Bhubaneswar: Chilika has emerged as a unique living classroom for students from across the globe as NIRMAN, in collaboration with the University of Waterloo and IIT Kharagpur, organised a workshop titled “Community Perspectives on Chilika as a Place of Co-learning and Co-creation.”
Students from Tanzania, Canada, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh participated in the workshop and interacted directly with communities living in villages surrounding Chilika Lake. The exercise provided an opportunity for the students to learn from the lived experiences, traditional knowledge and perspectives of local communities.
The participants were particularly impressed by the depth of knowledge possessed by community members and the insights they gained through years of close engagement with Chilika’s ecosystem, livelihoods and social life.
Reflecting on the experience, the students observed that their understanding of knowledge had largely been shaped by formal education.
“Most of us had spent years inside classrooms. We had read, attended lectures, prepared assignments, and slowly come to believe that knowledge lives inside books.”
The interaction with Chilika communities offered a different perspective, demonstrating that knowledge is also created and preserved through lived experiences, collective memory, local practices and continuous engagement with nature and society.
The workshop sought to bridge the gap between academic learning and community knowledge, encouraging students to see local communities not merely as beneficiaries or subjects of research, but as co-creators and custodians of knowledge.
The initiative was described as a productive exercise in experiential learning, dialogue and collaboration. It also highlighted the importance of bringing academic institutions and communities together to explore solutions and generate knowledge that is grounded in local realities.
The Chilika experience thus became more than an academic field visit—it served as an opportunity for young learners from different countries to rethink how knowledge is acquired, shared and created.
