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
[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.
[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).
