3 months ago
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‘Choice’ and ‘flexibility’ person go the caller buzzwords successful acquisition reforms and argumentation documents. Across the country, educators are focusing — much than ever earlier — connected catering to the idiosyncratic needs and aspirations of students. The accepted one-size-fits-all model is giving mode to an attack that values the diverseness of pupil aptitudes and interests.
The caller paradigm encourages aggregate pathways, allowing students to prosecute combinations of courses and careers that align with their passions and potential. A subject large tin present insignificant successful music, for lawsuit — a displacement symbolic of the determination from teacher-centric to learner-centric education. The absorption has expanded beyond disciplinary boundaries, embracing multi-disciplinary and adjacent transdisciplinary approaches. The rationale is clear: learning confined to a azygous subject risks isolating students from related fields, portion cross-disciplinary survey offers a larger and fuller position of the world.
However, erstwhile specified ideals are imposed upon a rigid world model similar ours, the prime offered is Hobson’s prime — prime successful sanction only. Teacher workload, accepted pedagogy, mediocre pupil to teacher ratios, and outdated valuation systems conspire to trim flexibility to a specified insubstantial promise.
The illusion of choice
The instauration of the Choice-Based Credit and Semester System (CBCSS) successful Kerala successful 2009 was heralded arsenic a landmark betterment meant to connection students much freedom. In theory, credits were to bespeak play teaching hours. In practice, the strategy accommodated anomalies: a four-credit people could tally for 5 hours a week, portion a two-credit people mightiness necessitate conscionable 4 hours. Such inconsistencies were softly ignored to support the illusion of freedom. Moreover, the alleged buffet of choices were hardly choices successful the existent sense. Beyond a acceptable of compulsory halfway courses, students were offered a constricted enactment of ‘electives’, often chosen by the departments themselves. The much-advertised “open course” — a two-credit insubstantial successful the 5th semester offered to students of different departments — was the lone semblance of choice. Thus, contempt the rhetoric, genuine world state remained a distant dream.
The aforesaid rhetoric of flexibility erstwhile again took centre stage, with the motorboat of the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) successful Kerala successful 2024, arsenic mandated by the National Education Policy, 2020. The caller operation allowed students to power majors and minors, theoretically enhancing autonomy. Yet, dissimilar earlier program changes, this betterment demanded heavy structural changes, making it highly challenging. The accepted thought of teachers delivering lectures successful fixed classrooms gave mode to students moving crossed departments successful hunt of suitable courses and teachers.
It goes without saying that structural changes airs insurmountable challenges. A lawsuit successful constituent was a clause successful the assemblage regulations of Kerala prohibiting students from choosing minors from allied disciplines. While it was intended to beforehand interdisciplinary learning, it inadvertently hindered specialisation.
Disciplines similar Commerce and Functional English, which had antecedently allowed aligned minors, recovered this regularisation counterproductive — a regularisation masquerading arsenic choice.
Need for systemic changes
For immoderate betterment to succeed, systemic changes are essential. During the author’s tenure as Chairperson of the Board of Studies successful English astatine the University of Calicut in 2017, two cardinal innovations were introduced.
The archetypal was a skill-oriented question insubstantial for the people connected Communication Skills. The accepted format, filled with effort questions connected theories and models, failed to trial existent connection ability. It was replaced with a purely activity-based insubstantial designed to measure existent skills. Yet adjacent this alteration ran into bureaucratic hurdles: support for an accompanying reply booklet was denied connected “confidentiality” grounds, forcing evaluators to flip endlessly betwixt question papers (which carried much than doubly the fig of questions of its earlier counterpart) and reply sheets.
The 2nd innovation was a people titled ‘Introducing Literature’ — a hands-on, concept-driven insubstantial designed to thatch however to work lit alternatively than simply what to read. Instead of memorising texts and answering questions connected the ground of prescribed texts, students were taught literate concepts and were required to construe unseen passages from linguistic, aesthetic and governmental angles. Ironically, this extremist measurement met much absorption from teachers than students, arsenic it demanded a displacement from accepted methods to concept-based teaching, teaching america the invaluable acquisition that teacher preparedness and grooming should person been ensured anterior to rolling retired the reforms.
Facing crushed realities
Today, the FYUGP aspires to marque undergraduate acquisition much skill-based, research-oriented, and autonomous, with a humble 10% autonomy fixed to teachers for framing syllabi wherein each teacher tin transportation successful their innovative ideas. Yet, astatine the crushed level, classrooms and methodology stay mostly unchanged. One tin lone reap the results if capable teacher grooming is provided, if people sizes are smaller, and if probe were to beryllium integrated into teaching workloads.
Abida Farooqui is simply a Senate Member of the University of Calicut, and Professor and Head, P.G and Research Department of English, Govt. Arts & Science College, Kondotty
