Engaging The Paradigm: Higher Educational Practices and Pedagogical Politics (original) (raw)
The selection of this topic for the dissertational requirements of this program have largely been guided by my experiences of being a student involved in an ongoing process of learning through the last many years of my life. Most pertinently since taking an active interest in what constitutes an education through three years of studying literature, a semester studying philosophy and a year and a half of doing this masters in sociology. While principally this engagement is an activity which bears life in the classroom as well as the seclusion of writing in the evening, an essential aspect of this process has been my involvements with multiple study circles, student groups involved in labour politics and a university newspaper. This peripherally maps the milieus or fields from which I shall be drawing from apart from the University itself. What I seek to investigate and shed some light on are the prevalent and emerging practices in higher education from the perspective of the two prime parties concerned-teachers and students and what their experiences of learning and it's relation to their non-academic life has been. This is sought to be enfleshed within the frame of directive changes sought to be implemented by the UGC and the MHRD in education, as well as a comparative portrayal of public and private institutions and their differing pedagogical trajectories. I was a part of the last batch of students taught in the annual calendar in DU, studying literature at Hans Raj. The semesterization of the calendar has led to marked changes in how it is possible to engage with the syllabus and how to prepare, present, teach and study these courses in a situation where the anxiety of an exam is upon students fresh out of school in the first couple of months of their entry into college. Earlier, we were introduced to how and what say literary studies constitutes, what we could do with it and the importance of such a disciplinary practice in understanding our everyday realities by teachers who had devoted many years of their lives enriching the experience of studying varying aspects, niches and periods of historical and cultural production. This was quite bluntly swept aside with the need to prepare students for an exam almost immediately upon their foray into the discipline. Qualitatively this led to marked changes in how and what it was possible to do between students and teachers in a classroom. Even leaving aside dialogue; there were some fairly absurd rearrangement in how the syllabi was divided with novels, plays and poetry being taught in one semester and their supplementary historical and background readings being taught in another. Essential to what enlivened the course was its chronological trajectory which allowed us students to develop a sense of how these various literary movements related to each other historically and the impetuses and spurs which egged and facilitated the emergence of tropes, genres or themes. The value of this is something not easily expressible without its practice as literature is one of the best ways of understanding a people or a
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