School of Doing

I think I have a better understanding! It is the same issues that happened in many where else where by rural cities are neglected and many young adults were allured to cities to pursue so called ‘better life’. 

But is not all that bad, because of these, we have more people trying to do something about this.

In Vietnam, our co-founder Mr Tay Kheng Soon is designing the master tourism plan for province. In Vietnam, their local craft skills are fantastic but dying trade. So how he is doing it is to design tourism site and contracting all the local craftsman to contribute to the cultural design. With that, it creates a livelihood, preservation of skills and later will be a town to promote such craftskills. 

Similarly in Malaysia, Kampung Temasek, I work closely with the local folks in finding ways for them to ‘express’ themselves. After working with them for quite sometime, we discovered many of them have interesting skills. Our site supervisor’s wife can do many kinds of weaving with natural materials like bamboo stripes and coconut leafs. One of our worker start to express their interest in rearing goats because he is so good at it. We are also doing mushroom farming.

These are the projects that going on that if you are keen, we have experts that can provide advice:

1. Mushroom farming
2. Goat farming
3. Fish farming
4. Bamboo Weaving (we also worked with Singapore design students who were passionate in cultural craft skills participate in designing products to sell in cities at premium)
5. Bee farming for honey
6. Bamboo bicycles
7. Square foot gardening

1. Courage
2. Curiosity
3. Creativity
4. Compassion
5. Collaboration

Courage is the necessary personality trait that can be nurtured through successfully taking small risks and moving on to take larger ones. with courage comes curiosity. this takes the form of asking more and more difficult and complex questions, to want to know why things are the way they are and finally to inquire into intangible and unseen things. creativity is the product of courage combined with curiosity. creativity is not a process, it cannot be taught, it is produced by being courageous and intensely curious with a big dose of competence. compassion is a natural tendency since the brain is hard-wired to emulate through empathy but because of socialisation calculation for selfish personal benefit has overtaken it. it therefore needs to be rekindled…awakened. compassion often needs creativity to know how to respond appropriately. knowledge is important and that comes from curiosity and from courage to inquire beyond the comfort zones. collaboration is the summation of all the preceding. successful collaboration comes from a confident ego that does not need to assert itself and is therefore inclusive and nurturing and co-creating. i feel that there is a need for competence…the 6th “C” there is need to acquire competence as it is an important source of confidence and important in creating something. there is a balance to be attained between free and structured inquiry and drilling. repetitive doing and applying is necessary to gain competence. Malcome Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule!

Thanks for your posts!! Great space to start working, collaborating and registering our process. I will tell you a bit about La Juanita. It is a 2 acres farm, located one hour away from Bogota, the capital city of Colombia. We started living here with my brother around one year ago. And slowly began organic planting, fixing the house, and establishing relationships with the rural people around us.

Both my brother and me have university degrees, in arts and anthropology, but little knowledge of agriculture systems, which we are learning and experimenting right now. The local people around here have little formal education, and not much agriculture experience, as much of the land has been neglected for long time. Most of the local young people, as the land is so near the city, have gone away to look for a supposedly better future, finding not much more than poverty and labor exploitation at the city.

We want to reverse the ongoing tendency of young people leaving their beautiful land. And we started this project. It wants to host people interested in sharing and building a better tomorrow. At the present moment we offer ecotourism activities and lodging, and sell home made granola to the city, those are the income generators meanwhile. We have a very nice construction space, which formerly was going to be destined to be stables, which can be conditioned for implementing a school of doing.

At the present moment we have two projects going on with the communities. The first one is an itinerary cinema, in which we go to rural adjacent areas and host movie screenings, showing inspiring films about rural processes, and other materials which generate discussions which can enrich rural dynamics. The other project is addressed to children from this rural area, we meet with them twice a month and do many kind of workshops which incentive awareness processes, through yoga, art, music, cooking, dance. People from the city come and share their knowledge with the children, which have no access to this kind of activities.

Joining all this processes, we want to start to work on the sustainability of the farm, and try to make it an irradiation focus from where rural processes start in this region. We want to forge sustainable edible gardens, and incorporate the knowledge which makes them possible into workshops to the adjacent population. That is why we want to start first with the composting workshop, and from there on start to plan regular practice workshops which generate agricultural processes within the community of this area.

We really want to work with you guys to be able, through sharing your experience at the School of Doing, to be able to implement your model, or a similar model which can work here in Colombia, thanks for your support!!

Hey guys, to get started, let me share with you some history of Kampung Temasek, how it has been evolving and its philosophy. Kampung Temasek now used to describe the camp site in Malaysia, while School of Doing Limited is a new company that has undertaken the concept of doing and its philosophical position. Some of the things we do might only apply to the context of our environment, others remained applicable such as the need for every village to move towards pragmatic way of sustainability and an educational village. So.. let me do my first sharing on subsequent post.

Kampung Temasek was initially established specifically to address learning needs of students, parents and teachers in a natural environment using the outdoors as a learning and teaching resource. Kampung temasek is situated in Ulu Tiram town, 1/2 hour from Johor Bahru Malaysia on 10 acres of land within a multicultural kampong (village) as its immediate neighbourhood. The core curriculum will consist of a program built around experiential encounter with nature, adventure, interaction with the local community and sustainable eco-technology. Overlaying this program are special programs designed to augment our school curriculum, bringing these alive through imaginative use of the natural environment to actualise the earning of maths, physics, geography, social studies, chemistry, biology etc. The aim is to constantly and creatively innovate relevant and engaging learning programs. An active teacher and parent engagement in developing these programs is key in constantly producing enthalling curricular. In this regard, KT will use information technologies establish an online participative community built up around all its activities, open and transparent. KT is a non-profit organisation dedicated to experiential learning supported through grants from foundations and well-wishers. All its capital costs are regarded as sunk costs and not subject to cost recovery. Only recurrent costs, maintenance and staff costs are recovered. This is to ensure affordability and sustainability. The aim is to regionalise the KT idea in the long term so that singapore students, parents and teachers will have a broad exposure to many different environments and learning situations.

p.s: Now KT is used to describe the campsite and some of the philosophy and concepts are undertaken by School of Doing.

Question: How is the educational level and what are the sustainable practices exists in Lajuanita today?

This is the beginning of some great collaboration.