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Anita Rampal
Curriculum Contestations: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Texts
Anita Rampal
Professor, Elementary and Social Education,
Department of Education, Delhi University
This presentation locates the contestations over curriculum and textbook development in Kerala within larger theoretical and policy debates on ‘decentralisation’ of curriculum construction. It analyses how ‘standardisation’ and centralisation have been invoked in some countries, in the name of better ‘control’ over decision making and higher ‘efficiency’, while on the other hand, ‘autonomy’, ‘accountability through participation’ and a ‘humanist’ democratic engagement with the aims of education are seen as elements of decentralisation. It looks at the pedagogical challenges and dilemmas of espousing a ‘critical pedagogy’ through a ‘constructivist’ approach, within the state and at the national level, and calls for a deeper engagement with the processes of children’s learning in diverse cultural contexts.
Anita Rampal
Professor, Elementary and Social Education,
Department of Education, Delhi University
This presentation locates the contestations over curriculum and textbook development in Kerala within larger theoretical and policy debates on ‘decentralisation’ of curriculum construction. It analyses how ‘standardisation’ and centralisation have been invoked in some countries, in the name of better ‘control’ over decision making and higher ‘efficiency’, while on the other hand, ‘autonomy’, ‘accountability through participation’ and a ‘humanist’ democratic engagement with the aims of education are seen as elements of decentralisation. It looks at the pedagogical challenges and dilemmas of espousing a ‘critical pedagogy’ through a ‘constructivist’ approach, within the state and at the national level, and calls for a deeper engagement with the processes of children’s learning in diverse cultural contexts.
Empowering through Education: Taking Positive Measures
Prof. Anita Julka
Department of Education
of Groups with Special Needs, N.C.E.R.T
New Delhi
The social model views Disability as a socially created problem, and basically as a matter of full integration of individuals into society. Disability is not an attribute of an individual, but rather a complex collection of conditions, many of which are created by the social environment. Hence the management of the problem requires social action, and it is the collective responsibility of society at large to make the environmental modifications necessary for full participation of people with disabilities in all areas of social life. The issue is therefore an attitudinal or ideological one requiring social change, which at the political level becomes a question of human rights (ICF, 2001). One of the major social changes and a significant achievement of the Indian disability movement is the enactment of the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995. The preamble to this Act clearly delineates its objective of promoting and ensuring equality and full participation of persons with disabilities.
Education is a social right that is closely connected to the exercise of many other rights like right to work, right to political partcipation and for exercising the right to culture. Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recently ratified by India indicates that States Parties recognize the right of persons with disabilities to education. With a view to realizing this right without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity, States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels and life long learning. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 has been a significant promoter of education for all by making education a fundamental right. Inspite of governmental and non-governmental efforts to grant children with disabilities the basic right to education in order to achieve real equality and empowerment, corresponding improvements in the educational scenario for these children is not yet visible. Based on analysis of the actual court cases and judgments, constitutional provisions and other policy and legislative frameworks, the paper highlights various challenges and initiatives for children with disabilities in gaining access to regular education. It becomes evident from this analysis that formal declarations of rights, formulation of policies and programmes will not make the unequal equal. This has to be supported by positive steps for bringing the disadvantaged to the level of the fortunate advantaged to make real the equality guaranteed to them.
Prof. Anita JulkaDepartment of Education
of Groups with Special Needs, N.C.E.R.T
New Delhi
The social model views Disability as a socially created problem, and basically as a matter of full integration of individuals into society. Disability is not an attribute of an individual, but rather a complex collection of conditions, many of which are created by the social environment. Hence the management of the problem requires social action, and it is the collective responsibility of society at large to make the environmental modifications necessary for full participation of people with disabilities in all areas of social life. The issue is therefore an attitudinal or ideological one requiring social change, which at the political level becomes a question of human rights (ICF, 2001). One of the major social changes and a significant achievement of the Indian disability movement is the enactment of the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995. The preamble to this Act clearly delineates its objective of promoting and ensuring equality and full participation of persons with disabilities.
Education is a social right that is closely connected to the exercise of many other rights like right to work, right to political partcipation and for exercising the right to culture. Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recently ratified by India indicates that States Parties recognize the right of persons with disabilities to education. With a view to realizing this right without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity, States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels and life long learning. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 has been a significant promoter of education for all by making education a fundamental right. Inspite of governmental and non-governmental efforts to grant children with disabilities the basic right to education in order to achieve real equality and empowerment, corresponding improvements in the educational scenario for these children is not yet visible. Based on analysis of the actual court cases and judgments, constitutional provisions and other policy and legislative frameworks, the paper highlights various challenges and initiatives for children with disabilities in gaining access to regular education. It becomes evident from this analysis that formal declarations of rights, formulation of policies and programmes will not make the unequal equal. This has to be supported by positive steps for bringing the disadvantaged to the level of the fortunate advantaged to make real the equality guaranteed to them.
M.Anandakrishnan
CHARACTER AND ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
M.Anandakrishnan
Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Kanpur
The attributes of a knowledge society are described in many different ways. In any case the two key attributes are: one, the access to relevant knowledge should be pervasive among all sections of the society, all age groups and all occupation categories; and two, the access to knowledge should not be restricted by exploitative tendencies and unfair social norms. The explosive growth of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has brought within easy reach a large variety of the sources of existing knowledge, often packaged in forms that can be easily availed.
At the same time, the new technologies also provide access to mind boggling volumes of data and information that can have considerable value to generation of new knowledge. However this would require special ability to extract the useful data and information by discarding the irrelevant and spurious data and information. Such a discriminative capability is mainly dependent upon the nature of education system at all levels. The character of the education system will determine the characteristics of the knowledge society. This paper describes the nature of educational improvements that can facilitate this process.
M.Anandakrishnan
Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Kanpur
The attributes of a knowledge society are described in many different ways. In any case the two key attributes are: one, the access to relevant knowledge should be pervasive among all sections of the society, all age groups and all occupation categories; and two, the access to knowledge should not be restricted by exploitative tendencies and unfair social norms. The explosive growth of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has brought within easy reach a large variety of the sources of existing knowledge, often packaged in forms that can be easily availed.
At the same time, the new technologies also provide access to mind boggling volumes of data and information that can have considerable value to generation of new knowledge. However this would require special ability to extract the useful data and information by discarding the irrelevant and spurious data and information. Such a discriminative capability is mainly dependent upon the nature of education system at all levels. The character of the education system will determine the characteristics of the knowledge society. This paper describes the nature of educational improvements that can facilitate this process.
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Towards democratization of education in India
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Insitute of Development Studies, Kolkata
Democratization of education in India, or for that matter, any other country, is part of, and intimately connected with the democratization of society and polity. As far as we know, human beings are the only animals who can communicate by various means, the learning of one individual or one group to other individuals and other groups at a distance and over generations. From the beginning of class societies, which is almost always the beginning of development of means of learning, such as memorizing by rote, pictographs and alphabets, a band of persons, in most cases belonging to a priestly order monopolized the dominant means of learning, denying entry of the majority to the charmed circle of learners and savants. In Brahmanical Hinduism, the monopolization was sanctioned by scriptural interdicts. .
The struggle to make education universally accessible in India began in real earnest, although many great educators in colonial India had argued for the universalization of literacy and more broadly education at all levels. Even the universalization of literacy, which was attained in most countries of the North Atlantic seaboard and Japan before World War I, remains an unrealized dream in most major states of India. Only three states of South India and several states of North-east India are within a striking distance from that goal.
Socialist states and states in East Asia, which have undergone a social transformation, have shown that the alibi of low income of a country will not hold when it comes to democratizing the access to education. Countries such as China, Viet Nam and South Korea have not only attained higher rates of literacy than India, but starting from a much lower base, they have also been able to provide access to tertiary education of the relevant cohorts at more than double the rate of the corresponding degree of access in India.
In some official and right-wing circles in India, a shibboleth has taken hold that there is a necessary trade-off between public expenditures on primary education and higher education and that higher education being a ‘merit good’, it should be paid for by the intending students themselves. The central government , with all its protestations of promoting inclusive growth has refused to spend the 6 per cent of GDP on education that is accepted as the minimum public expenditure needed to attain the goal of universal literacy. Higher education needs to spread among the Dalits, so-called lower castes, most Adivasi groups and minority communities in most parts in order for them to have access to employment with dignity and to the public resources meant for them. Ongoing privatization of education in India is severely increasing inequality of access to and achievement in education in India and seriously denting the quality of education and thereby also denting the prospect of fast advances in science, technology and real income. Education is too important a matter to be left to the vagaries of mercenaries masquerading as educators.
Amitbhaduri
The Economics and Politics of Education.
Amitbhaduri
Professor, Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Education is both a consumption good and an investment good, but with one important difference. As a consumption good it is mostly a private good, as an investment good it is a public as well as a private good.The public good character of education means privatization of education would lead to underinvestment, as the benefits that are public will not be captured by the private investor. This applies to education at all levels, perhaps more to the lower level.The private return on education depends on job prospect which may increase with the level of education for an individual, but macro-economically it depends on the total number of available jobs. The analogy is like this: with more education an individual comes more in front of a queue, say in a ration shop, but the total ration and the length of the queue (which when inadequate) remains unchanged, and deprives the less educated. Education improves individual chance without changing employment situation.
The relation between education, social control and privilege operates largely through network and is reflected indirectly in earning differentials not resulting from higher or lower skill. Argument about meritocracy, rejection of a common school system etc revolve partly around this issue of institutionalized privilege. The relation between education and social prejudice (e.g. caste, religious intolerance etc) is often misunderstood or over simplified. Prejudices based on privilege are unlikely to be corrected by more education. It is not information failure but class/group privilege
Similarly, if we take a narrow legal view of rights, understanding rights theoretically requires education. But awareness of operational rights (usually group rights) which are legal as well as acquired through social/political movements require not more education, but social movements and campaigns.Undue emphasis on education is often an expression of the privilege of being more educated. As a matter of fact ‘good education’ is often a method of inculcating conformity. What is ‘good’ education should be defined in a social context, as it depends on the way the society is organized and needs to be changed.
Amitbhaduri
Professor, Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Education is both a consumption good and an investment good, but with one important difference. As a consumption good it is mostly a private good, as an investment good it is a public as well as a private good.The public good character of education means privatization of education would lead to underinvestment, as the benefits that are public will not be captured by the private investor. This applies to education at all levels, perhaps more to the lower level.The private return on education depends on job prospect which may increase with the level of education for an individual, but macro-economically it depends on the total number of available jobs. The analogy is like this: with more education an individual comes more in front of a queue, say in a ration shop, but the total ration and the length of the queue (which when inadequate) remains unchanged, and deprives the less educated. Education improves individual chance without changing employment situation.
The relation between education, social control and privilege operates largely through network and is reflected indirectly in earning differentials not resulting from higher or lower skill. Argument about meritocracy, rejection of a common school system etc revolve partly around this issue of institutionalized privilege. The relation between education and social prejudice (e.g. caste, religious intolerance etc) is often misunderstood or over simplified. Prejudices based on privilege are unlikely to be corrected by more education. It is not information failure but class/group privilege
Similarly, if we take a narrow legal view of rights, understanding rights theoretically requires education. But awareness of operational rights (usually group rights) which are legal as well as acquired through social/political movements require not more education, but social movements and campaigns.Undue emphasis on education is often an expression of the privilege of being more educated. As a matter of fact ‘good education’ is often a method of inculcating conformity. What is ‘good’ education should be defined in a social context, as it depends on the way the society is organized and needs to be changed.
A. David Ambrose
FROM CHARITY TO RIGHT: EDUCATION, LAW AND JUDICIARY
A. David Ambrose
Professor Dept of Legal Studies , University of Madras,
email: profambrose@yahoo.co.in
The Constitution of India when adopted did not contain any express provision guaranteeing the right to education. However, the Constitution indirectly recognized the importance of education in Part IV of the Constitution. Thus Art.45 provides that ‘the state shall endeavour to provide, with in a period of ten years from the commencement of Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years’. Art.46 imposes an obligation to promote with special care the educational interest of the weaker sections including SCs and STs. Similarly Art.41 states that, the state shall make effective provision for securing the right to education, with in its economic capacity and development. Even though the Constitution imposed an obligation on the state to impart education to its citizens, the stale owing to its financial capacity, was not discharging its constitutional obligation. Therefore, during the first decade of our Independence education perse was considered to be an activity that is charitable in nature.
But after nearly 5 decades, now right to education has been not only recoginised by judicial pronouncements but also expressly by the Constitution itself. The present paper attempts to discuss the development of right to education in India. While doing so the different facets and scope of such right will also be discussed and analysed.
Recently the Right to education Bill-2005 which make education as a fundamental right for every children for every child in the age group was cleared up by union cabinet on 30th October 2008. It is expected that the bill will be introduced in parliament during the December 2008 session.
A. David Ambrose
Professor Dept of Legal Studies , University of Madras,
email: profambrose@yahoo.co.in
The Constitution of India when adopted did not contain any express provision guaranteeing the right to education. However, the Constitution indirectly recognized the importance of education in Part IV of the Constitution. Thus Art.45 provides that ‘the state shall endeavour to provide, with in a period of ten years from the commencement of Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years’. Art.46 imposes an obligation to promote with special care the educational interest of the weaker sections including SCs and STs. Similarly Art.41 states that, the state shall make effective provision for securing the right to education, with in its economic capacity and development. Even though the Constitution imposed an obligation on the state to impart education to its citizens, the stale owing to its financial capacity, was not discharging its constitutional obligation. Therefore, during the first decade of our Independence education perse was considered to be an activity that is charitable in nature.
But after nearly 5 decades, now right to education has been not only recoginised by judicial pronouncements but also expressly by the Constitution itself. The present paper attempts to discuss the development of right to education in India. While doing so the different facets and scope of such right will also be discussed and analysed.
Recently the Right to education Bill-2005 which make education as a fundamental right for every children for every child in the age group was cleared up by union cabinet on 30th October 2008. It is expected that the bill will be introduced in parliament during the December 2008 session.
Amarendra Behera
Dialectics of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Evaluation
Amarendra Behera, Reader
Curriculum Group, NCERT, Sri Aurobindo Marg,
New Delhi-110016
India, the largest democracy of the world is only second to China in its population i.e. more than 100 crore (Census of India 2001). After 62years of Independence it has been able to achieve only 67.3 (Department of Education, MHRD, GOI-2008) per cent literacy while its Asian counterparts like China, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand have crossed the threshold by achieving cent per cent literacy long ago. If that is our place in the nations of this fast advancing world, it is more than obvious as to what will be pace of our development? A developing society like ours should take into account not merely the needs of a growing economy but also reflect the spirit of a dynamic, liberal and growth oriented society. Education has always been perceived not only as an agent of social change but the very basis of creating a dynamic, liberal and growth oriented society.
Further, there is a deep disquiet about several aspects of our educational practice: (a) the school system is characterised by an inflexibility which makes it resistant to change; (b) learning has become an isolated activity which does not encourage children to link knowledge with their lives in any organic or vital way; (c) schools promote a regime of thought which discourages creative thinking and insights; (d) what is presented and transmitted in the name of learning in schools bypasses vital dimensions of the human capacity to create new knowledge; (e) the “future” of the child has taken centre-stage to the near exclusion of the child’s “present”, which is detrimental to the wellbeing of the child as well as the society and the nation. The basic concerns of education—to enable children to make sense of life and develop their potential, to define and pursue a purpose and recognise the right of others to do the same—stand uncontested and valid even today. If anything, we need to reiterate the mutual interdependence of humans, and as Tagore says, we achieve our greatest happiness when we realise ourselves through others. Equally, we need to reaffirm our commitment to the concept of equality, within the landscape of cultural and socioeconomic diversity from which children enter into the portals of the school. Individual aspirations in a competitive economy tend to reduce education to becoming an instrument of material success. The perception, which places the individual in exclusively competitive relationships, puts unreasonable stress on children, and thus distorts values. It also makes learning from each other a matter of little consequence. Education must be able to promote values which foster peace, humaneness and tolerance in a multi-cultural society.
The problem of curriculum load on children is another important issue. A committee appointed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in the early 1990s had analysed this problem, tracing its roots to the system’s tendency to treat information as knowledge. In its report Learning Without Burden the committee pointed out that learning at school cannot become a joyful experience unless we change our perception of the child as a receiver of knowledge and move beyond the convention to use textbooks as the basis for examination. The impulse to teach everything arises from lack of faith in children’s own creative instinct and the capacity to construct knowledge out of their experience. The size of textbooks has been growing over the years, even as the pressure to include new topics mounts and the effort to synthesise knowledge and treat it holistically gets weaker. Flabby textbooks and the syllabi they cover symbolise a systemic failure to address children in a child-centred manner. Those who write such encyclopaedic textbooks are guided by the popular belief that there has been an explosion of knowledge. Therefore, vast amounts of knowledge should be pushed down little children’s throats in order to catch up with other countries. Learning Without Burden recommended a major change in the design of syllabi and textbooks, and also a change in the social ethos, which places stress on children to become aggressively competitive and exhibit precocity. To make teaching a means of harnessing the child’s creative nature, the report recommended a fundamental change in the matter of organising the school curriculum, and also in the system of examination which forces children to memorise information and to reproduce it. Learning for the sake of being examined in a mechanical manner takes away the joy of being young and delinks school knowledge from everyday experience.
The National Curriculum Framework (NCF)-2005 which has been developed after a country wide debate and deliberation addresses some basic questions related to development of curriculum:(a) What educational purposes should the schools seek to achieve?, (b) What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to achieve these purposes? (c) How can these educational experiences be meaningfully organised? (d) How do we ensure that these educational purposes are indeed being accomplished? The fact that learning has become a source of burden and stress on children is an evidence of a deep distortion in educational aims and quality. To correct this distortion, the NCF-2005 proposes five guiding principles for curriculum development: (i) connecting knowledge to life outside the school; (ii) ensuring that learning shifts away from rote methods; (iii) enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks; (iv) making examinations more flexible and integrating them with classroom life; and (v) nurturing an overriding identity informed by caring concerns within the democratic polity of the country.
Besides, while putting the child at the front seat, the NCF-2005 has recommended for constructivists approach in teaching and learning (for construction of knowledge and fostering creativity, connecting knowledge across disciplinary boundaries for insightful construction of knowledge), providing learning experiences for developing critical perspectives on social issues (critical pedagogy), plurality of textbooks and other material incorporating local knowledge mediated through constitutional values, scientific temper and principles.
While discouraging the cut throat competition, the NCF-2005 emphasises on group learning strategies and states that examinations needs to be non-threatening, flexible and integrated with everyday classroom life. Also the NCF has advocated for a shift from content based testing to problem solving and competency based assessment, examination of shorter duration, flexible time limit, evaluation by peers, maintaining of daily diary by both teachers and students, maintaining portfolio etc.
In order to ensure effective transaction of the curriculum there must be some system for co-ordination across the key departments, and it is the school curriculum that must lead programmes rather than the stand-alone programmes intervening in the school curriculum (NCF-2005). Also the National Curriculum Framework-2005 has emphatically mentioned about cooperation and coordination among various agencies (at National, state and local level); encouraging grater communication and transparency between different structures and levels of decision making; and convergence of programmes as systemic issues and indicators of quality schooling. Then it is not very far that the Constitutional vision of India as a secular, egalitarian and pluralistic society founded on the values of equality and social justice, will be grooming with the fruit of a national system of education and provide opportunities for nurturing independence of thought and action, sensitivity to others, participation in democratic process with the idea of living together, and the ability to contribute to economic processes and social change.
Amarendra Behera, Reader
Curriculum Group, NCERT, Sri Aurobindo Marg,
New Delhi-110016
India, the largest democracy of the world is only second to China in its population i.e. more than 100 crore (Census of India 2001). After 62years of Independence it has been able to achieve only 67.3 (Department of Education, MHRD, GOI-2008) per cent literacy while its Asian counterparts like China, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand have crossed the threshold by achieving cent per cent literacy long ago. If that is our place in the nations of this fast advancing world, it is more than obvious as to what will be pace of our development? A developing society like ours should take into account not merely the needs of a growing economy but also reflect the spirit of a dynamic, liberal and growth oriented society. Education has always been perceived not only as an agent of social change but the very basis of creating a dynamic, liberal and growth oriented society.
Further, there is a deep disquiet about several aspects of our educational practice: (a) the school system is characterised by an inflexibility which makes it resistant to change; (b) learning has become an isolated activity which does not encourage children to link knowledge with their lives in any organic or vital way; (c) schools promote a regime of thought which discourages creative thinking and insights; (d) what is presented and transmitted in the name of learning in schools bypasses vital dimensions of the human capacity to create new knowledge; (e) the “future” of the child has taken centre-stage to the near exclusion of the child’s “present”, which is detrimental to the wellbeing of the child as well as the society and the nation. The basic concerns of education—to enable children to make sense of life and develop their potential, to define and pursue a purpose and recognise the right of others to do the same—stand uncontested and valid even today. If anything, we need to reiterate the mutual interdependence of humans, and as Tagore says, we achieve our greatest happiness when we realise ourselves through others. Equally, we need to reaffirm our commitment to the concept of equality, within the landscape of cultural and socioeconomic diversity from which children enter into the portals of the school. Individual aspirations in a competitive economy tend to reduce education to becoming an instrument of material success. The perception, which places the individual in exclusively competitive relationships, puts unreasonable stress on children, and thus distorts values. It also makes learning from each other a matter of little consequence. Education must be able to promote values which foster peace, humaneness and tolerance in a multi-cultural society.
The problem of curriculum load on children is another important issue. A committee appointed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in the early 1990s had analysed this problem, tracing its roots to the system’s tendency to treat information as knowledge. In its report Learning Without Burden the committee pointed out that learning at school cannot become a joyful experience unless we change our perception of the child as a receiver of knowledge and move beyond the convention to use textbooks as the basis for examination. The impulse to teach everything arises from lack of faith in children’s own creative instinct and the capacity to construct knowledge out of their experience. The size of textbooks has been growing over the years, even as the pressure to include new topics mounts and the effort to synthesise knowledge and treat it holistically gets weaker. Flabby textbooks and the syllabi they cover symbolise a systemic failure to address children in a child-centred manner. Those who write such encyclopaedic textbooks are guided by the popular belief that there has been an explosion of knowledge. Therefore, vast amounts of knowledge should be pushed down little children’s throats in order to catch up with other countries. Learning Without Burden recommended a major change in the design of syllabi and textbooks, and also a change in the social ethos, which places stress on children to become aggressively competitive and exhibit precocity. To make teaching a means of harnessing the child’s creative nature, the report recommended a fundamental change in the matter of organising the school curriculum, and also in the system of examination which forces children to memorise information and to reproduce it. Learning for the sake of being examined in a mechanical manner takes away the joy of being young and delinks school knowledge from everyday experience.
The National Curriculum Framework (NCF)-2005 which has been developed after a country wide debate and deliberation addresses some basic questions related to development of curriculum:(a) What educational purposes should the schools seek to achieve?, (b) What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to achieve these purposes? (c) How can these educational experiences be meaningfully organised? (d) How do we ensure that these educational purposes are indeed being accomplished? The fact that learning has become a source of burden and stress on children is an evidence of a deep distortion in educational aims and quality. To correct this distortion, the NCF-2005 proposes five guiding principles for curriculum development: (i) connecting knowledge to life outside the school; (ii) ensuring that learning shifts away from rote methods; (iii) enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks; (iv) making examinations more flexible and integrating them with classroom life; and (v) nurturing an overriding identity informed by caring concerns within the democratic polity of the country.
Besides, while putting the child at the front seat, the NCF-2005 has recommended for constructivists approach in teaching and learning (for construction of knowledge and fostering creativity, connecting knowledge across disciplinary boundaries for insightful construction of knowledge), providing learning experiences for developing critical perspectives on social issues (critical pedagogy), plurality of textbooks and other material incorporating local knowledge mediated through constitutional values, scientific temper and principles.
While discouraging the cut throat competition, the NCF-2005 emphasises on group learning strategies and states that examinations needs to be non-threatening, flexible and integrated with everyday classroom life. Also the NCF has advocated for a shift from content based testing to problem solving and competency based assessment, examination of shorter duration, flexible time limit, evaluation by peers, maintaining of daily diary by both teachers and students, maintaining portfolio etc.
In order to ensure effective transaction of the curriculum there must be some system for co-ordination across the key departments, and it is the school curriculum that must lead programmes rather than the stand-alone programmes intervening in the school curriculum (NCF-2005). Also the National Curriculum Framework-2005 has emphatically mentioned about cooperation and coordination among various agencies (at National, state and local level); encouraging grater communication and transparency between different structures and levels of decision making; and convergence of programmes as systemic issues and indicators of quality schooling. Then it is not very far that the Constitutional vision of India as a secular, egalitarian and pluralistic society founded on the values of equality and social justice, will be grooming with the fruit of a national system of education and provide opportunities for nurturing independence of thought and action, sensitivity to others, participation in democratic process with the idea of living together, and the ability to contribute to economic processes and social change.
Ajay Pal Kapoor
Social-Emotional Learning in Education__
Importance and role of process and non-intellectual factors in education
Ajay Pal Kapoor, Psychologist and Chartered Scientist, Manchester,
Emotional intelligence plays vital role in our lives. In education, most systems place more emphasis on the intellectual development and less emphasis on the social and emotional development. Recent advancement in the field of Positive Psychology (Clifton, in the Gallop organisation, Seligman, 2002, and Diener) focuses on the strengths based learning. The paradigm shift in applied psychology from ‘deficit correction’ to capitalising and enhancing the strengths has been termed as the ‘third wave’ by some prominent psychologists.
Applied learning theorists have enriched the field of education by developing learning theories such as Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner. All this has benefitted the process of education mostly by emphasizing learning on its own. However, the role of educational psychologists has been more focussed on ‘correctional’ practice.
Nevertheless, there have been efforts to widen the process of education and learning in by including the ‘holistic’ approach.
One of the most crucial and debatable issues has been the observation by educationists that ‘the child spends much larger learning time’ outside the school. Additionally the ‘peer group’ formed by the pupils in the schools has a unique mixture of social and emotional dynamics that affects the process of self regulated learning.
The challenge the educationist faces is whether schools should treat the moulding of aspiration and ‘learning to learn’ as a goal of education or leave it for the family and/or the society?
If yes, what are the conceptual and theoretical tools available to explore, assess, and enhance the process of aspiration and learning in the field of education. One of the most useful and important conceptual frameworks to aid such endeavour is understanding from the area of Social-Emotional learning.
This paper aims to explore together with the participants the historical, the current and the future trends of the role Social-emotional learning can play in education.
Importance and role of process and non-intellectual factors in education
Ajay Pal Kapoor, Psychologist and Chartered Scientist, Manchester,
Emotional intelligence plays vital role in our lives. In education, most systems place more emphasis on the intellectual development and less emphasis on the social and emotional development. Recent advancement in the field of Positive Psychology (Clifton, in the Gallop organisation, Seligman, 2002, and Diener) focuses on the strengths based learning. The paradigm shift in applied psychology from ‘deficit correction’ to capitalising and enhancing the strengths has been termed as the ‘third wave’ by some prominent psychologists.
Applied learning theorists have enriched the field of education by developing learning theories such as Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner. All this has benefitted the process of education mostly by emphasizing learning on its own. However, the role of educational psychologists has been more focussed on ‘correctional’ practice.
Nevertheless, there have been efforts to widen the process of education and learning in by including the ‘holistic’ approach.
One of the most crucial and debatable issues has been the observation by educationists that ‘the child spends much larger learning time’ outside the school. Additionally the ‘peer group’ formed by the pupils in the schools has a unique mixture of social and emotional dynamics that affects the process of self regulated learning.
The challenge the educationist faces is whether schools should treat the moulding of aspiration and ‘learning to learn’ as a goal of education or leave it for the family and/or the society?
If yes, what are the conceptual and theoretical tools available to explore, assess, and enhance the process of aspiration and learning in the field of education. One of the most useful and important conceptual frameworks to aid such endeavour is understanding from the area of Social-Emotional learning.
This paper aims to explore together with the participants the historical, the current and the future trends of the role Social-emotional learning can play in education.
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