Reflection

What teaching methods, practices, or policies do educators and schools use to support student happiness and well-being in India?

Across diverse school settings (government-sponsored, government, and private), I saw examples of happiness being cultivated through intentional, holistic approaches rooted in student agency, creativity, social-emotional learning (SEL), and culturally responsive pedagogy. 

Many schools we visited provide their students with opportunities to lead. At Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, for example, students lead morning assemblies and take on the role of “Student Ambassadors.” Students at Sanskriti lead extracurricular clubs, and older students have the opportunity to take on mentorship roles in bringing up younger students. At BJV, the girls’ agency is cultivated through an entrepreneurship program that equips them with the necessary skills to market and sell their arts and crafts. 

These leadership opportunities also spill into efforts to incorporate student creativity into the design of their learning spaces. At BJV, student-created alpona floor paintings and artwork beautify the hallways and rooms of the school building. At Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, the Stress Buster room was entirely student-designed and decorated. Movement toward more student voice and creativity is also evident in policy. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, for example, has softened rigid curriculum requirements, now allowing grade 11 and 12 students to study any subject in any stream (if they are Commerce stream students, for example, they can now also elect to take classes in the humanities). 

A strong commitment to holism and social-emotional learning (SEL) was also evident at different scales, from individual schools to state policy. Sarvodaya Vidyalaya’s Heartfulness Lounge encourages meditation, mindfulness, and emotional regulation. At BJV, Headmistress Sharmila is careful to ensure that girls are equally exposed to and trained in the arts (visual, dance, music) in response to a societal focus on STEM education. The small school also prioritizes relationships, with one faculty member noting students get both “studies and love” from th school. 

On a broader policy scale, Delhi’s Happiness and Science of Living curricula encourage mindfulness, gratitude, self-reflection, and emotional awareness. They have been designed with the understanding that happiness and well-being are not “add-ons,” and must be woven into the culture of education. In Kolkata, Dr. Ganguly, President of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, described the state’s current initiative to strengthen SEL as a way “to ground us from abstraction to reality. To understand students’ experiences.” (These lines don’t do justice to the many interesting cultural and political elements of these curricula. I would love to return to dig in deeper). 

Developing culturally responsive, inclusive environments is another element of cultivating happiness in India’s diverse education system. At S. S. Khalsa, their well-stocked multi-lingual library includes a wide variety of genres that are culturally relevant to their student body to support reader engagement. At DIET (the District Institute of Education and Training), teachers in training are using puppetry, folk art, and storytelling as culturally responsive methods that center student learning and challenge a culture of rote memorization. 

Of course, many of these practices and policies are not without contrasts. Public systems often operate with limited resources, and as Dr. Ganguly reminded us, they “don’t lend themselves to exuberance.” Not all students have access to spaces like the Heartfulness Lounge or multilingual libraries. Not all students have access to air-conditioned auditoriums, robust extracurricular programming, or learning centers to support students with special needs. As Drs. Monimalika Day and Poonam Batra emphasized in their reflections, India’s vast diversity—and the lasting impacts of caste and colonization—mean that happiness in education cannot be separated from questions of equity and justice.

What lessons from Indian education and culture can I bring back to my school’s efforts to foster students' happiness, hope, and resilience? 

While my school is relationship-based and values social-emotional learning, I think we have room for growth in this area. I was inspired by many of the social‑emotional routines and structures woven into daily life at the schools we visited. Inspired by these models, I hope we can work with students on developing intentional well‑being zones: perhaps these could take the form of physical space, like the Stress Buster Room or Heartfulness Lounge, or perhaps these could be temporal zones carved with more consistency into class and/or advisory periods for mindfulness, self-reflection, or gratitude. While we are often focused on getting students up and moving (which is important), I believe we could work on balancing this with quiet, centering practices. Additionally, many of the speakers we heard from brought up the importance of not pretending that education in India can be divorced from its historical and social contexts (this is my short paraphrasing). Likewise, I think we need to keep this in mind and specifically address sociopolitical context in an age-appropriate way when teaching SEL (see Simmons’s “Why We Can’t Afford Whitewashing Social-Emotional Learning).