The “Grassroots” in the public system: teacher-driven innovations for inclusive educational development

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, when several of my students, teachers, fellow travellers, farmers, artisans, professionals, and policy makers got together to trigger a new social movement in the form of the Honey Bee Network, we were not sure how the world would respond to the aspirations of the creative, knowledge-rich, economically poor people. What we knew was that unless the development process built upon a resource in which poor were rich, we could never achieve a dignified, fair, reciprocal, and emancipating environment. It soon became clear to us that a whole range of policy, institutional, and social innovations will be needed to give traction to the creative communities and individuals. But how policy makers within and outside the country would respond, was not clear, given the fact that there was no template for such a change in National Innovation Systems around the world. Here was a home grown model which, as some of the contributions show in this colloq