Volume VI Issue II April-June 2026

Name of Author : Aastha Sharma, Nirdosh Kumari

Title of the paper : Learning with the Mountain: Childhood, Material Encounters, and More than Human Pedagogy in Chiktan, Kargil

Abstract: This article examines ecological learning during a week long NGO volunteer engagement with schoolchildren in Chiktan, Kargil. Drawing on participant observation, reflective field notes, outdoor activities, childrens drawings, and photographic records, we consider how mountain terrain, plants, weather, movement, and creative materials shaped the educational encounter. Bringing common worlds pedagogy into conversation with posthuman ecocriticism, we argue that the Himalayan landscape was not a scenic background to human learning. It participated in the production of attention, movement, creativity, and social relations. The encounter also unsettled the assumption that knowledge travelled in one direction from urban volunteers to rural children. Although the volunteers introduced particular materials and activity structures, the children demonstrated embodied familiarity with place that the visitors did not possess. The article finally examines the contrast between the mountain child and the screened child. Rather than treating one as ecologically authentic and the other as technologically alienated, we understand both as relational figures produced through land, infrastructure, schooling, family life, and uneven digital access.

Keywords : screened child, Kargil, common worlds pedagogy, posthuman childhood, ecological learning.

DOI :

Page Number : 28-33