HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERSHIP: THE NEED FOR INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION IN HUMANITIES, LIBERAL ARTS AND BUSINESS STUDIES by Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

The most glaringly absent aspects of the Indian government’s initiative include attention to non-technical professional programmes, qualitative regulation, and pedagogical methodology as a part of the solution. An evolutionary transformation of the pedagogical methodologies is warranted at the higher education level. Rather than adopting a regulatory mechanism that stipulates, the paper submits that a validation mechanism that encourages innovation in institutional approach to academics will work better.

This paper builds on the concept of “education as communication” as a workable foundation for innovative academic methodology. Although the concept of education as communication is no stranger to European scholars, this approach to academics, as adapted to the Indian environment, is unexplored. The paper introduces the concept of “bidimensional communication” as a desirable input mechanism in academics to accomplish the global competitiveness objective. Using a sample case study where a methodological innovation is used, it substantiates the case for the new approach. Finally, the paper recommends how policy and regulation should view innovation.

Policy and regulation. India’s education policies have laid special emphasis on technology and science education (eg., [1]). Social sciences and liberal arts, although increasingly in demand among especially newer industries in India, do not appear to be acknowledged as social catalysts and are a largely neglected area. Research programmes and policies are mostly non-existent.

Within this lopsided environment, there are as many as 42 regulatory authorities for higher education in India, but a single body, the University Grants Commission (UGC) alone performs four out of five regulatory functions: (1) Entry: licence to grant degrees. (2) Accreditation: quality benchmarking. (3) Disbursement of public funds. (4) Access: fees or affirmative action. (5) Licence: to practice profession [2]. While many of the regulators cater to specialised fields (such as the Medical Council of India) and professional education (such as the All India Council for Technical Education, or AICTE), the UGC is an apex body that grants permissions to start universities and to affiliate specific programmes. The AICTE has been particularly in the eye of controversy. The AICTE is mostly geared toward imposition of mostly quantitative norms, such as qualification of faculty, number of faculty members, faculty-student ratio, tuition fees, etc.

In an earlier note [3], I have identified at least two problems with the AICTE as it exists today: One, the AICTE supervises technical and management programmes alone. This inherent restriction leaves out a number of professional programmes such as mass communication and several newer ones that AICTE did not bring under its umbrella. There is no mechanism to regulate those programmes in a similar way. As a result, there has been a spurt in such programmes across the country. Many of these lack basic resources, infrastructure and faculty.

The second problem, according to the paper, is that the AICTE does not supervise non-affiliated programmes (i.e., non-university programmes). The paper argues that the government must clearly distinguish between a university affiliation and quality control. If the government decides to give more teeth for quality control to universities, that decision would be welcome so long as universities are provided with standardized criteria, resources and information to do so.

The Government of India-appointed Planning Commission’s 2006 concept paper for the Eleventh Plan recommends to the government the establishment of a “grading system” for private, unaided educational institutions – institutions that it calls “education companies”. It is for the first time that a government agency has used a language about education that implicitly endorses commercial value embedded in its business.

An exceptionally different education body is the National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC), is an independent body under the UGC, and a grading authority for institutes of higher education. Although its “accreditation” (which is really a misnomer; “validation” may be a more appropriate term) is not mandatory for institutions in India, NAAC grades institutions on seven criteria that it believes are essential to education: a) Curricular aspects, b) Teaching-learning-evaluation, c) Research, consultancy and extension, d) Infrastructure and resources, e) Student support and progression, f) Organization and management, and g) Healthy practices. At the moment, NAAC only assesses affiliated institutes and universities (although there have been inexplicable exceptions), and uses a methodology that is mostly mathematical, rather than qualitative.

As the National Knowledge Commission [2] recommends, a number of changes are warranted in updating regulatory mechanisms in that the policymakers should ask themselves how best to encourage and approve desirable changes in our education system. This process may be termed the democratisation of education.

In addition to promoting centres of innovations, the government can also encourage private institutions to do so by providing the independence to develop innovative methods. One of the critical factors in creating a transformative change would be in pedagogical methodology.

This basically implies that innovatively designing the methodology of learning will lead to other related changes in higher education. How two-way communication can be transformative is illustrated later in this paper.

Education as Communication. Education has only sporadically been viewed as a form of communication. Classrooms are effective platforms for observation of the communication patterns between faculty and student. Yet, there is precious little documentation on the need for a progressive, two-way symmetrical communication pattern among Indian education systems.

The fact that Western educators view education as a two-way communicative process has been documented. The premise of Dutch scholar Gert Biesta’s [4] work is that

“[e]ducators of very different times and places share a common intuition about the educational relationship. They want it to be -- or at least want it to become -- an equal and symmetrical relationship.”

A school of thought has founded the argument for education-as-communication on the natural human tendency to use every endeavour as a communicative activity. Burbules [5] assumes primarily that pedagogical communication is dialogic. He goes on to argue that all dialogue is not necessarily in the form of question-answer. Ulmer’s [6] even earlier work identifies classroom dialogue as frequently stemming from a more complex form of human thought, conveying “a kind of ‘total’ knowledge of a cultural code or style”.

On the other hand, the Frankfurt School maintains that human communication is deliberate and “strategic”. Indeed, Habermas’s [7] seminal work contends that human communication is fundamentally strategic, and arguably, inherently manipulative.

In the field of higher education, such manipulation may not be all that inherent, but may be a synecdoche for a deeper form of teacher-student hierarchy. An osmotic learning-based hierarchy between the “learner” and “learned” is intrinsic within the walls of the classroom, or of another learning environment. Yet the teacher-student relationship regularly assumes a more structural relationship.

Unidimensional and bidimensional communication in higher education. Burbules [5] describes ‘dialogue’ as "a particular kind of pedagogical communicative relation: a conversational interaction directed intentionally towards teaching and learning." Dialogue "tends toward a decentred and non authoritarian view of learning" (ibid.) as it is not aimed at changing other people but at effecting a change in and by the participants themselves. The communicative foundations of dialogue are found in the fact that language, reason, morality and our social organization are thought to be thoroughly dialogical and relational in character. Nanjundaiah [8] draws a relationship between communication patterns and the formation of “articulation/silence dialectic”, and suggests that one-way communication particularly in a persuasive context is essentially the artificial creation of silence at the receiver’s end.

The case for two-way communication, and an even more advanced argument for a two-way symmetrical style of communication in the bastions of higher education cannot be made unless we draw a contrast with the concepts behind the extant practices. Biesta [4] draws a comparison between what he terms “manipulative pedagogy” and “communicative pedagogy”. In manipulative pedagogy, “Education itself is presented as a kind of trajectory which sets out as manipulation and eventually develops into communication”, whereas in communicative pedagogy, education is accomplished through “real dialogue or real communication” (ibid.).

In India, such a relationship is intertwined with the traditional and religious scriptures that dictate a hierarchical relationship between a teacher and a student. This guru-shishya parampara is revered even today. In effect, the practice of this tradition perpetuates and glorifies an interpersonal hierarchy to the extent that the communicative practice between a teacher and a student is, more often than not, one-way and asymmetrical. Grunig and Hunt’s seminal book on the four ways in which communication is managed recommends the two-way symmetrical model as the most effective, even in the educational realm [9].

Burbules’s [5] description of dialogue includes that it is "non-teleological" in that it has no pre-determined outcome, and this is where our argument for a two-way symmetrical communication in education must depart. Pedagogical communication can be seen as a communicative process that is intentional, as Biesta [4] and others have argued. Such communication entails that either or both the teacher and the student interact with intentionality as senders and receivers of messages. Thus, there can be one-way (which I will call unidimensional) or two-way (which I will call bidimensional).

Unidimensional communication can be characterised as an “active-passive” combination that is message-oriented and uses a discourse method. Such communication is normally hierarchical and therefore, the meanings attributed to the messages are heavily influenced by the sender. Thus,

UNIDIMENSIONAL EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Role of teacher

 Active

 Message-oriented 

  (mostly a source)

 Discourse method

 Top-down 

  communication

Role of student

 Passive

 Message-oriented

  (mostly a receiver)

 Theoretical learning

 Meanings motivated 

   by hierarchical structure

Contrastingly, bidimensional communication in classrooms entails an active-active task creating a meaning-oriented environment, helping both teacher and student engage in learning that is minimally and functionally hierarchical, in an interactive and shared way, through personal analysis.

BIDIMENSIONAL EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Role of teacher

Active

Plays roles of source and receiver

Interactive method

Hierarchy is limited

Role of student

 Active

 Plays roles of source and receiver

Participatory learning

 Learning through analysis.

Because bidimensional symmetrical communication is traditionally considered to be restricted in the Eastern educational world in general and in India in particular, teachers and students need to prepare themselves specially for such communication on campuses.

Global competitiveness and methodology. UNESCO’s International Commission on Education for the 21st Century [10] recommends that education must be organized around four types of learning – learning to know, that is acquiring the instruments of understanding; learning to do, so as to be able to act creatively in one’s environment; learning to live together, so as to participate and cooperate with other people in all human activities; and learning to be, a progression toward sustainable existence.

True integration of these noble principles can only occur when learning is acquisition of skills for employment and/or entrepreneurship.

In practice, however, higher education typically suffers from “little knowledge creation” [11]. India does not enjoy a competitive edge in higher education. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index [12] ranks India at number 50 on an overall scale, but at 63 in Higher Education and Training (China is at 30 and 64, and the United States is at 1 and 5 respectively), based on the following criteria, a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, with special emphasis on innovation and “efficiency enhancers”:

A. Quantity of education (33%)

Secondary enrollment

Tertiary enrollment

Education expenditure

B. Quality of education (33%)

Quality of the educational system

Quality of math and science education

Quality of management schools

Internet access in schools

C. On-the-job training (33%)

Local availability of specialized research and training services

Extent of staff training

A discussion paper on higher education in India by the Indian Commerce Ministry [13] reports that a dismal 25 percent of Indian engineers, 15 percent of its finance and accounting professionals and 10 percent of Indians with general degrees are fit to work for multinational companies.

The structure of learning in Indian higher education may be largely responsible for the failure of the system to produce globally competitive professionals. Social sanction of the traditional guru-shishya paramapara has helped permeate and perpetuate the concept of interpersonal—rather than functional—hierarchies between teacher and student. A new communication pattern, therefore, is needed in our campuses to improve independent thinking, and hence the standards of global competitiveness, among professional graduates.

The UNESCO recommendations on what learning institutions should be may be broken down into operational functions, as follows:

To create employees with the ability to analyze and the ability to apply classroom education to professions.

To foster pedagogic innovation.

To build a worldview among professional graduates.

To create a curriculum that includes problem-solving.

Survey on need for change in pedagogic methodology. Based on the above methodological factors of global competitiveness, in December 2008 and January 2009, this author conducted brief and preliminary interviews with corporate recruiters and industry leaders in India. The interviews included standard questions sent over e-mail to 30 recipients. The core questions revolved around the level of competency of Indian professionals in a typical scenario of corporate requirement around the world.

1.        Do entry-level professionals, mid-level professionals and business leaders educated in India come with:

a. Adequate grounding in management and social sciences at the postgraduate level (such as economics, statistics, psychology, marketing, geopolitics and history) that they could apply and relate to one another in their professional careers?

b. Sufficient training at (postgraduate) college in skills: professional, problem-solving, social, presentation, interpersonal communication, teamwork, accountability?

2.        Do you consider 1a) and 1b) above important in preparing Indian professionals to move up the value chain of global business?

3.        Would you support, in principle, or through teaching support, or through sponsored candidates, an academic/professional programme in interdisciplinary studies that offers:

a. broad training in social and management sciences that complement professional training, and

b. a project, research or other demonstration of expertise in interdisciplinary studies? Your opinion?

The responses proved to be overwhelmingly similar. All the respondents who chose to answer 1(a) said “No”, and all but one said “No” to 1(b). To 1(a), one respondent added the rider: “If they have done an MBA or PGDM (from an IIMs) yes.” To 1(b), the same respondent said “yes to professional and problem-solving skills” in the context of the IIT, of which the respondent is an alumnus.

All respondents chose to say “Yes” to question 2, as the answer may have seemed fairly obvious to them. Another respondent added: “Globally mobile Indian professionals are still seen more in process-driven IT or Finance jobs, which indicates that they still have a long way to go to prove the competencies in other people-driven domains like marketing, HR, and leadership.”

To question 3, 23 of the 30 respondents said they would support in principle, through teaching support or through sponsoring candidates, a progressive curricular structure. Many of the respondents felt that even if professionals displayed some of the desirable qualities, they are likely to be a result of individual strengths rather than of training.

Structural changes—a case study. What are the elements of preparation by practitioners to accomplish such communication? From the above functions of educational communication, we may deduce the factors governing such communication will be:

Orientation to independent thought and analysis.

Attention to participatory learning.

Facilitation of interactive.

Proper faculty training.

The Indira School of Communication (ISC) was founded in 2004 as an autonomous institute offering postgraduate and (later) undergraduate education in Journalism, Mass Communication and Communication Management. (The author was responsible for starting up and running it in its initial years.) The institute’s mission statement is to “promote innovative and independent thinking among our trainees through a forward-looking academic system that provides theoretical, research and practical input.” The following case is an example of an experimental practice that the institute undertook.

The school was designed to create smaller classrooms with long tables and chairs around them. Faculty and students would be seated around the table. At the postgraduate level, this practice is well established in many western countries. Since they typically do not admit more than 20-22 students in a class, university departments can afford to exploit this arrangement to several distinct advantages.

Upon implementation of this layout at ISC, a significant change in teacher-student communication patterns was observed among students. Students were tested on the “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”—a self-assessing tool used in management--at the beginning of their tenure and again towards the end of their tenure. The freedom to express themselves seemed to have lent a sense of responsibility among students towards their subjects. Many of the students had marked themselves higher on the Extroversion level of the MBTI scale than they had perceived themselves earlier. Whether the students grew on an analytical level was not recorded.

The institute gained critical acclaim in the media as well as among corporations that hired the graduates from the institute. Recruiters ranged from international research organizations to advertising / public relations agencies, with a mildly positive feedback on the overall performance of the ISC trainees both in local and international companies.

The round-table format can be seen as a metaphor for facilitating bidimensional communication that is directed toward being symmetrical. Over time, and coupled with several other innovative methods, such desirable communication may be seen emerging on the campus.

The inferences we may draw from the ISC example are:

The table-chair layout offers the student a feeling of responsibility and enhances a sense of accountability amongst students towards contributing to the subject under discussion. Both teacher and student feel equally responsible to take the class forward.

The round-table structure creates a small, intimate atmosphere and is found to help in breaking the ice with the faculty member and other students in a formal, yet open forum. It is this interaction, in fact, that many faculty members find lacking amongst students at higher learning levels. In a more traditional layout, the psychological barrier is the existence of a platform, standing-teacher-seated-students pattern. This sender-receiver model of communication has been frequently decried, since it denies a comfort zone between them. Both teacher and student find themselves duty-bound to be pigeonholed into talking and listening, respectively.

The layout also helps in creating new knowledge, especially in the social sciences and humanities, as each interactor comes with a unique set of experiences and backgrounds, application of which enhances the overall body of knowledge on the topic.

The layout change is merely one of many structural changes that are warranted at the higher education level (some of which were also implemented at ISC). However, it points to the primary argument that pedagogical methodology and global competitiveness are related. The round-table format is one instrument to accomplish the desired outcomes of higher education as envisaged by UNESCO.

Regulating innovation. While changes in methodology are warranted, policymakers need to also encourage innovative techniques and when found effective, “mainstream” them. The kind of regulation required at higher education levels—which an independent report calls “highly regulated” [14]--that can at once set required parameters as well as foster and manage innovation in pedagogy. Regulation must entail applicability of curricular content and methods of delivery in the industry, career counselling, inclusion of ethical practice as mandatory curricular input, student access to books, journals, computers and other resources as required for individual programmes, disability access, etc. Validation processes could stem from the professed policies of individual institutions. For example, an institute may claim to train its students for the industry, and in doing so, recruits faculty with high levels of industry experience. Rather than counting the number of doctorates on campus, the committee then proceeds to evaluate how the faculty accomplishes what they claim to.

Concurrent with due diligence are in-built checks and balances. For example, if an institute believes in keeping its students busy through the day in simulation of a workplace, then how is the balance maintained between classroom input and out-of-class input? For example, what daypart is spent on assimilating classroom learning through, say, assignments? Since students spend a major part of the day on campus, what resources are available to them outside the classroom? The mandate must go further for educational institutions in terms of transparency: Each institution must declare the grade in each of their public announcements, and in its literature and on its website. Once this is made the norm, aspiring students know where to apply. Evidently, this grade must be subject to periodic revision.

Conclusion and recommendations. In his television interview, India’s Harvard-educated former Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal lamented that arguing with a professor is not an Indian practice.

Much has been said about “learning” models in higher education. Relevantly, at a seminar at the House of Commons in London, Ebdon and Streeting [15] said: “More students see themselves as partners in learning than as anything else.  Partners in learning will want a say in the curriculum, in how they’re taught.” Although 27 percent of students in India at the higher education level attend privately owned institutions [16], there is a dire need today for both policy research and policy dialogue on considering education as a transaction. A transaction entails a relationship. As this paper has proposed, there is a need to change the existing social relationship between teachers and students into a business relationship.

Information, learning and knowledge are well-known concepts that need refinement and redefinition in an age where technology and access have transformed the way and the amount we know. Since much information is available at the click of a mouse today (and as the World Wide Web and its netizens mature in understanding the scope and perils of free expression), the relationship between information and learning, as catalysed in a classroom, must change quickly.

When teacher training is imparted, tailored toward teachers’ understanding of how information works today, it will have evolutionary and long-term impacts on this relationship. Teaching in classrooms can no longer be considered synonymous with imparting information from available literature. Further, teachers can no longer assume a superior knowledge of such information. Rather, teachers use classrooms as laboratories where shared information and insights lead to a new body of knowledge. 

Educational institutions must ensure the right platform for independence of thought and action by making information available readily. At some of the institutes here and increasingly in Western countries, coursework is made available in advance on a network, either an Intranet or over the Web, to postgraduate students.

By doing so, classrooms become not centres of one-way information dissemination but forums of discussion, thereby entailing the potential to move beyond information and creating new bodies of knowledge through application of information. The potential to create knowledge—not impart information—in classroom sessions goes beyond conventional classrooms. This study does not specifically deal with online (or blended) modes of learning, yet the scope for virtual round tables and interactive methods of learning is far closer than in the “real” classrooms. Indeed, online classes are more likely to be the adopters from whom traditional ones can borrow the concept of delivery.

References

[1] Government of India. National Policy on Education, 1986, updated 1992 (GOI Ministry of Human Resources, New Delhi). http://education.nic.in/policy/npe86-mod92.pdf. Extracted July 14, 2009.

[2] National Knowledge Commission. National Knowledge Commission Note on Higher Education, May 29, 2006. Manuscript.

[3] Nanjundaiah, S. Creating the Brightest and the Best, The Indian Express, May 22, 2006, p 11.

[4] Gert Biesta. Education/Communication: The Two Faces of Communicative Pedagogy. Philosophy of Education, 1995.  http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/biesta.html. Extracted July 13, 2009.

[5] Burbules, N. C. Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice. 1993 (Teachers College Press, New York).

[6] Ulmer, G. Applied grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys, 1985 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press).

[7] Jürgen Habermas. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 1985 (Beacon Press, Boston, Mass.)

[8] Nanjundaiah, S. Dr Spin in Shining India: Articulation and silence, image and reality in the 2004 political campaign. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2005, 1(3), 314-319.

[9] Grunig, A. & Hunt, T. Managing Public Relations, 1984 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York).

[10] UNESCO. International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, 1993. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0009/000939/093994EB.pdf. Extracted July 10, 2009.

[11] NAFSA: Association of International Educators. In Symposium on Leaders in International Education, Washington, DC, 2006.

[12] World Economic Forum. The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-9, 2009. http://gcr.weforum.org/gcr/. Extracted July 15, 2009.

[13] Government of India. Higher Education in India and GATS: An Opportunity: A Consultation Paper, , September 2006. (Department of Commerce, Government of India, New Delhi). http://commerce.nic.in/wto_sub/services/Consultation_paper_on_ Education_GATS.pdf. Extracted July 15, 2009.

[14] Fortress Education Team. A Report on Education in India: Status and Opportunities, 2009. (Fortress Financials, Mumbai, India)

[15] Ebdon, L. and Streeting, W. Higher Education and the Student Experience. In House of Commons Seminar, Higher Education Policy Institute, London, U.K., April 21, 2009. http://www.hepi.ac.uk/pubdetail.asp?ID=269&DOC=seminars. Extracted July 14, 2009.

[16] Kaul, S. Higher Education in India: Seizing the Opportunity. ICRIER Working Paper, 2006. (Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi).