Outlook – July 28, 2019

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