Learning my way back

The school that lives in me..

I have been thinking lately about a school I attended as a child who grew up in a the cosy Emirate of Fujairah. A close-knit school, simple, with an imported curriculum and porta-cabins that stood as our classrooms. Nothing in that setting was over polished and yet it managed to do something I have never forgotten. Our geography class was often held in the wadi, while PE was very likely taking place on the shore across the street and our circle time was at the courtyard under a strong rooted tree. The curriculum we were taught was not locally ours, but the school had found a way to root it in the place it stood. It showed me what is possible when learning is connected to the land, even through a borrowed framework, but it also showed me, quietly, what a borrowed framework cannot do. It knew the rivers of another land, yet had no word for our oasis. It could name the plants of a continent I had never seen, but not the ones outside our own door.It taught us the how of learning, the pedagogy, and rooted what it could in the land beneath us. But the what, the actual body of knowledge we were learning, still belonged somewhere else. Those early years shaped me more than I realised at the time: I grew up knowing foreign lands better than my own, everything I knew of my own coming not from a classroom, but from what my ancestors had already passed down.

That absence had a shape. It was the shape of everything our grandparents knew and our textbooks didn't: the names, the seasons, the water, the stories the land itself was still holding, waiting for a framework of learning brave enough to ask for them. I did not have a word for it then, I only felt the gap. Now I do: our indigenous knowledge, and it's precisely there, in that unnamed space, that it should have lived all along.

Not only a UAE story, a universal one

This is not a uniquely Emirati dilemma. Every culture on earth holds an indigenous body of knowledge, accumulated over generations, encoded in language, landscape, practice, and memory. As our lives modernised, so did our schooling, and entire societies began borrowing curriculums built for other places. That borrowing arrived with a cost: the gradual displacement of learning that was once native to the ground it stood on.

What I am exploring through the UAE is not only a local project. It is one expression of a universal methodology, how learning rooted in the land might look, feel, and function in any cultural context. The UAE is my lens, but the question belongs to everyone. I was that child in the porta-cabin classroom who began to formulate the preliminary question. The researcher I am today, is trying to build the framework around it.

The Farther I Went, the Louder Home Called

Years later, I found myself raising my own children abroad, on a land that did not speak their language. Their Arabic grew quiet in the classroom, spoken only within our walls at home. Their faith lived inside a small close-knit community, rather than out in the open, and their culture existed only in what I chose to amplify inside our four walls.

Within this reality, I noticed something. The further I was from home, the stronger it pulled. It felt like a jugular vein beating harder,  pushing the blood of the motherland, the mother tongue, back into the heart from across the distance. I began to ask: why is it that the deepest things are always named after the mother? Mother tongue, Motherland, Mother nature; as if the world has always known, by instinct, before theory, that the mother is the first keeper and the first transmitter of everything that matters.

I was carrying an amana, a trust, to preserve my children's language, faith, ethics, and belonging. And I had to find a way to honour it and nurture it. Because of that conviction, after years of raising them abroad, my husband and I made the decision to return to the UAE, back to the motherland, while my children were still young enough to plant roots here rather than simply visit them. I imagined that homecoming would settle something in me. That the ache I had carried across all those years, the jugular vein pulling me towards home, would finally quiet down, now that we were standing on the land itself.

It didn't, not entirely. The learning around my children was present, even excellent in many ways, yet parts of it felt surface-level, and I could not ignore that. Something was disconnected from the land they were standing on, from the stories that lived in the soil, from the knowledge their grandparents held. We were here and yet, the deepest part of here was not found in the curriculum at present. So I dared to imagine something different.

The doors that stayed closed, and why I kept knocking

I had a vision. I shared it with institutions. I sat in rooms and described what I believed education in this place could be: rooted, living, built from the land up rather than imported from above. Not a single door opened, I knocked again, still with no response. I had to decide something: was the vision wrong, or was the work simply mine to do regardless?

I chose to persist. I found the Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, and I self-funded my way in. God only knows how a mother of three, working, researching, coaching, consulting, parenting, carried all of it at once without dropping a single thread. I dropped things, if I'm honest, then I picked them back up. This post marks the end of my first year in my research, and I am still going.

As I looked at the year's work, something became clear, those fragments were all circling to the same question:

What kind of education allows a learner to remain rooted, while still being prepared for the future?

This is where the idea of Knowledge Sanctuaries began to take shape. Imagining the possibility of living laboratories where learners encounter the world through place, language, ecology, memory, and community. This is not a a project title but the beginning of a philosophy. One I believe is needed not only in the UAE, but wherever learning has loosened its grip on the ground it stands on.

Every child, and the ground beneath them.

I dare to dream of a different reality, not only for my own children, but for every child I encounter. My role as a mother does not end at the door of my home, but continues in every child I come across. Because I have come to believe that the mother, the language, and the land were never three separate things. They are one instinct, wearing three names, and somewhere, a jugular vein is still beating for all of it at once. The question I carry today started in a wadi, maybe in a geography class and in my arabic language practice, with a girl who did not yet know she was formulating one of her most important life questions. She has just learned, finally, how to build a door instead of waiting for one to open, not for herself but for her children and for generations to come.

Education | Learning | Motherhood | Homeland