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Praise for
Weaving Wholeness
Weaving Wholeness is a compelling and urgent call for humanity to wake up. To join the revolution from the inside out in being the work of Love and Justice. Romana is a true revolutionary who speaks from a place deep inside each of us. Her call to act on the work of our lifetime transcends difference and penetrates deep into our essence of doing human better. She invites us to be the kind of ancestors that make a courageous difference with our presence in service of every child, everywhere. I feel duty bound to rise to her wisdom of who we can be together.
I am with you, I am of you, I am because we are.
In the words of Shams Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher: There is no seeker among those who search for love. Who has not matured on the way. There is no wisdom without love.
Romana’s soul awakening and intimate labour of love, shared in Weaving Wholeness, is an embodiment of the timeless teachings of Shams Tabrizi’s 1185-1248.
SHANAAZ MAJIET
Learning and Development, City of Tshwane (South Africa)
Disability Inclusion, Government Leadership, and Social Justice Expert
Weaving Wholeness has helped me, as a young parent, to gain a multilayered window to my child's development. Romana has beautifully integrated the teachings of wisdom traditions and a trauma informed developmental lens to whole child education, to enable our children to thrive.
DANIEL LOBO
Social Entrepreneur, Founder & CEO, BecauseYOU (India)
Expertise in mental health advocacy and holistic wellbeing
Weaving Wholeness is remarkable. Remarkable in its honesty, depth, simplicity, rigour and power.
Romana Shaikh has accomplished what many scholars, teachers and educators aspire to achieve.... It is a compelling, wholly personal, evidence-informed, globally-inspired call to action. Drawing on her unique professional background, Romana offers insight into her own experience – successes and failures – to recognise and challenge privilege and power.
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From the start, Romana sets a uniquely powerful tone. Readers are encouraged to pause, breath and reflect. Throughout, Romana skillfully illustrates the importance of understanding and deconstructing our individual, organisational and system-wide practices that hinder wholeness. ​In each chapter, readers are invited to reflect on their own experience and contributions. There is no judgement, only aspiration for individuals, schools and wider education systems to acknowledge the historical influences and systemic conditions which often make true learning and development improbable. Romana is uniquely positioned to present, dissect, and renew the conception and importance of wholeness within education.
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As a teacher, I begin my term in England, moved to action. To live up to Romana’s ambitions, I reaffirm my personal commitment to ensuring ALL of my students are able to learn our required content while also learning more about themselves and their own duty of care for others.
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KAREN EDGE
Educational Leadership, Institute of Education, University College London (United Kingdom)
Global Education Policy Expert​
Over the last 15+ years in educational work, I have come to believe that schools are places for an enriching socio-cultural dialogue that can empower or subvert its pupils, depending upon how the school is imagined, designed and brought into action. Romana's reflections in this book offered an opportunity to re-engage with this belief. The book presented important mirrors, as Emily Styles refers, to my journey and a kind of solidarity in hoping for a different world. It also offered windows into her perspectives to look at some of my experiences from a new lens. The book offers a poetic movement across real landscapes of education and gently invites us to explore lives, of our own and the young people we serve, from a more nuanced lens and with some courageous hope into new possibilities.
ROHIT KUMAR
CEO, Apni Shala Foundation (India)
Educator and reflective practitioner; socio-cultural dialogue in Indian education
Weaving Wholeness is a groundbreaking and essential resource for anyone involved in the lives of children – whether you're an educator, parent, caregiver, community worker, social worker, policymaker, or philanthropist in education and equity. As a Muslim minority from post-colonial India, Romana brings a unique perspective, seamlessly integrating pedagogical theory with practical trauma-informed classroom strategies.
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In an era defined by climate change, geopolitical conflicts, technological disruptions, pandemics, and rising polarization, traditional educational approaches are in urgent need of transformation. The 2030 OECD Learning Compass underscores the importance of equipping students to thrive in the future and highlights the necessity of evolving teacher competencies. The pressing question then becomes: How can we, as adults, embody these principles in our interactions with children? Weaving Wholeness answers this by offering actionable guidance for creating classroom environments and spaces rooted in love and justice, particularly in contexts burdened by deep structural inequities related to race, religion, class, socio-economic status, abilities, gender, and more.
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This book challenges us to start with self-reflection, proposing that true systemic and transformative change begins with personal self-awareness, ownership, and healing. Only through this inner work can we achieve lasting positive outcomes. I am immensely proud of my sister – teacher, ally, and inspiration – for guiding us toward deeper understanding and meaningful change. I recommend keeping this book by your bedside as a trusted companion for anyone who is courageous and passionate about nurturing thriving children in our shared future together.
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SUMITRA PASUPATHY
Karuna Advisory Impact (Singapore), Global Leader in Social Innovation,
Learning, Environmental Sustainability, and Systems Change
Showing and discussing what a privilege looks like in different corners of the world is important. This book provides a great resource to understand concrete, and sometimes hard-to-accept examples how positive future opportunities are challenging or impossible to reach for many youth. Don't try to read this book too quickly - give time for yourself to accept that we have a lot to do in terms of equitable access to educational opportunity and meaningful life."​​
LASSE LEPONEIMI
Co-Founder and Executive Director, The HundrED Foundation (Finland)
Identifying and scaling global education innovations
Romana's book offers a refreshing perspective on education, inviting readers to explore their own embodied experiences and emotions. As a professional working in inclusive settings, I found the author's insights deeply resonant. The book's intersectional approach challenges us to confront privilege and create a more equitable environment.
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One of the book's strengths is its emphasis on the four processes of inquiry, particularly the final one: "how do I rise as an ancestor." This process serves as a roadmap for transformation in public school systems . The book's well-researched content and integration of multiple approaches offer a comprehensive understanding of human experience in education. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to foster a more inclusive and just world. It is a decolonising book that you cannot put down when you start, but also makes you pause time and again to rehumanise yourself, to see and be seen.
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DEVIKA MEHTA
Co-Founder, Synchrony (India), Dance Movement Psychotherapist and Clinical Psychologist
Leading voice in inclusive practices and decolonising approaches in therapy and education
This book offers an invitation to truly see one another – the child in your class, the teacher in the staffroom, the self that sees them all. When we witness others, we also offer them an opportunity to witness themselves and their own route back to wholeness.
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It is strewn with sentences that strike on a deep bell of truth. Read them. Slowly. Again and again. Until the truth that they unlock in you becomes your own permanent discovery, and you can no longer see the world, or the children and people in it, in any other way. This way of being cannot be ‘made’ to happen, or taught as a set of rules – but it can be nurtured and learnt at the deepest level of self, and the conditions to invite others in can be effectively created.
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‘Weaving Wholeness' resonates in the soul, distilling the words, thoughts and intentions of so many who are working for a deep, lasting, genuine transformation of how we are together, and how we learn together. Read it. Read it if you care about this work – it will help you to feel less alone, and to connect with the vast global community of people who are living into this way of being. Read it if you care about children and communities – it will offer you a lens to see into your and their possibilities, and to step into realising these. Read it if you don’t understand this work, and don’t feel that there is any way to escape the constructs of modernity – it will offer you a crack through which new light might shine.
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ROBYN WHITTAKER
Co-Founder, Africa Voices Dialogue (South Africa)
Expertise in fostering deep collaboration, relational trust, and societal wellbeing
Hannah Arendt described education as that point at which we decide if we love the world enough to take responsibility for it. Romana's book makes a compelling case for the importance of love in education. To read it is to open up the possibility of being changed for the better, it is a remarkable and important book and I hope it is widely read by anyone working in education.
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DOMINIC REGESTER
Director of Education and Director, Center for Education Transformation, Salzburg Global Seminar (Austria)
Expertise in international education policy and transformation
"Pause and Breathe," the book simply and subtly advises; I don't understand but obey. In Weaving Wholeness, Romana achieves one of the most daring and longed-for feats: explaining the unexplainable—Love and Justice—by diving into all the curves, spaces, and depths of these words. From the very title, the book delivers on its promise by offering writing that goes above and beyond, creating a holistic body-mind reading experience. It prompts the reader to pause and question, to think. It prompts us to move, feel, notice, and acknowledge. To feel our own bodies.
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By painting colorful and expansive worlds that span continents, Romana tells the stories of unheard lives, giving voice to the voiceless and illuminating the unseen. She reveals people so beautifully unique yet so encompassing and representative of Wholeness that they unlock deeper truths about not merely education but, more importantly, about ourselves and the world. This is Justice.
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This is what makes it a must-read for virtually everyone. But how did this book manage to tell, show, and paint all these worlds? Romana's advice to see these worlds and stories through the heart may be the answer. The book advises and teaches exploring the external world by sharpening inward sight. This answer is unexpected, even shocking, as it is a daring and bold challenge to our fast-paced world. But this is Love.
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Returning to Wholeness: despite her graceful emphasis on spirituality and transcendence, Romana also successfully incorporates a scientific perspective, grounding the entire book in solid reality. It is here that she reminds us once again of her promise to weave Wholeness.
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And suddenly, I understand. The book's most repeated phrase, "Pause and Breathe," serves as a profound invitation to the heart and mind of the reader. It whispers to pause amidst the relentless pace of our lives and breathe in the beauty, depth, honesty, and love offered here and now. To breathe the fabric of Wholeness woven by Love and Justice closely held to our faces. So we do.
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ANI MKRTCHIAN
Head of Seroond, Teach For Armenia (Armenia)
Leads whole-school transformation for public schools with expertise in social-emotional learning
Romana’s book, Weaving Wholeness is a powerful manifesto for those committed to education as a force for social justice and personal transformation. The book is an essential guide offering educators and policy makers around the world a profound exploration of what it means to create education systems that honour the individuality of every child.
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AASHTI ZAIDI HAI
Founder and CEO, Global School Forum (United Kingdom)
Supporting and scaling non-state education initiatives for underserved children globally
For all of us engaged with education, Weaving Wholeness is Romana Shaikh’s earnest
invitation to pause… and consider the children, with the full context of their lived experience in a world increasingly shorn of love and justice. Bringing her empathy, courage and vulnerability to the conversation, Romana’s voice resonates with us much like the meditative guide, asking us to close our eyes so that we may see more clearly. The future she is asking us to imagine is audacious and yet, the very least we owe our children. Confronted by Romana’s challenge, I am daunted by the journey she is asking us to embark upon. Systems of human development that deliver relief to physical pain and malaise, clean water to quench thirst and finances to fund a venture are complex enough, … how do we unmake and remake a ‘system’ to liberate human imagination and ingenuity and pass down the lived and earned wisdom of our tribe to our offspring? I deeply agree with Romana’s advice on how this is to be attempted: first, through trust in the intent and wisdom of individual educators and parents, enabled and empowered by those who wield power, and even more importantly, through patience in the strength and inevitability of slow, incremental, multi-generational change.
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ZIA AKHTER ABBAS
President and CEO, The Citizens Foundation (Pakistan)
Global South leaders in educational development, access, and resource mobilization
As a global community, we are not providing children with the education they need to thrive in today’s world. It has been a privilege to partner with Romana to build Kizazi to try to change that reality. This book is a wonderful distillation of her clarity of purpose and fierce determination to do the right thing for children. It is a reflection tool, practical handbook and manifesto for change.
NICK CANNING
Founder, Kizazi (United Kingdom)
Focused on creating educational solutions for children to thrive
As Romana Shaikh says, this book is about education for justice and love. It is an invitation to understand education from a personal perspective. It invites you to discover what education is to yourself. It's a call to introspection and continued struggle to a better world for all children.
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ARMANDO ALI
Chief Executive Officer, PAL Network (Kenya)
Improving foundational literacy and numeracy across the Global South
Weaving Wholeness is a reflective, thought provoking and courageous book in the present educational landscape. It inspires one to view children not just as students but as complete individuals and advocates for the concepts of love and justice in an intertwined manner. Romana’s writing offers insights and solutions for education of the next generation of children currently mired by oppressive societal conditions.
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SUGRA CHUNAWALA
Professor (Retd), Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education,
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (India)