I am back to undergraduate teaching after a hiatus of two
years. It is a break that enabled me to read and write and think, which is what
I would like to think I have been trained to do. Workspaces, even when
constituted by fellow academics are not necessarily happy spaces
and at present , functioning as we are under a far from perfect
semesterization that has been thrust upon us, I can only see the ragged edges
of communication spike unevenly out of control as we try to make sense of
the new system that we have to fit ourselves in.
The semester system at DU has meant a splitting across the centre, and a bifurcation of course content . All hundred mark papers will now be worth two hundred marks and students will study the course content over two semesters instead of a full length academic year.
India's premier central university, located In its capital city could have
certainly done far better for itself
and for its students. However, were you to ask any of the members in the
team of the present vice-chancellor or the previous one, you would be given to
understand that this illogically bifurcated syllabus is
because of the resistance of the undergraduate teachers to change.
That reasoned and sustained opposition to introduction of the semester was
snuffed out through high handed and devious use of the academic council
which in any case only provides token representation to
undergraduate teachers, ( 24 elected representatives speak for the college
teachers in a house which has a voting strength of over 150) has escaped them
altogether.
Now as they introduce a
meta-university which is to benefit 20 students and discommode a possible
20000 and will create new frankensteins of teaching, learning and
administration, it might be a good idea to describe a micro -detail in this not
yet meta university and this is going to be the first month or thereabouts t in
an undergraduate college. Sri Venkateswara College is located in
the upper rungs of the notional ladder of collegiate education at Delhi University.
The first morning when our vice-chancellor was visiting Bhagini Nivedita and
disapproving entirely of its modus operandi, at Sri
Venkateswara College orientations for droves of students who had
joined various courses were underway. We have a space crunch that has to be
seen to be believed and promises to be an
unsurmountable problem in the days to come.
Classroom spaces for the humanities and languages
has dwindled in geometric proportions in the last three years.
Teachers are supposed to have a teaching workload of around 18
periods. As a result of making the university OBC inclusive,
numbers in the classroom have more than doubled. The University administration assures us that this calls for an
increase in teaching posts by about 40 percent. No permanent appointments have
been made in our department in the last four years. Our previous strength of 11
teachers has gone up by 1.74. Our academic planning committee
reinvents the wheel, and talks of giving us posts for teachers on the
basis of sanctioned strengths. Although, each year, we admit an
enormous number of students into each department, our workload is never calculted on the basis of actual student strength. No upper limit is maintained for the number of students attending each lecture.
With semesterization, the duration of time
to teach a text and the number of classes to teach it in has shrunk. We
need to fix extra classes that do not form part of our official time
table in order to do any justice to the course content. Meanwhile tutorials, that should form
the backbone of teaching pedagogy in the humanities are mostly viewed as an
after thought in our institution. A weekly tutorial class for
Honours students in optimal groups of 6-8 is mandatory. I have an
English (Honours) first year class of over sixty five students. If
tutorials are meant to serve their purpose, I would need at least eight tutorials with
my I yr class. What I have been allotted officially (as per sanctioned
strength) is five which I am to fix myself with the students, preferably after
3.p.m. There is an absence of tutorial rooms in college.
Classes for students begin at 8.45 in the
morning. Our corridors and staircases, built forty years ago to
accommodate one third of the number of students who throng it achieve
high decibels of noise and near stampede conditions every day. On
different days of the week, students in first, second and third year
have a random off-day. In practice no department can plan
any collective academic activity for all its three years at one time.
This ensures that students lead truncated lives and are hampered
from growing or learning in any holistic manner. Classrooms burst at the seams
and students swell in number and taking roll call becomes a long time
consuming activity.
The issue of fixing modalities on the basis
of sanctioned strength and ignoring actual numbers is one of
the most insidious ways in which we cheat students and impoverish both teaching
and learning spaces. Higher education , with the crunch in space and the
crush of numbers and unethical practice is moving into critical
mass. Unless such issues are addressed on a war footing,, the
pleasure of learning and teaching will be substituted by the cacophony of
impersonal assembly lines producing near imperfect units.
