THE GLOBAL TIPPING POINT SUMMIT
GTPS Speakers - Day 4
27th February 2022
Session 1 – Civic Sense and SDGs
Debika Chatterji
With over 20 years of experience in the field of education, having taught in various reputed Cambridge, IB, ISC and ICSE schools in India and abroad, Mrs. Debika Chatterji, has managed various portfolios during her journey as an educationist and currently helms the Borivali branch of JBCN International School as Director Principal. She has served as the Head of School and CAS Coordinator at Garodia International School and Vice-Principal at S. M. Shetty International School. Mrs. Chatterji has also been instrumental in setting up the One World International IB School in Singapore.
As the founding Principal of JBCN International School, Borivali, she has introduced many educational and cultural projects in the school. Amongst other notable achievements, she has been instrumental in implementing and channelizing the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the long-term vision of the school.
Mrs. Chatterji is known to have excellent leadership skills and is a highly effective and positive individual. She has been a speaker and panelist at various national conferences. She is also the recipient of various awards with the most recent one being the ‘Iconic Leadership Award 2020’ which was presented in the presence of Hon’ble Governor of Maharashtra Shri Bhagat Singh Koshyari, hosted by Innovative Schools Union (ISU). Some of the other awards received by her include Vocational Excellence Award, Ethical educational leadership award, Progressive Principal of the Year Award, Community Leader Award, Inspiring Educator Citation award and Best Principal performance award.
Anahita Lee
Anahita Lee is the author and series editor for three textbook series published by Oxford University Press, India: New Mulberry English Course, GK 360°, and Little Artists. She has also authored A Hundred Days of Happy Maths, and Be the Change, a series of student handbooks for the Sustainable Development Goals, published by ARC. She is a freelance consultant for teacher development and curriculum design.
Anahita’s alma maters include Christ Church School, Sophia College and St Xavier’s Institute of Education (Mumbai, India). Additionally, she has completed a course in The Future of Learning from The Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA, and has been certified as a Teacher Trainer by the Oxford Teachers’ Academy, UK.
Shamim Padamsee
Shamim is a writer who has been through several avatars in her life; educationist, globe-trotter, social worker, businesswoman, diplomat, mother and proud grandmother of 6!
She is the author of many books for children and regularly contributes articles and stories to newspapers and magazines.
She is the founder of the website ‘Young India Books’ that reviews and promotes children’s books in India. She is currently working on a project that through stories for children will demonstrate that learning about, and appreciating diverse and pluralistic global societies, can actually be an enriching experience.
Trupti Doshi
Architect Trupti Doshi has 20 years of experience in ecological architecture and sustainable engineering. She has been India’s youngest woman architect whose work has been featured by the United Nations Environment Program as a model for Sustainable Development in India.
Her TEDx talk in India titled “Making Smart Buildings before Making Buildings Smart” received rave reviews. She then represented India at the first ever Women TEDx in Greece, where she received a standing ovation for her talk “Can a building be a Person?”
Trupti has represented India at the Professional Fellows Congress / World Youth Congress in Washington D.C and has been awarded ‘Woman of Pondicherry’ by Lt. Governor Dr. Kiran Bedi for exemplary contribution to ecological and social entrepreneurship.
Trupti has lectured widely in India, Europe and USA – including several Indian universities, University of Oklahoma in USA and Technical University of Crete in Greece – on a variety of subjects ranging from hidden geometry in nature, sustainability, smart cities, role of technology, social development, Indian architecture and entrepreneurship. She was the speaker from Asia for the Bio-Architecture conference in Portugal. Her audience ranges from architects, civil engineers, environmentalists & planners to entrepreneurs, start-ups and students.
Trupti has addressed over 200 groups and personally interacted with over 1000 highly prestigious consultants and personalities of national and international repute from academia and industry including top management at The World Bank, UBS – Union Bank of Switzerland, MNRE – Ministry of New and Renewable Energy – Govt. of India, Stanford University, TERI – The Energy and Resources Institute, Cadbury, Forbes, Mckinsey, Bridge Partnership, The Taj group, the University of Oregon among several others, all of whom have been greatly inspired by her systemic approach and the synthesis of so many diverse disciplines into an integrated whole.
She has been an eminent jury member for NASA’s most prestigious ANDC awards as well as Indian Council of Architecture’s Best Undergraduate Thesis Awards. She represented India at the International Green Summit in Rome in 2019 where her research (soon to be published by Springer) as co-author on the positive effect of green buildings on human well-being was greatly appreciated.
She has been the Chief Co-Architect of Sri Aurobindo Society, an international NGO, where she played a key role in master planning numerous large institutional projects spanning several hundred acres.
When she is not on a building site, you can find her bird watching atop a mountain in Ladakh, capturing the diversity of the world through her lens, meeting inspiring people innovating in Entrepreneurship, learning a new language – currently on her 7th – or simply enjoying the fresh air and writing poetry.
Ritu Malhotra
Ritu Malhotra is the co-founder of ARC (www.arcedtech.com), an education startup dedicated to making education meaningful and transformative. She is the series editor of Be the Change, a series of integrated worksheets for Grades 1 to 8 to educate, engage and inspire young people to actively support the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She is a champion of climate action and sustainability, inspiring the youth to save the planet. Ritu is an educator and an entrepreneur who is passionate about educating the youth. Her two decades of experience as an editor and an educator brings value to her work with young and adult learners. She has a strong background in publishing, making her an expert at developing and curating meaningful content. She has received her education at Lady Shri Ram, DU and NYU, New York. She has worked at Oxford University Press, Dorling Kindersley, Heritage Xperiential Learning School, National Skill Development and Corporation and Step By Step School Noida, and so on.
Session 2 – Readers will be Leaders
Rakhee Chhabria
Rakhee Chhabria is the Founder of Teachers Help Teachers, an online community of educators which was created to share and learn and cater towards tools and curated content in education to help teachers, teach better.
With more than 18 years of experience as an educator and being a mother of two boys, she founded Sai Eduserve to help pre-schools deliver engaging and age-appropriate content along with training educators in teaching creatively.
Rakhee is currently pursuing her passion as a social entrepreneur and empowering teachers.
Veena Basu
Veena has more than 25 years of experience in Education. She has worked as a Consultant, Guest Lecturer and a Special educator in several noted schools in Mumbai and USA. She has authored and published a phonic-based reading program called Phonicsc2c- Chaos to Clarity-Beginners Reading Program.
The Phonics Chaos to Clarity Program is a systematic and self-sufficient early phonics-based reading program typically for children aged 3-7 years that can also be applied across all ages and demographics regardless of social-economical background. It is designed to teach beginning reading and to build reading success through a comprehensive, structured and spiraling curriculum.
Veena is also the founder of BVerve- a multi-modal Center where parents, children, adults and professionals can avail of various services such as cognitive skills training, counseling, remediation, occupational therapy, psycho-educational assessment and other therapeutic alternatives.
Session 3 – Preparing Teachers and Parents for the PEGC (Personlised Education for Global Citizenship) Framework
Karon Shaiva
Karon is the Convenor of the RISE PECO World, an innovative space for thought leaders to influence action and outcomes for the SDGs. She firmly believes that PEACE is the ultimate indicator of development, not the esoteric variety but one that comes from the absence of conflict, be it internal or external, between people, people and nature or nature and nature. Passionate about people-powered solutions based on Partnership, Entrepreneurship, Citizenship and Ownership (PECO) to address some (if not ALL) of the world’s most pressing issues in a Shared World. She is a Managing Trustee, Rise Infinity Foundation and the Chief Impact Officer of IDOBRO.
Karon is a social entrepreneur, writer, speaker and trainer. She has over 20 years of experience in Asia and the USA in Technology, Education, Finance, Gemology and development sectors. Karon was awarded the “Most Inspiring Social Enterprise” at the hands of the late Dr. C. K. Prahlad. and was selected to the top 30 of 20000 applicants for the Lufthansa – Pioneers of Tomorrow TV series. She has been selected as COVID Shereos by Twitter India and recognised for her work during the pandemic by multiple organisations.
Karon has lived in India, USA, Africa and Japan. In addition to holding a Masters in Marketing Management, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science, she is a Chevening Fellow from Oxford University and an alumnus of the Swedish Institute Management Program in CSR & Sustainability. She is also a certified ISO 9001:2000 Auditor and Six Sigma Green Belt.
Karon truly believes that learning should never stop and is currently a student of Human Rights and Peace.
Dr. Coomi S. Vevaina
Professor and Former Head, Dept of English, University of Mumbai, Coomi is an Education Futurist, Founder Director of the annual Global Tipping Point Summit, Peace Activist, Internationally acclaimed Educator, Literary Critic, Teacher Educator, Writer and Storyteller.
Coomi has two Ph.D. degrees to her credit – one in literature and the other in Education, both of which as rooted in Psychology. She has published 11 books and 58 papers that have appeared in peer-reviewed national and international journals and critical anthologies. She has won numerous national and international awards and is a renowned speaker who delivers lectures and leads seminars and workshops for teachers and parents. The two TEDx talks which she delivered, have received rave reviews from viewers.
The International Journal of Canadian Studies, Ottawa, declared as among the ten best Canadian critics in the world and this won her an honorary position for three years on the Advisory Board of the International Journal for Canadian Studies. She was re-appointed on the Board from Fall 2007 to 2009. The Sahitya Akademi nominated her as a Member on the English Advisory Board of from April 2016 to December 2017.
Coomi is passionate about teaching pedagogy and has been actively involved in curriculum designing at all levels and has helped set up study centres in India and abroad. In 2013, her book on Education, Source-full Intelligence: Understanding Uniqueness and Oneness through Education was selected as among the eighteen best books published in the U.S.A. in 2013 and her most recent book, What Children Really Want, has received critical acclaim from educators, psychologists, parents, writers from all over the world and even the Dalai Lama. In August-September 2015, she was selected by the World Leaders in Education (WLE) as one of the thirty-five women from across the world changing educational paradigms.
In 2020-2021, she directed the online international Global Tipping Point Summit that was attended by 6332 participants from India and abroad. Currently, she is engaged in creating the PEGC (Personalised Education for Global Citizenship) Framework in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and UNESCO’s Four Pillars of Learning.
Coomi has her own storytelling organisation called Wordfully Yours which hosts storytelling programmes and conducts training workshops on storytelling for enhancing ecoliteracy, socioliteracy and psycholiteracy.
Coomi adores children, loves reading, music and dancing, experiences deep oneness with nature and tries to do all she can to make our rapidly shrinking and increasingly threatened world a better place for the generations to come.