Diyalo has developed a holistic model of primary education that vertically integrates a contemporary pedagogy adapted specifically for Nepal within a scalable, low-cost, earthquake-resilient school infrastructure to provide free education to Nepal’s 23M rural population. Our model was designed complimentary to our Agriculture and TECH (Technology, Energy & Computer Hardware) programs to transform education in Nepal.
A Pedagogy Designed by Nepalis, for Nepalis: Aditi Adhikari, Diyalo’s Education Director, is a native Nepali. She holds a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in International Education Policy from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Over the past eight months, Adhikari has worked with experts in the field to develop a transformational pedagogy unlike any that exists in Nepal.
Currently, the majority of pedagogy is adapted from India’s system, which, in turn, is based on 19th century British colonial education. Our approach—place-based learning—provides students with an education that is relevant to their current lives and the futures they are likely to live. Student-driven learning and hands-on interdisciplinary inquiry allow students to learn about the world through active exploration.
Experiential learning has been scientifically proven to engage multiple senses, build social-emotional skills, create a context for memorization, expand critical thinking ability, and have greater relevance to real-world applications. Students are active 80% of the time as they collaborate with others, learn from their peers and share their experiences, upending traditional 20:80 student-to-teacher activity ratios.
At the same time, Diyalo innovates by highly valuing its teachers, which actively counters social norms surrounding teaching as a low-status job. Diyalo teachers receive fair wages, promoting their centrality to our model and creating an example for the rest of the country. Finally, an enriched environment is central to learning outcomes. Diyalo equips its schools with a library, art supplies, toys, basic computers, and internet.
Earthquake Risk Reduction and Resilience - Intelligent Architecture for Safer Primary Schools in Nepal: Ethan Levine, the architect of Diyalo’s schools, holds a Masters of Architecture (M.Arch.) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Ethan’s thesis at Harvard explored how to design Diyalo’s schools in conjunction with Diyalo pedagogy while accounting for disaster risk, resource constraints, and local materials. The outcome is a massively deployable, affordable, and resilient primary school architectural design featuring a novel, but simple, hexagonal classroom.
Breaking away from British-colonial design paradigms, Diyalo classrooms shed existing hierarchies and preconceptions about student-teacher relationships to promote interaction in non-traditional ways. Traditional designs enforce a teacher-as-authoritarian education model while excluding possibilities for other pedagogical approaches. Our new designs create non-hierarchical geometries that can bend and conform to local landscapes, liberating both interior space and exterior form to create space for improvisation.
Our new classroom is more efficient. By moving from a rectangle to a hexagon, the new classroom is more spatially efficient, safer, more cost efficient, and can deliver better learning outcomes. Compared to a rectangle, the hexagon creates 16% more classroom area (with equal perimeter), 50% more shear wall length (with equal perimeter), and 7.6% fewer wall materials (with equal area).
Further, our architecture methodology is expansive. Though Nepal needs 250K classrooms, communities should also receive something special and unique. Our methodology can produce 2.7M unique classrooms, which can combine into schools smaller than three rooms apiece and grow to any size necessary. The 2015 earthquake fully or partially destroyed more than 50K classrooms, according to the DOE. According to Nepal’s Ministry of Education’s 2016 Consolidated Report on Education, one in three schools needs to be built due to chronic shortage, and one in three existing classrooms must be rebuilt due to earthquake damage.
The Diyalo Foundation sees an opportunity to provide schools that can model best practices for disaster resilience for the approximately 12K schools that must be built (and 12K more that must be rebuilt) nationwide. Our design philosophy is that building integrity is deeply linked to human integrity; communities will be happier and healthier with safe buildings that are beautifully and intelligently designed. The path out of poverty is paved with education, and schools are the roads to resilience.
Join our movement now at DiyaloFoundation.com
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