Education begins in relationships
among people, within place, and with the cultural and ecological heritage that shapes how communities learn and live
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About me
I am a social anthropologist working on childhood, education and parent-child relations. My work explores how heritage, place and community knowledge can shape meaningful educational practice.
As a lecturer in Anthropology of Childhood and a consultant for Culturally Responsive Education, I examine how children learn within social and ecological contexts, and how educational spaces can honour the knowledge systems that already sustain communities. I teach within an Early Years Child Development programme and mentor educators, welfare and health workers in developing culturally and community-responsive approaches to learning, supporting them in integrating local knowledge, environment and intergenerational relationships into their practice.
In my academic research, I integrate my ethnographic research among indigenous people in the forested Nilgiri hills in South India (the Kattunayaka people, historically known as hunter-gatherers) with my work in Forest School and Outdoor Education in England and years of experience as an outdoor and environmental education instructor.
Alongside my academic work, I am engaged in public archaeology and heritage practice. I supervise applied projects that seek to strengthen public engagement with archaeological sites and to design reconstructed environments for experiential learning.
I currently serve as Designer of Immersive Heritage Experiences for Prehistoric Underwater Archaeology, where I translate archaeological research into immersive, tangible and participatory multisensory experiences. This involves integrating craft, material culture and performance to create spaces in which visitors can encounter the past in embodied and memorable ways.
Across these contexts, I am interested in how education can strengthen identity, intergenerational connection and community wellbeing, while remaining intellectually rigorous and open to the wider world.
My approach and vision
Across societies and throughout history, children have learned through participation in community life — through shared work, storytelling, craft, ritual, play, and engagement with the natural world. Knowledge has always been embedded in place: in landscapes, in material culture, in intergenerational exchange, and in everyday practices that carry memory, skill and meaning.
Community-based and heritage-based pedagogies recognise this richness. They understand learning as a relational process through which children come to know themselves, their histories, their environments and their responsibilities to others.
When education is grounded in local knowledge, language, craft and ecology, it strengthens identity and belonging. Heritage becomes something lived, practiced and shared, not simply preserved. Learning becomes embodied, experiential and meaningful.
Material culture, landscape and embodied experience play a central role in this process. Learning through making, reconstructing, observing and participating allow knowledge to be felt as well as understood. These approaches cultivate attentiveness, creativity and care — qualities that support both individual growth and community wellbeing.
This perspective does not reject formal education. Rather, it asks how educational spaces, whether schools, museums, community centres or outdoor settings, can recognise and build upon the cultural and ecological worlds that learners already inhabit.
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