As Lectures Flow. . .

The odyssey began on July 16, 2007 when the University of Delhi geared up for the new academic year. This time I altered from the role of a student to that of a teacher and found that the difference between the two is quite thin. This made me pen down my reflections.

My foundations have been built on Social Sciences. In the present competitive times, academics is looked down upon as “non-lucrative†. Family, friends, peers desisted my venture into humanities at the college level. Yet the inherent need to understand the dynamism of the human being, politics, sociology, ethics, economy in their multifarious forms, gave me the confidence to go ahead in my own field of interest.

I used to look upon a teacher’s job during my school and college days with awe. Monotonous, dull, unchallenging were the adjectives which I used to ascribe to teaching. Having got into pedagogy by sheer stroke of chance, I found myself thoroughly wrong.

THE task of facing a class of forty students, with variations in intellectual and comprehension ability, is inexplicable in itself. To be able to make a concept clear within a motley lot is what I look forward to after every lecture. It is not only about the delivery of the lecture but ensuring that the nuances of the complex ideas are put across in simple terms.

To do so, the need for mutation clicks in my mind. There is a sudden metamorphosis into the role of a student. How would I want my teacher to explain this particular phenomenon to me? What examples are present in everyday life that gives me proof of it? As I continue, I feel that there have been certain lacunae in the way I was taught, which leaves a lot of scope for improvement. I imagine myself as the student across the bench. The mundane mugging of answers, photocopying reams of ancestral notes, non-involvement of teachers with the students’ thinking process were like thorns in my college education. These become the guide-posts to help me upgrade my teaching by overcoming them. In the process I also try to improve my communication skills. No one is perfect, we are all in a constant process of learning, and this is the crude fact, which distinguishes knowledge from wisdom.

There is a need for intense student-teacher interaction, in a positive sense, beyond the frontiers of the class room. Education, in real terms, takes place beyond the curriculum. The sole reliance on marks as the yardstick of the student’s performance is null and void. We need to place the student in the larger context, as a citizen of the nation, as a child of the Earth. What difference will this education produce in these roles? There is a need to link the theoretical lectures to reality and devise some practical course modules, for example, internship in an organisation dealing with related issues and prepare a project report at the end of it.

These reflections may seem to be the eagerness of a beginner. It is not easy to change things overnight, yet a beginning has to be made. The journey as a student and disseminating informa-tion thereof shall continue. Perhaps it will give me more insights, which I shall be able to share with all subsequently.

The author is a Guest Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Zakir Hussain College, University of Delhi; she did her BA from St Stephen’s College in 2005 and her MA in Political Science from Hindu College in 2007.