Beyond the Walls

As a child, Priyanka did not find school to be easy. This was a bizarre world with strict norms, stricter consequences, and a grade curve that left her behind. Priyanka mused that this was what probably drew her to work with children in conflict with the law. If school itself was a judgemental and unforgiving place, what must the weight of the penal system feel like? If she felt like an outcast, like she was not up to the mark, how must these children feel? Priyanka began working with children in conflict with the law as a lawyer and a fitness trainer, before dedicating her time to them as a nature educator. Most of her time was spent in a facility at Bangalore. The children spent three or four years here, receiving counselling and vocational training before being sent back out into society.

She visited them, every week, over seven months, for a variety of sessions and activities all surrounding the natural world. They were filled with crafts and other hands-on activities like mask-making or working with clay, and were often backed up with a lesson. Once, Priyanka instructed her students to create their dream kingdom, and plan and illustrate everything that they would put into it – money being no bar. After this, she took a glass of water and a handful of dyes. The glass was a river, she told them, and the dyes were the emissions of their realms. She moved from kingdom to kingdom, learning about them and adding dye as she went along. Our cities produce waste; we need to acknowledge that and learn to manage it. “What I’m trying to do with my project is to spark a connection to nature in these children,” she said. “I want them to understand certain concepts about the environment, but I want them to have fun doing it.” 

The children were shy at first. Quiet and not engaging in the activities that were brought to them. However, when they realised that these sessions were not the rote routine of their other classes, and that they would not be shouted at for getting something wrong, they began to enjoy themselves. Priyanka noted that soon they began asking her when she would be coming next, and what activities she was planning for that session. “When [she] did not come for a couple of weeks, they kept asking ‘why didn’t Priyanka Ma’am come?’” said Shobha, a teacher at the facility. “The children get bored seeing us regularly, so when someone from outside comes they get happy.”

Priyanka succeeded, a few times, in bringing the outside world to her students. She drew inspiration from Arpita, another fellow at YouCAN, in bringing a mini travelling museum to the children. Arpita’s students on the other side of the state, sent letters to the children about living in coastal Karnataka and the nature around them – something that Priyanka’s students were very eager to respond to with life in the city. And, Arpita herself came to the facility to conduct a session for them. Priyanka also brought a theatre actor, and former child film star, for a music session, thoroughly impressing her students when she revealed who he was. “One of the students was like ‘how do you know all these people ma’am?’” She imitated his enthusiasm. “You brought a photographer one day, a scientist another, and today you brought an actor!” To Priyanka, this was the moment where she felt the children understood her work and what she was doing there. 

Empathy was a guiding principle through Priyanka’s time with these children. Obvious as that may seem, it was doubly important when engaging with children that had been written off by the rest of society and deemed too incorrigible to control. Apart from that, Priyanka found it essential to give her students agency in their sessions. “It is a kind of co-creation: yes, I will give them instructions, but they can tell me if they are not okay with something and we can have a discussion,” she said. For children who have so little control over their own lives, agency translates to respect and personhood. “Not treating them like adults, but as human beings with their own opinion,” she added. 

Week after week, Priyanka’s classroom provided these children in conflict with the law a space to be children alone. You can see her work in action in Beyond the Walls, a film produced in late 2025.

Priyanka Lal was among the 15 fellows of the fourth cohort of the Earth Educators’ Fellowship. Since graduating, she has been setting up her own venture – Grāma – a space where people of different skills, ages and ways of knowing come together, learning from each other and from the land and nature around them. 

Nitya Krishnan is a communications intern at YouCAN, and a part-time English teacher. She studied Journalism and Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University.