Outlook – July 28, 2019

(Axel Boer) #1
LIBERAL TEACHING

UNIVERSITY
SPECIAL

A


S students move from
Class XII to college,
they face radical shifts
in the way disciplines
are taught. The ‘difficulty’
of understanding subjects
is the result not only of a
quantitative expansion of
the discipline’s horizons,
but more importantly, of
fundamental qualitative
shifts in the way knowledge
is produced in professional
scholarship. Sometimes, this
makes for rude surprises.
A student wants to study
psychology because he/she
wants to figure out why men
are from Mars and women
are from Venus. More ambi­
tiously, they wish to learn
about the vagaries of the
human mind. As the major

gets going, they find them­
selves in labs feeding mice
and in class before Power­
Points on neurons. Another
student has taken up eco­
nomics because she longs to
unravel the ethics of human
want and lack in the world.
They find that they have
signed up for advanced
mathematics and statistical
modelling instead.
Inevitably, there are disap­
pointments, sometimes def­
ection from chosen courses.
This is what career confusion
looks like: caught between
adolescent ima gi nation, the
pragmatics of professional
consideration and the con­
temporary intellectual reality
of a discipline. Post­
secondary edu cation is about

exploring disciplines as they
exist in the current state of
research, which can diverge
starkly from the way they ap­
pear in popular imagination.
This is a reality for which the
student has to prepare.
However, a responsible
edu cator knows how to pres­
ent the alien contours of res­
earch knowledge in a way
that makes sense to early stu­
dent learners and excites
them. It is a good idea for the
educator to ask: what is a
teaching question for a disci­
pline? What is a research
question? How are they dif­
ferent from each other?
In 2008, the Teagle
Foundation published a rep­
ort on economics major that
raised this question.

Research questions, it
claimed, are those which take
small steps in highly special­
ised domains. Teaching ques­
tions tackle big issues that
are essentially unanswerable.
Research questions are by
definition small, narrow and
technical, as that is the only
way to find new knowledge.
Teaching questions tend to
be big and sweeping.
Teaching questions, the rep­
ort insists, must be asked as
they drive a passion for learn­
ing and provide an und­
erstanding of the discipline
in a historical capacity, even
though it is hard to come up
with answers that might add
to our knowledge.
Economics, the report says,
has its own set of teaching

Saikat Majumdar
Prof of English &
Creative Writing at
Ashoka University,
is author of College:
Pathways of Possibility

A Warm,


Epistemic Caress


Undergraduate teaching must
focus on the ‘big think’ questions
that ignite passionate interest

New entrants
are often caught
between adoles-
cent imagination
and the intellec-
tual reality of
a discipline

Photographs: TRIBHUVAN TIWARI
Free download pdf