This article summarizes the experience of inquiry based Math teaching at an alternative school in Chennai, India by outlining the outcomes of the approach for Montessori, Elementary and middle-school children. The paper is published as a part of the Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Mathematics Teachers' Association - India, January 3-5, 2019.

Project‐Based Learning (PBL) is inherently creative. But little is known about children's process of creativity during a PBL experience or how PBL supports the creative process. This qualitative study explores 14 Indian schoolchildren's creative journey during a book‐authoring PBL program. Transcripts for the structured interviews, assignments, driving questions, and journals were analyzed for patterns inductively and codified for themes. Results show that PBL provided the framework for children's creative behavior. Children's creative process was a cycle between ideating, shaping a story, reviewing, and rework with elements of “jugaad.” Emotion played a key role in the creative process. Metacognition played a dual role in both helping to shape the storybooks and children's self‐beliefs and added to their motivation. Children's self‐concept as authors and self‐efficacious beliefs in the powerful impact of their storybooks motivated them through an extremely challenging project. The significance of the research is threefold. First, it explores Indian children's creative process, which is extremely under‐researched. Second, it explores the role of creative metacognition in the creative process. Most importantly, it highlights PBL as a way for creating learning conditions to foster creativity.

This research sheds light on Indian children’s process of meaning-making of the Anthropocene using place-ecological meaning. It explores how children creatively expressed their understanding of human and more-than-human under the Anthropocene in books they authored. The children’s books were the primary source of data; additional data from creative writing responses, journals and interviews was elicited, and the analysed using thematic analysis. Results reveal that the children used their experiences with place-based nature to develop a strong place-ecological meaning, which inspired a striking critique of the necropolitical and geontopolitical regime of the Anthropocene. Children’s own sense of marginalization in an adult world forged empathy with the more-than-human, children, and marginalized humans, countering the hegemonic narratives that drive the Anthropocene, and fostering a sense of collective activism and resistance. In the books, the more-than-human entities became agents rather than objects centred around humans, shaping an exchange and co-merging with children. The results of this research reinforce theoretical and empirical work on the process of place-ecological meaning with additional significance as a qualitative study that foregrounds the voices of children in the Global South and their meaning-making of the Anthropocene. The study roots universal knowledge of the Anthropocene in familiar spaces using experiences, places and local ecologies. It recommends adding place-ecological meaning as a criterion for adjudging children’s environmental literature. It also recommends revising the place-ecological meaning scale to include ways to assess meaning-making of the Anthropocene.

Aligned with the constructivist notion that children’s learning is meaning-making and that theirvoices should be heard about their experience of educational programs, this paper exploresmiddle-school Indian children’s meaning-making of an innovative teaching and learning methodviz. the See-Think-Wonder (STW) thinking routine, held online during the pandemic. Givensparse prior research, the research design was qualitative, exploratory and used first-personaccounts as expressed in journals. 93 journal entries by 17 children were analyzed usingdescriptive coding and thematic content analysis. The results show that STW was athought-provoking and engaging activity for this population, even when adapted to an onlineversion and despite the traumatic context of the pandemic lockdowns. The impact of STWremained with children well after class hours as children continued engaging with the visualmedia in their journals. The STW provoked metacognition, engagement and positive emotions.Furthermore, the research highlights the important role of journaling and technology to enhanceSTW. Adoption of thinking routines is one way to improve children’s thinking, metacognitionand engagement, especially in an exam-oriented education system like the one prevalent in India.While the results are not generalizable, formal and non-formal educators should explore usingthinking routines in India in in-person and in online classes. Further qualitative and quantitativeresearch should be conducted using other data sources, and on specific of the role of journaling& technology in provoking meaning-making, and in context of bricks and mortar schools andnon-formal education spaces.

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