Language Literature and Creativity- II (English): Language Literature and Creativity-English

Special Orientation Modules for the Foundation Courses

Resource persons:

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:

Group formation should be done by involving the students in the process.
Groups should be heterogeneous, attracting students from different subjects and with varied competence in English.
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.
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.
Projects are to be selected by students by the 4^th 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.
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.
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.
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)