It was a busy weekday morning at EuroSchool Kharadi in Pune, with the usual rush of classes, teachers, and schoolwork around her. When I called Principal Afreen Kazi Sheikh, she was in the middle of that familiar school-day bustle, yet as we began talking about a sustainability exhibition that had visited the school two years ago, she paused. 

The conversation that followed was less a description of an event and more a recollection of what happened after the exhibits were packed away and the visitors had gone home.

For her, that was when the real impact of the experience began to show.

She remembered children returning to their classrooms with questions, discussing things they had seen and, months later, approaching their teachers with ideas of their own. Some wanted to make compost. Others wanted to reduce plastic use or find ways to save water. What stayed with her was not what the children had learnt during the exhibition, but how they continued to think about it afterwards.

For a school that had already been teaching children about waste, water conservation, climate change and environmental responsibility, the challenge had never been a lack of information. It was helping children see how those large ideas fitted into their own lives.

“I think the biggest challenge was for us to help students build real-world connections,” she says.

When the lesson left the classroom

EuroSchool Kharadi opened in 2021 during the lockdown, beginning with around 200 admissions and an entirely online first year. By the time she spoke about the sustainability programme, the school had grown to more than 2,800 students, from pre-primary to the senior classes.

Environmental awareness has been part of school life from the beginning. There were plantation drives, waste segregation activities, environmental clubs, awareness campaigns, and project-based learning. But the principal felt that children needed something more than conversations inside a classroom.

“You cannot engage children with minimal talk. You have to give them opportunities to engage,” she tells The Better India. “When you actually do something practically, when you get the feel of it, then you are never going to forget it.”

That opportunity came in mid-2024, when the school hosted ‘Shashwat Bharat Setu’, a mobile sustainability learning initiative created by ‘The Eco Factory Foundation’. The initiative was formally launched in February that year and was designed to take sustainability exhibits and demonstrations directly to schools, communities and other spaces rather than keeping them inside a permanent centre.

At the school, a large cafeteria that was not being used was converted for the exhibition. Furniture was moved out, exhibits were brought in, and the space was arranged so that students and parents could walk through different sections and interact with them.

More than 2,000 students and parents visited that Saturday.

The school had spent the previous week preparing the children through discussions and debates around climate change and environmental challenges. But once the exhibition opened, something changed. Instead of solely listening to a teacher explain a concept, the children could see how it worked.

There were demonstrations and displays around renewable energy, water conservation, waste management, biodiversity, composting, rainwater harvesting, urban gardening, sustainable agriculture and the circular economy. They could ask questions directly to people working with the exhibits and hear explanations beyond what they had read in textbooks.

For the principal, that was the difference.

“The programme was different because children were meeting new people and experts and seeing things that we could not always recreate inside the........

© The Better India