Wanda Dynowska’s Educational Laboratory

The aim of this article is to present the educational activities of Wanda Dyn- owska (1888–1971) within the Tibetan refugee community in India during the initial period of its existence in exile. Dynowska, a now largely forgotten Polish theosophist and social activist, typically worked within cultural niches, focusing primarily on educational issues. In interwar Poland she was active in small theo- sophical communities, but she also directed her educational initiatives toward children and adults excluded from the formal education system. After moving to India in 1935, she worked, among others, with the children of Polish ref- ugees in India, emphasizing the need to build an axionormative community. Eventually, she undertook work among Tibetan refugees who began arriving in India after 1959. She focused on the education of children and young peo- ple, striving to create a system of schooling that addressed the specific needs of young refugees – understood by her primarily as the necessity of shaping and preserving identity. To this end, she introduced the Montessori method into the Tibetan education system. This article seeks to present and interpret Dynows- ka’s activities in light of the performance theory of Victor Turner (1982, 1988) and Richard Schechner (2013), with particular emphasis on the transformative potential of performative acts to model human attitudes and behaviors

Formal education · Performative utterance · Refugee · Transformative learning · Education and Cultural Studies · Education Methods and Practices · Global Education and Multiculturalism