At the Walking Within sessions, our objective is to make the abstract ideas closer to the lives of children. The guiding question becomes what does this term ‘mean’ for the students? A transmission-based teaching learning practice where we simply state these terms and their meaning is inadequate.

Fraternity is one of the values that is enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution. In the foundation of citizenship module of the program, in order to introduce the students to the idea of fraternity, they were introduced to the spirit of interrelatedness.
Students were divided into mixed groups and asked to discuss amongst themselves how some of these items actually reach them. The items included any clothe, a phone and a meal.

Students got into groups and started examining the stages that are involved in preparation of any cloth. They were not familiar with the stages of processing of cotton and then that thereby became an opportunity to introduce them to the various stages involved in getting cotton from the farm to processing it and then finally converting it into fibre, with each stage involving several people about whose life conditions and social background we are totally unaware of.

Likewise, similar efforts were made to examine how a phone reaches us or else a meal and the various stages that are involved in this process. This idea that we are all connected to each other in special ways is meant for children to get a sense that we are part of a large whole of individuals and we can only do that much on our own. We need to depend upon others for our day to day material requirements. And this fact is relevant irrespective of where we stand in the larger scheme of life. Secondly, the identity of people on whom we are depending is somewhere lost.

We don’t know the social background of the farmer who contributed to the production of grains that I consumed this morning or who all were involved in the value chain of production of cloth.
We partake of the good work that is put in by different individuals and this connection that we share enriches us as a whole.

It was good to see the students coming up and presenting their understanding in front of wider group of students and also some visitors who had come to witness the session in action.
This session then gave us a pathway to discuss the idea of fraternity with the students and how it acts as a glue to keep the society together.