Bio

I grew up in Delhi, India. After graduating from a residential school in the Himalayas, Woodstock School, in 1993, I headed to the USA for college.  In 1997, I completed a BS in Social Studies Secondary Education before taking a brief detour for some graduate work in African History at Emory University in Atlanta.

I became a full-time high school history teacher at private schools in the Atlanta area for nine years, spending eight of those years at Whitefield Academy, a school just getting started. I had been attracted by its stated vision of becoming one of the first truly racially integrated private schools in Atlanta. The experience of helping to build that school from empty farm fields confirmed my love of bringing new systems and frameworks into being!  I served as the first Head of History there for five years, gaining invaluable experience with curriculum development and team leadership.

In 2008, I returned to my alma mater  to teach history. Soon after, in 2010, I accepted a position as Woodstock's Academic Dean, then doubling as the Deputy Head from 2012. The school was going through some massive changes and occupying this role gave me the opportunity to apply a lot of what I had been reading about school communities, learning, and change. The neverending work on curriculum development took on a much wider and deeper role. I developed an abiding interest in the cultivation of and care for organizational culture. More importantly, the position allowed me to work collaboratively on a number of levels to embed a philosophy of education deeply into all parts of the school, even as I refined my own approach.

I grew increasingly convinced that the current paradigm of primary and secondary education needs fundamentally to be shifted if our children are to become mature, resilient, and well-equipped adults who live whole, meaningful lives around the world.

In 2016, I left the administration role for a study sabbatical at Schumacher College in Devon. I was interested in design thinking, as well as systems thinking, and found the perfect course for me in Schumacher's MA program in Ecological Design Thinking. The inspiration from the natural world intrigued me. given how divorced most student experience is from nature, even as we face a climate crisis. I wanted to figure out how it might be possible to spark a widespread paradigm shift, given the profound entrenchment of current models of learning and teaching.  From visiting progressive and innovative schools around the world, I knew that people in all sorts of corners are trying new methods and attempting to set new directions in schools. I wanted to see if a degree of coherence across schools and a shared language of educational change might be possible.

L to R:
Ana (Brazil), Michael (UK), Tara (Kenya), and Amy (USA)
Global collaboration! 

I returned from Schumacher full of new ideas and skills.  In October, 2016, with help from three wonderful volunteers, the Centre for Imagination opened at Woodstock School as a space to experiment with new paths forward.  This blog has emerged to capture and tell the story. As a start up with an unconventional name, the essence and excitement of life and learning at the Centre for Imagination are best captured in anecdotes about all that happens, interspersed with more philosophical musings on everything from design thinking to new trends in leadership or learning.





Enjoy! And please do feel free to contact me if I can be of any help to you or if you have ideas that may enrich the work we're trying to do!