Nestling on the banks of the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, a yellow and blue board at the very end of a row of bungalows welcomes visitors to a nondescript building surrounded by trees. This is the Riverside School, spread over an acre, that has been at the heart of an idea that germinated two-and-a-half decades ago and took shape as one of the most innovative educational programmes in the world, touching 73 countries and influencing 25 lakh children and 65,000 teachers.

This idea of creating an innovative educational environment for schoolchildren came to Kiran Bir Sethi in 2001, when she decided to partly convert her family bungalow and adjoining piece of land into a school. “The Riverside School started from my home. I still live here,” says Kiran Sethi, who left her decade-old design firm, that ran from her home and produced iconic designs for theme restaurants in Ahmedabad like Tomato’s and Mirch Masala and jumped into academics though she had no formal training in the area. Having travelled from Bengaluru to study design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in the late 1980s, she decided to stay back, especially after she married billiards ace Geet Sethi, who dominated the cue sport in the 1990s.

It was not a smooth start at the school for Kiran, who was trying to attract parents. “I still remember the first day when I was getting interested parents to come and see that I have a proper building and a school. The earthquake hit on January 26, 2001,” she says recalling the devastating Kutch temblor that killed close to 20,000 persons — including in Ahmedabad — and destroyed more than three lakh buildings.

“People would consider it a bad omen. But the earthquake was meant to shake me up. Life asks you whether you are really up for the job. It challenges you. So, nobody landed up that day. Subsequently, the school opened its doors in June — five months after the earthquake — with 25 children. It had classes from Kindergarten to Grade 1,” she says.

Kiran attributes her foray into education to her son Raag. His experiences in school resulted in a change for both her and the family. “Once my son came home early from school. There was some homework and I told him, ‘Why don’t you try this’ and he replied, the teacher told me this. At six, children are stripped of a voice and are asked to keep quiet. How can children learn when they are asked to remain quiet? I realised that it was a system that rewarded compliance. So, I took him out of the school,” she says, explaining how the idea of starting a school first struck her. “I was not thinking of changing education. It was my son’s life. It was the story of a mother and it was not about being a changemaker,” she adds.

Crafting design with children

Riverside became a laboratory to prototype and refine a design process that blurred the boundaries between school and life. Armed with an education in design, Kiran had ventured into the education sector at a time when people were crafting education systems “for” children and not “with them”. “Design is to work for the user; to work and understand user-solution. Nobody was doing that in education then. Everybody was designing for the kids and not with them. The idea of inviting the user into the design process and knowing how learning happens was a powerful insight. It became our story and now it has been 23 years,” she elaborates.

From this tiny school emerged three initiatives that gave wings to the idea that Kiran once conceived. In 2007, ‘aProCh’, a community-based initiative was born out of the need for making city spaces more accessible to children. Two years later, ‘Design for Change’ was born, which prompted children to solve everyday problems they faced as individuals, or as a family or as part of a community. In 2015, Riverside Learning Centre took shape, which tried to help other schools emulate the principles on which it was set up.

‘aProCh’ was a multifaceted campaign that made children a stakeholder in the city’s operations. This campaign tried to create child friendly cities. It was an initiative to return the element of outdoors in the lives of modern urban children from diverse backgrounds. The campaign was not just limited to Ahmedabad but was also rolled out in Rajkot, Vadodara, Aurangabad, and Kolkata, as also in Bangladesh.

“Similarly, in 2009, I had the opportunity to create a national challenge and we ran it with 30,000 schools in India. Subsequently, we made it into a global, open source for children, partners and teachers anywhere in the world to use the same magic formula to make children believe that can make the world a better place.”

Today, Kiran heads the global movement and says: “We give training and tool kits free to our partners so that they can contextualise and translate it and we are in the 16th year now.”

‘Design for Change’ is the largest movement of change by and for children. It is spearheaded by a global network of passionate community leaders, social entrepreneurs, designers and educators who nurture children. This movement works on a simple revolutionary model. It asks children to feel a problem that bothers them, imagine a solution to make it better, act in a way to bring about a change, and share their story of change to the world.

‘Design for Change’ has thus thousands of stories of change, not just in India but across the world. “A lot of our children are offering design services to clients. For instance, our children have created an audio tour for the reptile section of Kankaria Zoo in Ahmedabad. There is another example where we reimagined the waste management system for the Vastrapur lake (in Ahmedabad), and we did a butterfly garden for Sundravan. So, all of this says that you don’t have to be 18 to bring about change. The idea that the curriculum should build in children the skills, the attitude and the mindset to believe that they can make and design a better world is a fundamental reason education should exist. Not to just get a job or get into college. The children from the schools outperform in academics too. Similarly, one of my girls went to Symbiosis in Pune and said there is no football team for girls and started one. One went to the UK and started a service club,” Kiran explains. Today, it has become the biggest movement of its kind covering 73 countries and over two million children.

At the Riverside Training, more schools are being helped to emulate the Riverside model through training, leadership bootcamps and visits. It has now spread to nine countries: Bhutan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, Jordan and Taiwan, among others.

Dr Madhav Chavan, co-founder and CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, says, “It is heartening to see that educators have welcomed Design for Change with open arms. It is difficult to gauge the impact on children but it has surely instilled joy and creativity in the way a child thinks, works and studies.” Chavan, who is also a board member of Design for Change, felt that unlike educational programmes that have a “push” factor — where aid or some other advantages are offered along with the programme — the Design for Change model has a “pull” factor, where the methodology has been accepted by educators across the world.

Going forward, Kiran is looking to go deeper into India with her model of education by connecting with State government-run schools. Her pilot programme involving 100 Gujarat government schools has seen attendance and participation in these schools rising. The intervention is small and not resource heavy, involving modern-day gadgets used for learning in schools. She is now looking to extend the effort to 1,000 schools in Gujarat and connect with other States.

Last year, the 10-year reunion of Riverside school threw up an interesting statistic. Of the former students in attendance 60 per cent had become entrepreneurs. On a more personal side, Kiran’s son Raag and her daughter Jazz have been following their own passion. “My son is a music producer and operates the Compass Box studios that functions out from the same Riverside school campus. My daughter, who was the first graduate from Riverside, has an NGO — Diabesties Foundation that works with diabetics,” she says. While both the son and daughter duo continue to teach at her school, Geet Sethi has been aiding her as a “strategic advisor” limited to finance and liaison. It wasn’t by design, but her programme changed the course of her life.

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