For her reflective essay on her experience teaching in an ashram with DukeEngage India in Bengaluru, Diya Patel T’26 won the Ethics and Partnership category in the 2024 DukeEngage Reflection Challenge.
Judges commended Patel’s entry for capturing the essence of ethical engagement.
On our first day at Suvarnamukhi Ashram in Bengaluru, India, the Duke students and I were eager to mentor students and collaborate with teachers in the classrooms. We started by pairing off to observe how classes typically run.
Connor and I sat in on an English class. The English teacher began by instructing students to open their workbooks and to read aloud from an English passage. One by one, students stood up and meticulously pronounced the words. This continued until one student struggled with the word, “environment.” Immediately, the teacher reprimanded the student, who nodded quickly and then sat back down.
As the class continued, this happened repeatedly—a student would make a mistake, and the teacher grew increasingly frustrated. Eventually, the teacher switched to lecturing the material and answering his own questions. Throughout the class, not a single student raised his hand to ask a question.
By the end of the period, it was clear this was a learning style neither Connor nor I had encountered before. We had grown up with exploratory, interactive, and observation-based learning environments. Here, students focused on memorizing facts, perfecting pronunciations, and refrained from asking their teachers questions. We noticed that while the ashram students were skilled in memorization and attention to detail, they struggled in other areas such as comprehension and critical thinking.
When it was time for us to step in and help teach, we felt unsure about where to start. In particular, we questioned whether it was right to change the way the students were being taught. Was one educational approach better than the other? How do we work alongside teachers who have different teaching and learning philosophies?
Our first English activity forced us to face these questions head-on. Our task was to prepare the students to present a play in English. Connor and I selected “The Tortoise and the Hare” and created an ESL script for the students. In class, we had them read the story aloud a few times and then asked some questions.
“Who is in the race?” I asked.
Leo, a 7th-grader, raised his hand.
“The rabbit and the turtle are in the race,” he recited from the script.
“Correct, now who wins the race?” Connor prompted. This question was trickier as the answer was not stated directly in the text.
Arjun, another student, looked down at his paper and answered, “The turtle crosses the finish line before the rabbit can catch up, winning the race.”
“Yes! Now what did we learn from the story? What is the lesson we can take away?” I asked.
Nobody raised their hand.
A few moments later, a student, Arasu, gave his best guess: “I learned my life is very, very important.”
Connor and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. How do we help them understand the story’s meaning without explicitly giving it away?
We had the students reenact the play, this time asking them to imagine they were the ones racing. The two best runners in the class were called up to the front of the classroom and positioned to race. One sprinted off initially but took a nap midway, confident he would win. By the end of the re-enactment, the students’ hands shot up.
“You can’t be lazy!”
“You can’t be overconfident!”
“You can’t give up until the end!”
By placing the story in a familiar context, the students more easily drew upon their experiences and reflected upon them. From racing their peers countless times, they knew that laziness and overconfidence lead to loss and that persistence leads to victory. By connecting their values to the plot events, the students developed a deeper understanding of the play.
“As we continue with our educational and professional journeys, we will encounter people from differing backgrounds and ideologies. We will discover how our values intersect with our differences, and how by defining and discussing these beliefs, we can foster deeper connections and build meaningful communities. By keeping our values at the forefront of our actions, we can drive meaningful social change.”
As the other Duke students and I continued working with the students, we discovered that to bring new knowledge and skills to the classroom, we needed to connect to the students’ existing knowledge and experiences. More specifically, we needed to connect with their values. For instance, in math class, while many students had memorized how to add fractions, they struggled to grasp what fractions represented. By relating fractions to dividing chapatis amongst their peers, they understood fractions to be parts of a whole and a means of sharing with others.
Whether we taught lessons that connected to hard work and honesty or spirituality and service, a values-based approach to teaching not only improved understanding but also strengthened students’ commitment to their values. This approach also offered clarity regarding change—our toggle between the ashram’s way of teaching and our own. Was there an in-between? If so, where was it? What should change and what should remain?
Answering these questions began with defining how we wanted the curriculum to change: we wanted it to grow in a values-driven manner. Then, we identified which educational practices (from the ashram and the US) aligned with the ashram’s values and which did not. For example, while it was common for teachers to discipline students physically, we discussed that it contradicted nonviolence and self-regulation preached in their Hindu scriptures class. It was important for teachers to be role models for the beliefs they taught and focus on reflection or discussion-based consequences rather than physical ones.
There were also aspects of the ashram’s educational model that we sought to preserve. While observing math classes, I noticed that whenever the teacher asked a question, the students would point to their classmate who knew the answer. The teacher would call on that student, and he would answer correctly. There was a sense of shared knowledge, and all the students felt pride in their fellow classmate’s abilities. This differs from American schooling, where typically only the person who knows the answer will volunteer it, and solely he/she feels pride for answering the question.
This interaction revealed why countries like the United States are often called individualistic, while others are seen as collectivist—we value knowledge in different ways. Americans often prioritize “what do I know?” while other communities focus on “what do we know?” Both can be leveraged for people and their communities to grow.
At the ashram, a collectivist culture meant cooperation and communication were inherently built in. However, it also meant that not all students equally participated in the learning process. To retain collaboration but incorporate equal contributions, we adjusted homework and assignments. For example, while students could help one another with math problems, each had to write down and explain the steps in their own words. In English, they could brainstorm and discuss vocabulary together, but their sentences had to be unique.
Modifying the educational philosophy at the Suvarnamukhi ashram taught us how to approach change when partnering across communities and cultures. We learned that no one culture does something “the right way.” Rather, the “right way” is different for each community at different times because our values are continuously evolving. What may measure up in one instance may require reform in the next.
As we continue with our educational and professional journeys, we will encounter people from differing backgrounds and ideologies. We will discover how our values intersect with our differences, and how by defining and discussing these beliefs, we can foster deeper connections and build meaningful communities. By keeping our values at the forefront of our actions, we can drive meaningful social change.
During our time in Bengaluru, we learned that India is often called Bharath. Bharath, a Sanskrit word, means “one who revels in the light of wisdom”. I believe it was these foundational values of the ashram that made it the ideal place to explore how change can occur across various cultures and ideologies.
Diya Patel is a Duke student majoring in Biology and English. She is an undergraduate researcher in the Sanders Lab at Duke University Medical School, where she studies patient-derived cell lines to identify molecular pathways for neuronal cell death that lead to Parkinson’s Disease. In 2023, Patel received a Huang Fellowship, a summer research fellowship designed to explore science in service to society and to understand the ethics, policy, and social implications of scientific research.