#06 / new visions in conversation with Shaheen Mistri
Shaheen Mistri is the founder and CEO of Teach for India, with a bold vision of providing excellent education to all children across India.
We first met about ten years ago, in Mumbai, at a Teach for All conference that Shaheen and her team were hosting. It had a tremendous impact on my practice at that time working with new teachers at Iespējamā Misija, especially in ways of bringing awareness to how important it is to put effort into understanding a child as a whole and as part of different communities outside of school to be able to adapt learning to their needs. It was also an important turning point in the journey of exploring leadership as a collective practice that is also at the core of our work as new visions.
LJ: I would like to open this conversation with you introducing yourself and how you see your place in the world.
SM: I am Shaheen, the founder and CEO of Teach for India. My place in the world? That is an interesting, interesting question. I think my place in the world is trying to be a part of unleashing the human potential around me, especially in children. I find all children incredibly precious. And I think, really, all they need is the opportunity to realize that potential. So my own journey essentially has been around that. Just asking - what do children need, especially, children in poverty? And what can I do and mobilize around me to be able to provide them with the opportunities that they need to fully realize that potential?
LJ: That is such a powerful and inspiring mission and I resonate deeply with that, and am curious to know what actually brought you to it? What have been your experiences, moments of obligation that shaped this path?
SM: From a very young age, when I was around 12, I started noticing that the world felt very unequal for different types of children. I grew up with a lot of privilege, living in different countries and having the opportunity to go to really good schools. I saw that many kids around me didn't have those opportunities, so when I was still in school I started doing a lot of volunteering, work with children, and animals, who are my second big love. Then at the age of 18, I really just on an instinct dropped out of Tufts University in the U.S. to move back to India. It was a little bit unusual because I had never lived in India. We left India when I was one year old. And I came back when I was 18 wanting to do something. I didn't quite understand why I did it at the time. Looking back, there were a lot of dots that added up and led to that moment.
I then joined a college in India, and from the first few months of being in college, I spent most of my time not in classes but in the large urban slum community, trying to figure out what kids needed, and trying to see what I wanted to do about it. So at 18 I started my first organization called Akanksha. Akanksha had a mission to bring together college students with children that needed education. So it was just set up as a small college project, with the belief that there were a lot of resources everywhere, and they just needed to be brought together to enable kids to really have an excellent education. It started very small with teaching about 10 children myself, and slowly mobilizing volunteers to join. And I really believed from the start that education needed to be fun and engaging and linked to the holistic development of a child.
Akanksha Foundation was a big milestone, and probably my biggest learning came from being a teacher and working with students.
Then the next big career milestone was 17 years later starting Teach for India. That came from seeing a lot of the children at Akanksha really grow and transform their lives so significantly, that I just kept asking as an Indian in India, looking at the size of the population, how do you do anything at a reasonable enough scale, that it makes a difference? That question led me to realizing more and more that ultimately the quality of education was not going to exceed the quality of people that cared about the issue. And consequently the question of how we could actually build a movement of leaders in our country at all levels of the system, who would work together to shift the system itself, became the quest over the last 12 years.
LJ: Since you mentioned the movement of leaders - what does leadership or leaders mean for you? Taking also the geographical and political context of your work into account.
SM: I think that answer has evolved a lot for me over time. Today...I think one of my mentors says it very beautifully and I resonate a lot with that. He says, "try to be a ladder, not a leader." How can you be that person that holds the ladder while other people are climbing. I think my definition of leadership resonates more and more with that idea. How can you really unleash the potential of the people around you and let them climb the ladder? I have also started to realize that everybody is and isn't a leader at different points in their life and in different situations. There are actually times that demand that you step in front and be a leader, there are times that demand that you stand in the back of the room and gently nudge others, and there are times that demand that you follow others leadership, and being a leader to me today is about knowing when to do any of those things. Another quality of leadership that has become really important to me is the value of love - leading with love in every possible way. Starting with self - how do you learn to accept and love who you are with all your flaws and all the things that you feel good about? How can you really love the people you work with? How do you love the work that you set out to do? Love the world around you so that you look after it?
It feels to me that when you operate with love, you're able to really develop all the other qualities needed because there's such a deep commitment to doing what you need to do.
LJ: I feel deeply touched hearing you speak about love this way. It is also one of the things that we center our work around, reclaiming the broader and deeper understanding of love, and looking at love as transformational force and practice. How do you see the practicing part of love, leadership, and leading from a place of love?
SM: The answer to all of that is sort of the same to me, because the things that I try to practice are all work in progress. Some days you're a little bit ahead, some days you go backwards. Over time, we have defined certain qualities at Teach for India as well. We've just put this down on paper and we call them today the 8Cs (Compassion, Communication, Creativity, Consciousness, Curiosity, Collaboration, Critical thinking, Courage). Under each of the Cs you can imagine the different micro actions and practices that could be there. We have defined some of those, but we also don't want to over-define them because they could mean different things to different people.
The first one is Consciousness, which I think is sort of the bedrock of all of the other Cs. With consciousness we talk about what is your practice of becoming aware. Aware of yourself, aware of the other, aware of the world around you. And that can be actions that range from journaling, to meditation, to having a friend to talk to.
The second one is Courage, which is a practice again. Of not shying away from your fears, but embracing your fears and saying that despite fear I can still take a step and what does it mean to cultivate that. In a classroom it might be getting kids to feel courageous enough to raise their hand even if they're unsure about the answer, for example.
The third one is Compassion, which in some ways I think is the umbrella across all of them. Compassion is for us - how do you really care deeply about another and show that in all of your actions?
The fourth one is Creativity. And creativity for us is really being able to think boldly, having new ideas, embracing change.
The fifth one is Critical thinking. What does it mean to really push how deeply you understand things? Say, if you're working in inequity, how much do you understand about the causes of inequity? How much are you actually probing, asking the right questions.
Very closely linked to that is Curiosity. In today's world, we don't really need to remember anything, but we need to know how to be curious enough to ask the questions to access the information that we need. To ask the question WHY especially.
Then comes Collaboration. How do we really learn the skills to work together? What does collective action mean? And where does ego get in the way?
And the final one is Communication, which for us is a lot around voice, having the courage to speak up, raise your voice, express your opinion, be yourself.
LJ: Thinking about the collective, collectivity, collaboration - I remember this strongly from my first visit at Teach for India. How you encouraged your fellows to go out in the communities, get to know the surroundings of the child, the people in their lives, so you can see the whole of the child better. Can you comment more on the community and collective aspect of your work?
SM: Yeah, actually, the pandemic has opened up such important questions, deepening how we think about community, and especially how we think about parents. We've always known that parents play a really important role. But by design, it was never a very thought through part of our system. There was still always more focus on the teacher and the students, and less on the parents. And now, with kids at home, the parent has become as important in the educational process as the teacher. And it has become a beautiful partnership that has included and brought in much more of the community. We're learning a lot more about community and how we can work together. One of the things that we've done a lot of thinking on, especially in the last four years, has been the idea of students as partners. Which has meant really shifting the way from seeing students as recipients of excellent education to saying - no, actually, students can be our partners in spreading excellent education to other children as well. And that means taking very different actions than we would have taken in the past. It looks like students teaching other students in class, it looks like students sitting on governing bodies at the school level, and really shifting things in their school. It looks like students running change making projects in the community and operating as partners there. It's a very beautiful shift in power. From the adult deciding what you learn, how you learn, and whether you learn to doing that in partnership with students. So we are talking to students about what they think is worth learning, and how they best learn. And we're really sitting around the same table as them when decisions are taken. For instance, we have just brought two children onto our Teach for India Board of Directors as well. That's been very, very, very beautiful, and exciting work. And also a huge relief. Because, you know, at least in the context like India, where we have about 260 million children of school age in the country, being responsible for our vision of "one day, all children will attain an excellent education", it just feels very heavy and daunting and overwhelming. But when you suddenly see these 260 million kids as an asset, and you say: “wait a minute - they are not the problem to be fixed, they're the ones to work with us on this”. It just unleashes all kinds of possibilities, because what a child brings to the conversation is actually very complimentary.
LJ: I find this so powerful. And I cannot help but wonder how the world would look if that would be the approach in not just education, but in all domains - having the very people that any kind of work is for at the decision making table. And what does the road towards that kind of reality look like?
SM: We're trying to answer the same question. What I have realized is, even though the idea intellectually resonates with most people, somehow it just doesn't happen. Because power is a strange thing, right? Whoever has power, wants to keep power. In any system. It's very unusual for people to give up power. And we all have many reasons. But what we have observed to help is actually getting people to experience what it feels like in small ways to share power with students, like bringing groups of educators and children together for two days in equal numbers and giving them the same exact task to do and having them see that "oh, my gosh, I never would have heard that perspective from another adult and I got it from a student or my thinking was challenged by a student". Having people actually experience it seems to be the way to shift it.
LJ: I admire your vision and work, and so many things resonate with our work as new visions. And in it we often talk about connecting, and reconnecting, and building bridges. And through that lens I see so many things that you already talked about as building bridges or reinforcing ones that were not so strong before - like the work with parents, and sharing decision making power with children. Are there other bridges that you see as yet to be built or that you are in the process of building?
SM: Yes, there is one more really big thing that the pandemic shifted for us, and that’s the way we thought about the potential of education going beyond school. I think we always felt very limited. In India, most of the schools run in double shifts, so there are a very small number of instructional hours. And we always used to think that school equals class time, but the pandemic helped us see more clearly that you could expand learning to every waking moment of the child's life. So we now have yoga classes online for students with the teacher. Parents are joining the yoga classes in the morning. We have nutrition sessions in the evenings. We have masterclasses for kids led by other teachers. So the boundaries of who teaches, where do you learn, and what time does learning happen, have all got blurred in really beautiful ways. And that's something that we hope will be an enduring change, even post the pandemic. That shift in learning has built a lot of really beautiful bridges. Yet access is still a huge problem for us, as only 50% of our kids are accessing this kind of learning.
LJ: That sounds like a significant challenge. Could you talk more about that? How do you approach that? And are there other challenges that you are encountering in the current moment?
SM: We've managed to bridge that for some Teach For India kids just by going out and doing fundraising, buying hardware, and getting it to kids. So our numbers are going up. It started with 10% accessing online education, and it's now at 50%. It's rising steadily. But it continues to be a major challenge. And then the challenge of working remotely - the way it affects each and every person is just different. For some of us, we've been lucky to have the support of family and people around us, we have enough food to eat. And for many of us, that just isn't the case. We've had massive challenges of child safety and child protection, we've lost a couple of children to suicide during this time, we've lost a couple of children in accidents during this time. So even just the heightened pressure of living in really low-income communities in very cramped conditions with your family members, which you were able to sort of navigate around before, but are now with 24/7, has been very challenging for our children.
That is honestly the toughest thing, just really, really heartbreaking to see the kind of violence that has gone up in the community, especially where there's been alcohol at home. And fathers have been out of control. Because we have not been able to access our communities physically, it's been very, very hard for teachers, staff members to know what to do and how to really support our children.
LJ: How do you then as a leader and your movement of leaders navigate through this? How do you cultivate hope, when there is heartbreak and feeling of helplessness?
SM: It’s been two things. One is just constantly reminding each other to support and to love each other. There's been a lot of visible love in our Teach for India community in the last six months. Unbelievable things. Somebody needs something or there's a medical emergency, it's posted online, and literally within days, people raise money, support each other, provide moral support. And the second is that we put a lot of emphasis in the last eight months on communication and positive stories of hope. One of our teams started this beautiful newsletter called "Some Good News" that comes out every two weeks. And it's only stories of positive things that are happening in and across our community. And I think it's just been really important for people to be inundated with stories of compassion and goodness and hope and resilience at a time where we're so bombarded by negative news. Also we have opened spaces for people to talk and share their opinions about what is emerging right now. For instance, there has been a lot of discussion about whether we should focus on the learning or the well-being of the children at the moment. Some are saying children are too upset now to be learning, others - if we don’t focus on learning our kids will be in poverty, and then what will their well-being look like for the rest of their lives? Having been able to hold really nonjudgmental conversations and diverse perspectives, has been really powerful.
LJ: I am thinking about your work and commitment and the approach of compassion, love, courage, and hope. If and what is the role of spirituality in your work and approach?
SM: Religion wise, my family belongs to a very small religion called Zoroastrianism. It's originally a faith that started in Iran and then migrated to India. And it rests on three very simple thoughts. Good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. That is what I have grown up in. And while I don't consider myself an overly religious person, I do believe that there is something out there that is larger than me and that is in all of us and unites all of us. So in these terms, organisation-wise, we have put real effort to embrace the fact that diversity is a very beautiful thing to value. And at the same time, we also need to be talking about our common humanity. That ultimately there's no human being that doesn't need to belong or doesn't need to be loved or doesn't need to be heard or listened to.
LJ: The need for belonging resonates a lot, and I am thinking how very often the search for that ends up in belonging to something that sustains itself at the expense of the suffering of others, and what is the healing that needs to take place for that not to keep happening.
SM: One way we have been trying to do this with children and also the adults in our community is showing that to be human is to be imperfect. That at the end of the day all of us are falling all the time, making mistakes. And especially for those of us working with leadership development and learning - mistakes are the stepping stones to learn, and schools are so much about achievement while they should be about learning - being able to notice who I was three years ago and who I am now and how do I progress. That is a big shift we need to work on.
LJ: This has been such a giving conversation, thank you for this. To end, I would like to ask if you would be willing to share a practice of yours that helps you stay grounded in these times?
SM: (laughs) I have been doing so many things in the last eight months that I never did before. Biggest one is that I have started learning art and painting that I have always wanted to do. Really learning the basics - watercolor, charcoal. I have also started exercising regularly for the first time in my life, and that's been so helpful. And then the smaller things - taking 5 minutes during the day in between meetings, walking around. We have a new puppy, so spending some time walking with the puppy. We go out every evening and feed about 45 dogs outside the house, who during the lockdown have really been starving on the roads outside. I am not usually a very routine person, but the pandemic has really helped me see the value of routines, and practices, and rituals.