- Sumesh Sir had an interesting research area for us to explore. He wanted to build a biodiversity park in the school that he was taught in. We were unsure about how successful we could be at designing a park, but as Sir suggested we looked at the children that came to the school and we realised that most of them came from tribal communities. (BTW, big shoutout to Sumesh Sir, for patiently taking the time to listen to us and give us his valued feedback on everything.)
At this point, we were studying the Paniyan tribe and we went to the school to see if we could gain some insights by talking to the teachers there. They told us how different tribes had different rates of progress and how there were many government initiatives to help the children, but still some children were unable to take advantage of it.
They informed us about the problems that many tribal children faced. How they got restless in class, stayed absent, witnessing alcoholism at home and often had to eat just one or two meals in a day. On the other hand, they highlighted the excitement the kids have when they want to organise, make, play, sing or dance. They ran their own gardens in school, cleaned the place up after the midday meal and participated enthusiastically in cultural meets. After the school is over and the kids wait for the jeep to come, they run around the entire place playing variations of games that I have played as a child.
After a week in Wayanad, we went back to Bangalore and our learnings lay heavily on our mind. (Hindsight:)However, we had seen only a small part of the problem and assumed it to be the whole thing.
We came to the implicit conclusion that dealing with Alcoholism would be the best way forward in this case.
So we proposed this question,
How do we talk about Alcoholism without talking about Alcoholism to the children?
and arrived at this answer:
By teaching them to aspire
(hindsight: again problematic because of reasons- down below)
Have a glance at our project here.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/76085663/Educational-Tool-to-build-Aspiration
This only highlights what I did as part of the team-the story concept and the story boarding. We designed the shape of the template, the shape of the story panels and the visual style and elements together. Gopika and Veda then, put together their knowledge of stitching to make the idea come to life (I am utterly unskilled there)
Now that you have seen the project and know the background behind it, let me show you why I see it as an inadequate solution now(in hindsight).
After we finished our 5-week course ‘Landscapes in Transition’ (for which we developed this design), I took the same problem-setting forward into my two-week Self Directed Inquiry, for which I developed some other designs, which I will publish soon. During that time, I researched more into the lives of the Paniyas and my problem space kept expanding. It finally ended up looking like this.
As you can see in the top right part of the chart, the problem we identified was a small part of many bigger problems. And even this, map is quite inadequate and doesn’t involve the many micro-aggressions that people from these communities must face as well. I, recently stumbled onto this paper, which kind of explains why education suffers in tribal communities. Once those factors are considered, alcoholism becomes almost beside the point. The paper describes children not turning up to school and not being involved in education as this system
In addition, to this we soon understood that the social mobility of the Paniyan community is very low. Since, they are the landless marginalized, they don’t get to move into other occupations as readily as those with even a little land. This way the options available to the Paniyan child are far too restricted. I am sure, as we study more, the complexities will keep rising. There are too many root causes to deal with before we consider developing aspirations as an educational framework.
Version 2.0 of this design would be to see how an education would use care, nourishment and aspirations as its central principles. For this intervention to work, there must be many other interventions in place. To understand in what kind of future such a solution might work and then understanding the different initiatives that need to be taken in the STEEPL- SocialTechEnvironEconPoliticsLegal- fields is of utmost importance. It is only by looking at the future and systematically designing for change that we can change such complex systems.
