Friday, November 1, 2013

English Through Creative Pedagogy (Book Review in Confluence -South Asian Perspectives (UK), Winter 2013, p#20)


 ENGLISH THROUGH CREATIVE PEDAGOGY

FOUNDATION COURSE: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CREATIVITY -ENGLISH

University of Delhi, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2013
                                    Book Reviewed by Gifty Gupta
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Delhi University has broken ground by developing a versatile “study material” book and is out to demonstrate the pedagogy for effective and meaningful learning. As a language of global communication, English is not only seen as a language of development through which nearly all contemporary knowledge is accessible , but also as a language of opportunity, social prestige, power as well as success.

Students today want to learn English as a communicative tool in social, educational and economic settings. It is important that the learners should be consciously led to develop their learner language by engaging them in socially meaningful activities. There has been a great deal of research that ascertains that a language class should represent simulation of real communicative situations by focusing on the integrative and interactive activities. Thus, language teaching should be meaning and function oriented, learner-centered and interactive.

The foundation course on ‘Language, Literature and Creativity- English’, seems to have been developed with the above objectives in mind. A vital component of the new Four-Year Undergraduate Programme  of the University of Delhi, the course endeavours to incorporate concrete activities and not just hypothetical suggestions and idealized changes. It aims at “implementing a new mode of participative and creative pedagogy”, and also promises to deliver “not only stimulating study materials, but also outcome-oriented tasks for the students to perform in class or at home…”

In doing away with the streaming of students on the basis of the years spent in learning a language, the present course reaches out to a heterogeneous group of students. The tasks have been so designed as to be chosen, modified and used by the teacher/facilitator to cater to different difficulty levels present in the classroom.

The group activities not only give a fair chance to the students to interact among various levels of  linguistic proficiency, but also enable the teacher to be inventive in treating the subject according to the need of different groups of students.



There are eight units in the book, which have been designed with the focus on enhancing the learner’s listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. For instance, the activities requiring the students to listen to the clips on YouTube website are very innovative and interesting as the students’ keen interest in technology actively engages them in the given tasks. They have an easy access to the sources available online for their further reading. “It’s a ‘Happy Classroom’ wherein we are allowed to talk, sit in groups, use internet and express ourselves freely,” exclaimed a student. According to another: “We look forward to our LLC lecture even in the late hours, because we interact with a new group and a new task every time we meet; it’s so evolutionary and therefore interesting.”

The titles of all the units are suggestive of their extensive and comprehensive themes:  ‘Dialoguing with Nature’, ‘The Location and Dislocation of Culture’, ‘Beyond the Classroom’, ‘Thinking Livelihood’, ‘The Hungry and the Homeless’, ‘ Telling Experiences’, ‘Creative Journeys’ and ‘Art and Life’. All the units recommend group learning and include trans- disciplinary activities. For instance, the tasks vary  from  responding to news headlines to sensitivity to environmental issues; from writing a positive statement to thinking about the traditional games of India; from common errors in grammar  to discussing the food security bill, and from being sensitized to the problem of displacement to understanding literary language, just to name a few.

“There has never been such a versatile accumulation in the language courses. It’s certainly a favourable shift towards achieving the much desired creative expression,” says one of the teachers of this course. What is called for is an imaginative engagement with the material by both, the learner as well as the teacher.

The strength of the course lies in bringing a transition from evaluating a student for his/her capacity to memorise the content to encouraging him/her to achieve some degree of communicative competence. The suggested class presentations and group projects provide a practical platform to the students in order to participate, perform and practice in real life situations.

Thus, the study material serves as an invaluable resource in the discipline of English Language Teaching that attempts to eliminate the habit of rote learning. The students are required to analyse the content, understand issues and be able to think clearly and develop an argument cogently.

 The activities have been carefully designed so as to appear more like games than strenuous grammatical exercises. For example, discussing a  given ‘cartoon’  in groups of five, rearranging ‘jumbled words’, responding within a minute to a quick query and role-playing dramatically are some of the  exercises which not only adopt a learner-centered approach, but also aim at bridging the gap between the basic school training and the integrated and reflective approach in college.

As there is no content to memorise, students are not required to produce ‘the correct answers’ for writing an exam. However, they are expected to understand the concept and think precisely. The challenge is for teachers to adopt a creative pedagogy and flexible methodology to make this course as effective as it is intended to be, for “one who dares to teach, must never cease to learn”.
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Dr. Gifty Gupta is Assistant Professor in English at Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences, University of Delhi.
 
Source: Book Review published in Confluence -South Asian Perspectives (UK), Winter 2013, P#20.  
 
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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Language Literature and Creativity-English


Dr. Prem Kumari Srivastava, Dr. Tulika Prasad & Dr. Ruchi Kaushik


Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Courses were conducted at University of Delhi- South Campus on 19 August 2013, mainly to address Ad hoc teachers who had missed the opportunity to participate in the extensive Orientation Programmes this summer. Held over two separate sessions of 3 hours duration each, the programme was attended by almost 400 teachers from various colleges. Considering that 3 weeks of teaching has been completed, the group held lively discussions on the new pedagogy of participative learning and shared experience of group formation in the classroom, project identification, learning ‘tasks’, flexibility of material design and issues of technology.
The sessions opened with remarks by Prof. Malashri Lal, Dean Academics, and Prof. Sumanyu Satpathy, Head, Department of English. Enthusiastic about the engaged and inactive platforms, teachers in the English department emphasised the need to see the prescribed book, Language Literature and Creativity-English (Orient BlackSwan, 2013), as an evolving ‘study material’ and not a fixed ‘text book’. The resource persons, Dr. Prem Kumari Srivastava, Dr. Tulika Prasad and Dr. Ruchi Kaushik, conducted the sessions with the expertise developed while composing the book, and also from their vast experience of training about 180 teachers of English in the summer programmes. Through a combination of Power Point presentations, experience sharing and Q & A, they highlighted the issues and gave practical suggestions. Uniformly, questions about the pedagogy surfaced, the primary problems mentioned being large classes and limitations of technology access.  These were offset by teachers who found Project coordination an exciting role, and interacting with student groups a healthy challenge. 



The main points underscored in the Special Orientation Module for LLC-English are the following:


  1. Group formation should be done by involving the students in the process.
  2. Groups should be heterogeneous, attracting students from different subjects and with varied competence in English.
  3. Teachers are welcome to modify the tasks given at the end of each chapter in the study material as these are guidelines that are open to experimentation.
  4. The textual material is indicative of the major challenges in India, such as environment, social development, linguistic diversity and this aspect should be conveyed as a principle of understanding the Foundation Courses.
  5. Projects are to be selected by students by the 4th week, allowing sufficient time for exploration of the subject and completion of a report. The template of the Report was suggested by the resource persons as about 5 pages per project, with other material as Appendix. Quality of Reports rather than the number of pages matters.
  6. It was usefully suggested that a group could choose a broad based theme such as ‘Challenges in Rural India’ and take up focus on aspects that match each of the four Foundation Courses in a semester.  This would result in efficient deployment of data and will help to  bring  density to the Project research.
  7. Peer learning is to be encouraged. True, that all students will not perform equally, but the philosophy of peer learning believes that group identity brings other benefits in the learning curve of an individual such as information sharing and confidence building.
  8.  Evaluation methods were also brought up, but the decision was taken that intensive workshops for this would be planned in the future.


The teachers thought it would be a good idea to have access to a blog for common discussion forum on the FYUP website for sharing and building additional electronic materials for the classroom. This suggestion was enthusiastically accepted.  

Please write to webmaster Dr. M.Madhusudhan, Dy.Dean Academics @ madhumargam@gmail.com
 

Snapshots 

Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Course on Language Literature and Creativity (English)  at the University of Delhi (South Campus). Session  Chaired by Prof. Malashri Lal, Dean Academic Activities & Projects, University of Delhi (19 August 2013)

    
Participants of Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Course  on Language Literature and Creativity (English)  


Participants of Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Course  on Language Literature and Creativity (English) 

Interactive Session on Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Course  on Language Literature and Creativity -II (English)  

Participants of Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Course  on Language Literature and Creativity (English)