Our Neighborhood

Hear Akshay Nagarajan, who is currently a cognitive science doctoral student at the University of California San Diego. He is a globally celebrated researcher and has established several maker-spaces in schools across India. Starting off as a tech-skeptic, he went on to develop India’s first haptic simulator to virtually teach plumbing and carpentry skills to thousands of rural people in India. He also fascinates us with his passion for rescuing wild animals and talks about his anthropological experiences while driving a taxi-cab on the roads of Mumbai.

Hear Payal Agarwal speak about the world famous Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum adopted by Delhi’s Public School system. What does it take to institutionalize a student-centric curriculum reform in a state’s education? She summarises her 13 years experience of working in Public Edu space, primarily with school transformation programs across India. As a bonus, she also discloses about her plan to open play-based micro schools for kids.

Listen to Tushar Bansal, founder of Avtaar Education and Businessworld Edtech 40 under 40 as he takes us on his journey of working at two large, extremely successful education companies - Simplilearn and Pearson. How did his choices influence the decisions he made on his journey from India to Georgia Tech and back. His quest for understanding the intersection of his profession, his passion, his vocation and his mission has led him to build Avtaar and help children everywhere find their Ikigai. We dive deep into his thoughts on being a first-time entrepreneur and understanding the ethics of building an impactful educational organisation.

Why is it important for Nations to have structured validation for professions like Early Childhood Educators or Caregivers? Can accountable Policymaking for Early Childhood Development avoid the perpetuation of Systemic Inequalities? Learn from Zina Noel, who is a fierce proponent of Social Justice, to build a better civil society for the future.

Hear Azeez Gupta, Co-founder of ‘Rocket Learning’ unfold the unique B2G2C model of his ed-tech non-profit impacting 100,000 children annually. How this alum of IIT Delhi & HBS culminated his learnings from McKinsey & Pratham into launching an ed-tech org leveraging tech, communities & incentives to build a system where the youngest kids of India learn.

Listen to Franco Mosso, the Co-founder & CEO of Teach For Peru on what is the single most important factor for Systems Change in Education. Let us understand how the collective leadership & coalition approach helped systemize 21st Century skills in a country with 52 languages & ~25% school population.

How do you replicate a complex school environment on WhatsApp? Hear Prerna Kalra speak about designing Learning and Teaching experiences for public schools in Delhi; when the entire country’s schools were shut down indefinitely. How her work at Simple Education Foundation is not simple at all, because learning should never stop.

Get a 101 on starting a school in India from Jayant Gauri, a serial entrepreneur who is also a first-generation vintage car collector. What are the challenges of Adaptive School Leadership and how he managed to not lay- off even a single teacher while transitioning his schools to a remote setting, amidst reactionary government policies.

What’s the need for evidence-based policymaking when everyone seems to know the recipe for changing the Indian education system? How to evaluate the impact of large- scale government projects? Listen to Murali Mallikarjunan, an engineer turned policy professional who has taught 4th graders, built curriculum, and traveled across India to understand alternate schooling models.

Around 50% of students attend private schools in India. The majority of these are Affordable Private Schools that face the brunt of crude policies. Join this fascinating conversation with Harvard Alumna, Aditi Nangia who cares about systems-level change in Education. She covers rarely talked about topics like the Teacher labor market, Power of the State, and Ethics of advocacy in Education.

From dropping out in high school to being an assessment designer at MIT and now leadership and online- pedagogy coach for business school professors; Aditi Parekh has had it all. Tune into this exciting conversation to peek into the complex world of learning assessments and what it meant to design a self- learning path for a 16-year-old girl from Conoor.