ETHNO-AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES OF COMMUNITY: EXPLORING THE POTENTIALS OF SCHOOL CURRICULUM

This study explored the villagers’ ethno-agricultural practices to find perspectives on designing school curricula. The study revealed that the villagers practised traditional agricultural knowledge in crop selection, irrigation, water knowledge, temperature, light, nutrients, varieties of crops, insect resistance, site selection, land preparation and seeding. The villagers had an intricate ethno-agricultural culture of repetitive tillage during monsoon, growing vegetative barriers on field boundaries and mixed cropping, and crop cultivation cycle using indigenous fertiliser and indigenous recycling system of animal dung. Significant themes that need to be integrated into the school curriculum were checking soil loss by wind erosion, soil moisture conservation for the showing of winter crops, high production, indigenous flood control and land erosion by tree plantation on canal banks. Hence, the preservation and transmission of traditional agricultural behaviour for building a culturally responsive and indigenous knowledge-based education system is suggested.