


































Frontiers of Contemporary Education 
ISSN 2690-3520 (Print) ISSN 2690-3539 (Online) 

Vol. 1, No. 1, 2020 

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/fce 

53 
 

Original Paper 

Karma and Yoga: Transformative Pedagogy and Empowering 

Communities through Study Abroad and Service Learning 

Anita Anantharam
1*

 

1
 Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, University of Florida, Gainesville, 

USA 

*
 Anita Anantharam, E-mail: aanita@ufl.edu  

 

Received: May 11, 2020         Accepted: May 25, 2020        Online Published: June 24, 2020 

doi:10.22158/fce.v1n1p53               URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/fce.v1n1p53 

 

Abstract 

International education and global citizenship are keywords in our culture today and the success or 

failure of our attempts to be global citizens depends on the level of commitment we are able to make to 

cultures different than our own. The academic study of transnational feminism rests on the idea that 

cultural knowledge can be learned and appreciated. Studying abroad is a small step towards fostering 

global citizenship and transnational solidarity. This essay illustrates some of the successes of and 

impediments to community formation and global awareness through study abroad programs and 

initiatives. Service-learning assessment modules, non-traditional assignments, and stimulation of 

contemplative health are presented as pedagogical examples that make possible a mutually 

life-transforming experience for educators and students alike. 

Keywords 

international education, study abroad, community, feminism, service-learning  

 

1. Introduction 

Popular culture of recent decades has provided our national fetish for global citizenship with plenty of 

inspiration. Movies, books, and blogs engender cultural exchange and knowledge even if some cultural 

forms of communication (like proverbs and humor) are practically untranslatable across cultures. 

International education and global citizenship are keywords in our culture today and the success or 

failure of our attempts to be global citizens depends on the level of commitment we are able to make to 

cultures different than our own. The academic study of transnational feminism rests on the idea that 

cultural knowledge can be learned and appreciated. Studying abroad is a small step towards fostering 

global citizenship and transnational solidarity.  



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Study abroad opportunities have also received much criticism: This essay will illustrate some of the 

successes of and impediments to community formation and global awareness through study abroad 

programs and initiatives. Service-learning assessment modules, non-traditional assignments, and 

stimulation of contemplative health are presented as pedagogical examples that make possible a 

mutually life-transforming experience for educators and students alike. In the next three sections of this 

essay I will elaborate on specific ways in which study abroad fosters global community. The first part 

of this essay will focus on the politics and problematics of women’s studies abroad. Here I will delve 

into how I tailored my course curriculum to mirror the efforts of our host organization in India so that 

my study abroad program could dovetail with some of the outreach activities that the Indian 

non-governmental organization Navdanya (9 Seeds) was already engaged in and had already 

implemented at the grassroots level. The second part of this essay will highlight some of the 

complexities of “translating” gender paradigms in India for a group of college-aged American students. 

In this section I will briefly illustrate some of the tensions of teaching academic feminism in the US 

classroom context and teaching feminism in practice in the study abroad context. The final section of 

this essay will contextualize what is meant by transnational feminist pedagogy in order to illustrate how 

study-abroad environments are fruitful for thinking through questions about global citizenship and 

belonging. Communities created through study abroad encourage all participants (teachers and students) 

to confront and address shared structures of experiences and feelings in contradistinction to and across 

national boundaries. In order to transgress the binaries of “us” versus “them”, teacher versus student, 

the privileged versus the disenfranchised, each of us had to sacrifice personal comforts and live with, 

alongside, and in cooperation with those very communities that we sought to understand and empower. 

Indeed, cultures are for the claiming, but only if we have a commitment to those cultures—otherwise 

our claiming would be nothing but an exoticization of cultural practice. 

1.1 Introduction 

Among the primary reasons I was drawn to the discipline of women’s studies were a sense of 

community, the opportunity therein to find a group of colleagues who would be mutually supportive, 

and because, more often than not, the discipline fosters safe spaces for the small, individual voices 

often left out of mainstream social discourse and interactions. In many ways then, one might argue that 

self-reflexivity and social empowerment are twin ideals at the very core of the discipline of women’s 

studies. Given this incredible set of paradigms I enthusiastically set forth to Northern India with twenty 

[University name] students to study at Navdanya Biodiversity and Conservation Farm in Dehradun, 

India.  

Dehradun is in the Uttaranchal Valley of the Himalayan foothills, about ten hours north of New Delhi. 

It is in close proximity to several important pilgrimage sites for Hindus and Buddhists, and it is an area 

with a great environmental diversity. The city of Dehradun is one hour from the hill-station Mussoorie 

(location of the famous Woodstock School and the Landaur Language Institute), 40 minutes from the 

famous Transcendental Meditation Ashram in Rishkesh (home of the Beatles when they came to India) 



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and 15 minutes from the Mindrolling Tibetan Monastery and the Wildlife Institute of India. The 

Indo-Tibetan border is 3 hours north of Dehradun and as such the city is also a strategic center for the 

Indian military. The main campus of Navdanya is situated on a lush 40 acres and consists of a 

small-scale model farm, two soil and water testing labs, a centralized dining facility, a small catering 

kitchen, ten dormitory-style rooms, and two thatched huts, which accommodate 4 guests each. There 

are four bathrooms with running water (cold only) and toilets that are shared among the dormitories. 

The huts have their own bathroom and one of the 10 dormitory rooms—designated as the 

research-scholar room, has its own bathroom. The campus also has a large lecture hall, a conference 

room and library, and a large gazebo where meditation, yoga, and other social activities are held.  

Of the twenty students enrolled in my women’s studies course, only four had formal coursework in 

women’s studies prior to embarking on the study abroad program. Most of them came from working 

class family backgrounds. None of them spoke Indian languages nor had any formal training in South 

Asian Studies. However, they were all in better shape than me—nearly all of them were active hikers, 

and many of the female students had taken a yoga-for-fitness class. All of the students were interested 

in learning about veganism, environmental politics, and international development. In India these 

differences in political values or class backgrounds did not matter. As a group we were foreigners and 

treated like outsiders. Once a week when we left the idyllic and quiet Navdanya campus to go to 

Dehradun city to do our shopping or to send emails to friends and family, we were met with public 

stares. I could tell that the students were growing increasingly uncomfortable with their power as 

Americans, often at the expense of local men and women. Yet, when they were sick, doctors made 

house calls and held their hands while they recovered. As Americans we had access to historical 

monuments and sights that locals had to wait in long lines to see; we also had to pay ten times the local 

price. We became objectified and gawked at as we walked through the crowded bazaars and streets; 

everyone wanted photos with us. Yet for those who did not speak the language, forming real personal 

connections with local people was nearly impossible. It was difficult to blend in and experience India 

as a resident “Indian” would; yet we were not simply privileged outsiders either. 

This study abroad program was perhaps one of my most rewarding teaching experiences. It was 

rewarding because I got to experience the “light-bulb” moments of each and every student—that 

moment when connections between theory and practice are made through lived experience. Lack of 

media (cellphones, email, television, internet, etc.) forced students to engage class material and 

generate dialogue with other members of the group whom they may have otherwise not engaged; 

communal living created opportunities for in-depth outside class discussions on a variety of topics; and 

finally, students learned first-hand lessons on personal and collective empowerment.  

As a result of this shared living-learning community setup, I found that students asked insightful 

questions about required readings for the course but also sound ways to interject their own 

life-struggles in dialogue with the theoretical models posed in the required readings. Generally, they 

became more engaged in course materials than they might have otherwise been. Many were also able to 



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apply the work learned in class to their own lives, in many ways “women’s studies” abroad became a 

life-transforming experience.  

Notwithstanding the clash of cultures, students were able to turn their personal experience into a 

paradigm of social change, beginning first with changing their own habits and lifestyle choices, and 

then expressing those choices in terms of future academic pursuits and career goals. Students gave up 

personal comforts that they were accustomed to at home in order to have a true cultural immersion 

experience. In sum, the scenarios I have just described encapsulate a teacher’s dream situation and one 

that is rarely experienced en masse by the entire class in any given semester on the institution campus 

at home. These everyday victories motivate and inspire both instructor and student to be introspective 

and honest about their expectations and frustrations. If transformative pedagogy is about de-centering 

power relations in the classroom so that learning can happen more organically, or about “interactions 

between educators and students that foster the collaborative creation of power”, the study abroad 

context is ripe for this type of faculty-student cooperation and mutual learning (Cummins).   

 

2. Research Method 

2.1 Democracy in Practice 

Benjamin Barber, the outspoken political theorist and professor, has argued that, “education is crucial 

to the life of our democracy [and that] anybody who has been thinking about democracy has to think 

about education” (London). As a professor who routinely teaches courses on feminism and 

international studies, I am acutely aware of the fundamental link between power and 

knowledge—between political enfranchisement and educational opportunities. I spend a great deal of 

time explaining to students in my courses the relationship between activism and feminism and why the 

discipline of Women’s Studies is not solely about the theoretical but equally invested in the practical. 

The discipline not only exposes the tragic, the painful, bitter realities of life but also makes possible the 

dreams and visions of alternate paradigms and strategies for survival.  

Many students in my classes do not know that in the US women did not get the right to vote until the 

year 1920—which is 144 years after the American Declaration of Independence. Countries like India 

and Pakistan gave women the right to vote on the very day they were free from British colonialism 

(1947). Fewer still are aware of the history of the discipline of women’s studies: that the establishment 

of Women’s Studies departments occurred in the wake of the movements for civil rights in the 1960s 

and 1970s. Many are surprised to learn that it was not until the early 1980s that women’s contributions 

to history, education, politics, science, and art became subjects worthy of serious academic study and 

that degrees were granted for studying these subjects from a gender-sensitive lens. And because the 

establishment of women’s studies departments in colleges and universities across this country came as 

a result of women’s activism, the discipline of Women’s Studies has maintained an emphasis on 

knowledge gained from both activist and academic perspectives. 

 



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I say all of this because it was not simply fortuitous coincidence that my transnational feminist 

pedagogy mirrored Navdanya’s mission to empower local communities—I picked Navdanya as a site 

for hosting the study abroad program in India precisely because the curriculum I wanted to teach in the 

classroom mirrored the activism of Navdanya. Navdanya is a non-governmental organization that is 

heavily invested in the local communities in and around the city of Dehradun—their educational 

outreach is vast and their work to empower the youth populations of surrounding communities is 

impressive and extensive. Dr. Vandana Shiva, the world-renowned environmentalist, founded 

Navdanya in 1987 in the wake of the Union Carbide Plant Bhopal disaster of 1984 because she wanted 

to teach the rural communities in the Himalayan foothills about pesticide independence. Shiva’s work 

on women, ecology, and development made groundbreaking contributions to the field of ecofeminism: 

linking explicitly the male desire to dominate over nature to patriarchy and women’s subjugation 

(Shiva, 2010). Navdanya’s field campus was a good place to teach ideas about gender and international 

development. 

Secondly, this study abroad opportunity provided alternate paradigms and rich strategies for teasing out 

the historic gap between feminist organizing and academic feminism (Hartman et al. 1992). By this I 

mean that students were able to engage in an experiential learning community that constantly 

challenged their assumptions about power and privilege. Navdanya’s mission is mirrored on the work 

of M.K. Gandhi (1869-1948)—the assertion that each person must be the agent of social change; that 

true freedom and equality can only be achieved through selfless labor and the discipline of action 

(karma-yoga). This pivot was crucial for teaching ideas about self-transformation and global 

consciousness.  

Thirdly, students learnt to ask tough questions about the relationship between feminist pedagogy and 

internationalizing the curriculum initiatives that is all the rage in colleges and universities across the 

United States today. Indeed, we are seeing more and more demand for internationalizing the curriculum 

and global consciousness. One needs to ask at this important historical moment if these new measures 

for international education are backed by a commitment to empowering those very communities that 

host our projects of internationalization. Our students began to think about whom internationalizing the 

curriculum initiatives benefited and how they could work in tandem with local organizations that 

supported democratic values.  

As a teacher I was proud of the contributions my students made to the communities we visited in 

India—we did not just visit these places as tourists; rather, we engaged communities as if we were a 

part of them. As Pipitone notes in her essay about the importance of “place” in pedagogy, “educators 

can adapt the intentions and practices of their programs to embrace the pedagogical potential of place 

to foster the renegotiation of representations and heightened relationality” (Pipitone). But this is not 

easy especially if power and privilege hierarchies are not understood or internalized.  

 

 



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It is my sincere belief that our initiatives to internationalize the curriculum can indeed showcase 

Americans abroad as exemplars of multiculturalism, generosity, and ambassadorship, but this can only 

happen if we are introspective about our own privileges and work consciously to not wield them—at 

least not intentionally. After all, if there is one thing that encompasses transnational feminist pedagogy 

and practice, it is to understand the relation between the local and the global and how one is contingent 

on and complicated by the other.  

The study abroad experience opened up a transformative living and working environment that touched 

and motivated every participant. In organizing, directing, and teaching in India for six weeks I learned 

several things about myself as an academic. Indeed, this was one of the most difficult things I have ever 

done as a teacher: to manage twenty students in their late-teens and early-twenties as we traveled 

through a dozen communities in rural and urban North India. For many of the students who came to 

India this was their first time outside of the United States, for some, it was their first time outside of the 

state of [insert state name], and for two of them it was their first time on a plane! Emotions ran high 

and low, and oftentimes students began to treat me more like a parent than a teacher.  

Yet I am acutely aware of the fact that what I did was not unique because for many women and men 

across the globe, community organizing or community building is an integral part of their day-to-day 

life; something that they do because they were inspired; because it is done in the spirit of generosity 

and comradeship. 

2.2 Translating Gender Differences: “This is Not Summer Camp” 

The most difficult part of taking a group of college students to a country like India was the noticeable 

gender differences between the way in which Indian and American social life is organized. India is still 

very much a society where there are socially acceptable roles for women to play in the public sphere, 

and day-to-day life for men and women is organized along the axis of gender. This is particularly true 

in rural India where gender roles are discrete and segregated. While in urban centers like New Delhi 

(India’s capital city), Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, etc. these lines are blurred by corporate and 

cosmopolitan agendas, at Navdanya and in Dehradun that was not the case.  

An important slogan of the women’s movement, “the personal is the political”, took center stage in our 

lives while in India. Oft misinterpreted, the slogan as coined and used during the second-wave feminist 

movement in the US, served as a battle hymn for women’s organizing. As Carol Hanisch—credited 

with coining the term—explains the term’s origin: “It came out of a movement (the Women’s 

Liberation Movement) and a specific group within that movement (New York Radical Women) and a 

specific group of women within New York Radical Women” (Hanisch). 

Faced with the obvious gender differences in India, my feminist students struggled to understand that 

curbing one’s personal choices was not tantamount to political disenfranchisement. As a teacher I 

rarely have to deal with telling my students what they can and cannot do outside of the classroom; I 

never have to deal with what they wear to class or outside of class—it never comes up in a traditional 

classroom setting. Yet, in India I was responsible for my students both in the classroom and outside it. I 



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struggled to explain why women could not wander away from our group into the mountains by 

themselves; being able to go where one wants to go was not the sole marker of women’s liberation. I 

had to learn this for myself and it is after many years of travel to India that I am able to reconcile with 

this reality.  

Some of the gender differences in Indian culture and acceptable gender roles for men and women were 

often explained away by the students simply as a result of differences in “American” versus “Indian” 

values and norms. Yet, no one was completely satisfied with this kind of translation of gender 

experience. It was tough for American students to relate to gender segregation in social life, and to 

learn that having distinct roles for men and women did not automatically translate to gender oppression 

in and of itself. Yet they were surprised to learn, for example, that the majority of farmers in India are 

women and that the majority of cooks in India—including on our farm—were men. Rather than 

reducing gendered division of labor in the public and private spheres to women’s oppression, they 

learned that it is the way in which these gendered roles become loaded with value—paid labor versus 

unpaid labor; respectable work versus demeaning work, and so on—that marks oppression. Ethnicity, 

religion, class, caste, and sexuality are other ways in which women’s and men’s labor gets marked in 

India. This was something that they learnt first-hand. 

Women students also began to recognize the freedoms they enjoyed in India: for some it was their 

ability to let go of consumerist practices—of doing their hair every day in order to feel attractive; or 

feeling the need to wear make-up. Male students became attuned to the subtleties of their gaze and 

what that might mean in an Indian context. They realized that making eye contact with women they 

passed on the street suddenly made them feel self-conscious and embarrassed. These are experiences 

that the students were not able to process immediately and speak articulately about but I am sure, in 

time, they will be able to reflect on these moments as raising their global and gender consciousness a 

hundred-fold.  

If in-fact “yoga is action, not reaction” as our yoga teacher in India was fond of exclaiming, 

transformation happens through sustained contemplative practice, and yoga is one of the most salient 

example of it. We all became aware of the direct link between our personal choices and the 

consequences of those choices on our salubriousness. If the personal is political, as feminists believe 

they indeed are, “contemplative practice works on the human psyche to shape attention into a far 

suppler instrument, one that can appreciate a wide range of world-views and even sustain the paradoxes 

of life” (Zajonc 2). Karma yoga as a transformative practice for self-empowerment and social 

improvement should resonate well with transnational feminists, social-justice activists, and 

practitioners of contemplative sciences like yoga and meditation.  

For both my students and myself, waking up at 6:30am and doing yoga while the sun rose slowly 

across the Himalayan foothills gave structure and new definition to our day. In the yoga classroom, I 

was also a student, no different (and in many cases less qualified) than the other students in class. I 

grunted and suffered alongside my students in trying to learn yoga, and it was experiences like this that 



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cultivated mutual respect between teacher and student, and strengthened cross cultural and 

intergenerational bonding. 

2.3 Building Communities at Home and Abroad 

In the final part of my essay I will briefly address the community building aspect of study abroad 

programs. Aside from teaching gender differences in Indian social life the second most trying aspect of 

the [University name] India study-abroad program was learning to live in a community—a true 

community where one eats together, lives together, plays together, and studies together. Twenty-four 

hours a day/seven days a week was difficult not just for the students but for the teachers as well. The 

instructors on this program lived alongside our students, we ate meals with them, we did yoga together 

with the students, and even our down time activities like shopping, laundry, cleaning, and so forth were 

done together. It took us six weeks before we achieved a sustainable routine of living and learning 

together. And just when we had achieved our community, the program was over and our self-made 

community had to end. 

Upon returning to the United States I began to think about the ways in which our students traveling 

abroad would be better served if they had had prior experience in communal living; if culture shock 

could be mitigated with a sense of community support. We began to wonder how we might enhance 

their educational and professional training overseas through intensive language training—indeed many 

of the students on the study abroad trip began to study Hindi informally through teach-yourself Hindi 

study guides and in conversations with local farm workers. If they had some sense of Indian history, 

social life, religious life, and political life before venturing on the journey that would take them half 

way across the globe, away from their families and loved-ones, would they have been able to adapt 

more easily? While we held three to four orientation meetings prior to leaving for India, many of our 

pre-departure meetings were about the logistics of travel to a “distant” or “foreign” country and not 

about any of the other issues addressed above.  

 

3. Conclusion 

In conclusion, I wanted to address my most recent strategy for creating community in a traditional 

classroom context. Following the study abroad experience, I had the privilege of developing a 

service-learning module in my home institution centered around the theme of food justice. The sixty 

students enrolled in the course were required to participate in a volunteering opportunity with a 

community organization of their choosing devoted to alleviating food insecurity, promoting social 

justice, or promoting sustainability. The only conditions were the number of required volunteer hours: 

forty hours over the course of the semester. While the students were overwhelmed at first about the 

logistics of getting to their volunteer site and finding their work rewarding, or whether they would even 

be able to finish the requisite hours by the end of the term, I found that each and every student managed 

to successfully navigate these stumbling blocks. And more, they did so with such positivity and 

optimism that it reaffirmed my own commitment to making civic engagement an explicit part of my 



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transnational feminist pedagogy. Community development and community organizing have been 

crucial aspects of the movements for women’s rights and social justice. It was clear that through 

engaging in this service-learning opportunity, students recognized this as well. This type of knowledge 

cannot be learned though theory, through books and lesson plans. It is imbibed and embraced through 

experience and practice. While this was not a study-abroad experience, it was an opportunity that took 

students outside of their comfort zones, and outside of the confines of the traditional university space 

into the community of which they are a vital part. Building on the ideas of karma-yoga, (discipline of 

action) I facilitated opportunities for students to transgress assumptions of their power and privilege, 

and work side-by-side with community partners from whom they could also learn. I will end this essay 

with a quote from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (1994). Her words are offered her at the close of 

my essay without foreclosing the possibilities that they engender: … the academy is not paradise. But 

learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a 

location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to 

demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality 

even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as 

the practice of freedom. (207) 

 

Acknowledgement 

I am grateful to the University of Florida for the opportunity to teach in a study abroad context and to 

the fellow students and teachers who made this experience an exercise in transformative learning.   

 

References 

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Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: 

Routledge.  

London, S. (1992). The Politics of Education: An Interview with Benjamin Barber. Retrieved April 15, 

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Shiva, V. (2016). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and 

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