Nanvi is an educator, learning designer, and founder of Emergent Inquiry Studio (EIS), an initiative exploring how creativity, agency, and imagination can be cultivated through materials-based learning. She holds a Master’s in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She is driven by a deep belief in the power of nature and the everyday materials that surround us – reclaimed, discarded, and found – to spark children’s thinking, build their agency, and nurture creativity and care for the living world. Her work is shaped by Reggio Emilia and inquiry-based approaches that position children as capable thinkers, researchers, and creators, and by a commitment to moving Indian classrooms away from rote, exam-driven learning toward exploration, questioning, and making.
Across India and the United States, she has worked in alternative, international, nonprofit, and public education settings, supporting the professional learning of more than 500 school-teachers.
While at Harvard, she developed the EIS and received funding to pilot it in India, where it is now being implemented across schools serving marginalized communities in Ahmedabad, with early signs of increased curiosity and engagement.
Through her work with public-schools in the US and Reggio-Emilia, Italy, she has studied how materials-based learning strengthens executive functioning and how, in the Indian context, it can also help children build a lasting relationship of care with the land and nature around them.