VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016 E-QUAL · PDF fileVOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016 E-QUAL NEWS ......

BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE EU-INDIA PROJECT E-QUAL

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016

E-QUAL NEWS A BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF EU-INDIA PROJECT E-QUAL

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016

CRITICAL THINKING

&

KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Guest Edited by: Shiv Nadar University

Photo Courtesy: Harish Venkatesh, IV year, B.Tech. in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Shiv

Nadar University


VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016 P a g e | 2

Contents

Published by the Central Communications Unit, EU-India Project E-QUAL, School of Education

Technology ,Jadavpur University, Kolkata- 700 032, India. Email: [email protected] Website:

www.projectequal.net and www.equalcourses.net

Guest Editor: Deepa Hazrati

Editors: Deepnanda Ray, Piyali Chakraborty and Somak Mukherjee

Guest Editorial (Deepa Hazrati) 3 Critical Thinking and the New Humanities (Supriya Chaudhuri) 6 Reflections (Akhil Katyal) 9 Exploiting Language (Tulika Chandra) 10 The Challenges of Teaching Creative Writing in India (Vikram Kapur) 13 Why do I write? (Aratrika Das) 14 TESTing the Possibilities (Manjima Chatterjee) 16 Active Pedagogy: A Detailed Study on its Prospects and Expectations (Abhilasha Awasthi) 18 Systems of Knowledge and Exchange of Knowledge (Samuel Berthet) 21 A Political Palette: Thinking Through Colour (Cleo Roberts) 23 Teaching and Learning Critical Thinking (Saravanan Mani) 32 Critical Thinking and Knowledge System (Saanika Singh Deo) 34 Critical Thinking: Thinking about Thinking (Oshin Shakdwipee) 38 Details: Pixels of reality (Vinay Krishna) 41 Reflection on Two Essays on Critical Thinking (Harini Kapali) 43 Learning to Think and Thinking Critically In Learning (Ritopratim Mukherjee) 46 News from Partners 49

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.projectequal.net/



Guest Editorial

Building bridges between Disciplines: Rethinking ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’

Sciences for the E-QUAL Project Deepa Hazrati

In recent years, there has been much debate about the learning goals and policy directions

for higher education in India. At heart, as the many discussions and conversations seem to

suggest, is not only the urgency for reorienting the idea of what pedagogic practice should

mean for a young and technologically savvy India but whether the rigid boundaries

between disciplines should remain? Unsurprisingly perhaps, India has witnessed within

barely a decade an unprecedented and remarkable leap in the absolute enrolment of

students in higher education. According to a Harvard - Yenching report1,

Between 2000 - 01 and 2011 - 12, the number of colleges in India increased from 12,806 to 35,539 which

meant an average of nearly six new colleges a day for more than a decade. By 2011 India had 659

Universities (degree granting institutions) – 152 Central Universities under the Federal Government, 316

State Universities and 191 Private ones. (p.11).

The dynamics of India’s demographic dividend, however, makes it imperative that the Indian higher

education scenario be gauged at multiple levels. While it is critical that the issue of access to meaningful

education is adequately addressed, it is equally important to constantly review and reflect on the quality of

education that may be deemed relevant; more so given that sustaining high levels of economic growth has

become imperative for raising standards of living and employment.

It is amidst such pressures to balance demography and educational aspiration that there has also emerged a

vast array of what have been termed as ‘private players’ in the education sector. These new initiatives have

brought in much diversity in the education field through the introduction of skill based training,

entrepreneurship, managerial and vocational instruction and efforts at developing synergies with industrial

requirements. Many subsequent models and best practices that have been evolved from these initiatives are

still being tested, adapted, customized and debated for their scalability.

Sahil Makkar in an article in The Business Standard took note of this explosive private shift in the field of

university education by observing that, ‘New centres of excellence have come up in north India in the past

5-6 years. They promise flexible curricula, international faculty and research-based education’2. One of the

attributes of these ‘newer universities’ has, in fact, been to encourage students to revise their notions and

ideas on higher education. The new emphasis in higher education — as distinct from the government

driven commitment to sustain conventional and conservative curricula — has been on developing

innovative dialogues across disciplines. The attempt here is to get students to address and understand a

range of new interdisciplinary challenges such as climate change, rapid technological transformation,

globalization and grappling with dynamic social and cultural contexts created by markets. This significance

of pursuing interdisciplinary programmes and building bridges between the ‘hard and soft’ sciences is

increasingly being grasped both by educators and students:

1 Devesh Kapur and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Higher Education Reform in India and China: the Role of the State, Harvard

Yenching Institute Paper, 2015 2 Sahil Makkar,“Changing Face of Higher Education on Private Campuses”, Business Standard, March 8, 2016 at http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/changing-face-of-higher-education-on-private-campuses-116030800020_1.html# (Accessed March 8, 2016)

http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/changing-face-of-higher-education-on-private-campuses-116030800020_1.html

http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/changing-face-of-higher-education-on-private-campuses-116030800020_1.html



For decades now, interdisciplinary efforts such as science studies, environmental history and full-fledged

post graduate programmes under the rubric of science-technology-environment-medicine (STEM) have

successfully broken down the hard divides between the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

These interdisciplinary initiatives have also compellingly revealed that the natural sciences are ideologically

driven and are often oriented by political practice. In effect, the social sciences and humanities will be

critical to help us understand what the sciences will become in the future3.

Along the same gradient of support for such interdisciplinary efforts but argued from a different stand

point is Carol Chiste suggesting that cross-training in the sciences in fact produces better humanists4. To

conclude, ‘new universities’ are perhaps signalling the need, desire and urgency to match students with the

dramatically changed economic and social realities of our times.

The establishment of the Shiv Nadar University (SNU), as a private philanthropic education institution in

2011, in fact, can in one sense be largely understood as responding to the above discussed challenges. The

University initiative is essentially designed in a mission mode that is aimed at training students for a new

India with knowledge, skills and leadership qualities that are relevant for the 21st Century and beyond. As

an explicitly stated teaching and research platform, the University strives for academic excellence through

collaboration, collegiality, and civility.

In 2013, the SNU community was excited to become a part of the international collaborative project

compellingly titled Enhancing Quality, Access and Governance of Undergraduate Education in India (E-

QUAL). As we advance into the fourth year of the E-QUAL project, it continues to help us to further add

capacity to our many ongoing academic initiatives including learning and sharing from collaborative action

with our E-QUAL partner institutions (British Council, Ambedkar University, Delhi; Jadavpur University,

Kolkata; University of Bologna, Italy; University of Hyderabad; King’s College, London).

In particular, I want to highlight, that the four themes (to create modules for undergraduate courses)

around which the Project E-QUAL is centred; are also indicative of the way the broader scope of the

disciplines within higher education are being sought to be developed and oriented. This is also an attempt

to position teaching and research within the disciplines as being not only inextricably linked through

dialogues but also intend to sustain engagements within the disciplines.

Figure 1: The four themes in the Project E-QUAL

3 Rohan D’Souza, “Hardly the soft science” The Hindu, June 10, 2015 at http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/hardly-the-

soft-sciences/article7298891.ece (Accessed March 9, 2016) 4 Carol T. Christhe, “Myth: A Liberal Arts Education Is Becoming Irrelevant”, Spring 2012 at http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/Myth-A-Liberal-Arts-Education-Is-Becoming-Irrelevant.aspx (Accessed on March 9, 2016)

Critical Thinking

and Knowledge

Systems

Cultural Studies

Human Ecology

Natural Resources,

Environment and

Sustainable Technologies

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/hardly-the-soft-sciences/article7298891.ece

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/hardly-the-soft-sciences/article7298891.ece

http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/Myth-A-Liberal-Arts-Education-Is-Becoming-Irrelevant.aspx

http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/Myth-A-Liberal-Arts-Education-Is-Becoming-Irrelevant.aspx



The themes are intended to stimulate and urge the student to think ‘out of the box’, while constantly

developing ‘new’ ways to engage with existing disciplines; find creative pathways that innovatively sets

dialogues and conversations between the engineering or hard sciences with that of humanities or the liberal

arts.

Here I would like to draw attention to the fact that the basic architecture of the undergraduate curriculum

at Shiv Nadar University is designed to encourage students to choose multiple electives across disciplines.

The effort is to enable students to acquire an enhanced breadth for learning and engagement with topics

and themes from the humanities and social sciences with natural sciences, engineering and technology

studies. This is, a unique way to foster students’ ability to integrate critical thinking, interpretive skills,

scientific exploration, hand-on experience, normative principles and bring into their worldview the abilities

to deal with a complex, changing, and unpredictable

world.

The architecture of the course curriculum reconfirms

that while it is important to engage within the

discipline, however, one cannot rule out the fact that

the larger debates, such as collaboration between

industry-academia, holistic education, adaptive skills

hint at the way Universities’ need to be better oriented

towards getting students to “imbibe” and “practice”

critical thinking as a way of learning, irrespective of the

discipline.

In this sense, critical thinking is to be understood as the

art of thinking; the art of questioning and questioning

creatively. It is a skilled thinking that is based on

curiosity, scepticism and the ability to argue based on

evidence and logic. The theme, hence, of the current

edition of E-QUAL Newsletter is Critical Thinking and Knowledge Systems. The issue consists of

articles from faculty, students and staff (from SNU and Partner institutions) largely reflecting their

considered opinions, experiences and analysis.

Happy reading!

Deepa Hazrati is Academic Coordinator, Office of Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Shiv Nadar

University

Figure 2: Figure 2: Diagrammatic depiction of unique architecture of Undergraduate Curriculum at Shiv Nadar University



Critical Thinking and New Humanities Supriya Chaudhuri

Now more than ever, with universities under attack across the country, and

threatened in different ways across the world, critical thinking is central to the pursuit

of knowledge, since it is what prompts us to ask questions and search for answers.

Above all, it is central to the humanities, which may be characterized as those

disciplines that seek to answer the question, how should we live? In an essay –

written in the form of a letter – prefaced to a book by his colleague John Higgins at

the University of Cape Town, the novelist J. M. Coetzee offers a pessimistic coda to Higgins’s powerful

appeal for a revival of the humanities as the only means for training students and future citizens in the

‘critical literacy’ required for a culture to continually renew itself. As Coetzee notes,

“All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves

as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools

equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”

Rejecting the notion that ‘the transient needs of the economy’ should drive higher education – a motive

with which we are increasingly familiar in India today – Higgins argues instead for the ‘critical literacy’ (his

term) that a humanistic education provides. And this is the capacity to think critically, to argue, to

interrogate, to reflect upon the paradigms by which social and political life are structured. Coetzee is

sympathetic to this cause, but he is pessimistic about its outcome. For, he says, universities have shown

themselves to be reluctant or ill-equipped to withstand the manifold pressures of the state, they have

programmed their own extinction by yielding to managerial newspeak, and (I quote) ‘there are too few

people left who really believe in the humanities and in the university built on humanistic grounds, with

philosophical, historical and philological studies as its pillars.’ Gloomily, he concludes that

“The campaign to rid the academy of what was variously diagnosed as a leftist or anarchist or anti-rational or anti-

civilisational malaise has continued without let-up for decades, and has succeeded to such an extent that to conceive of

universities any more as seedbeds of agitation and dissent would be laughable.”

Perhaps not so quite so laughable in the university where I stand today – and perhaps there are still such

places, ‘seedbeds of agitation and dissent’, which can genuinely give birth to political and social critique,

elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, Coetzee’s gloom has its origin in a genuine crisis, a global shrinkage, if

we might call it that, in the philosophical and critical function of the academy. For this reason, Coetzee

concludes that universities themselves are doomed to extinction, and that the humanities disciplines on

which they had been founded will be the first to go. Indeed, he suggests that the ‘managerial’ solution to the

acquisition of ‘critical literacy’ will be a single-semester course in critical thinking, rather than entire sets of

courses on Plato and Heidegger. For, he says to his friend,

“I envisage a telling question will be asked of you: even if we grant that critical literacy is as important as you claim, do

students really need to know about Hesiod and Petrarch, about Francis Bacon and Jean-Paul Sartre, about the Boxer

Rebellion and the Thirty Years War, to attain a sufficient competence in such literacy? Can you not simply design a pair of

one-semester courses - courses in which all undergraduates, no matter what their career track, will be required to enroll - one

course to be entitled "Reading and Writing", in which students will be trained to dissect arguments and write good expository

prose; and the other to be entitled "Great Ideas", in which they will be briefed on the main currents of world thought from

Ancient Egypt to the present? A pair of courses like that will not require an entire faculty of humanities behind them, merely a

school of critical literacy staffed with bright young instructors. … [I]f critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just

teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?”



For Coetzee, thus, the threat to the academy is not just from the loss or attenuation of traditional

knowledge disciplines, but from their substitution by ‘skill sets’ which are claimed as transferable even

without disciplinary foundation – and among these he appears to place a modern version of ‘critical

literacy’, or critical thinking. At the close of his essay, predicting a future as bleak as that in Poland under

totalitarian rule, he suggests that philosophy be taken out of the academy, be taught in our living-rooms, if

it is to survive.

There are some thorny problems here. As we can see, Coetzee’s position on critical thinking and

philosophizing, for all that it might initially seem to support our faith that the two are inseparable, is so

conservative as to institute a radical break between the two. What he means by philosophy is of course not

well-defined, but he is clearly gesturing towards the traditional humanities discipline as involving study,

intellectual labour, and ‘useless’ knowledge, rather than simply a training in argumentation or reasoned

assessment. For him the semester course in critical thinking is precisely the kind of dangerous supplement

that turns out to be a replacement or substitute for humanistic training itself. I would like to argue that he

may be, in his justified gloom and pessimism, mistaken, and that it would be wrong on our part to trivialize

and reduce critical thinking, to regard it separately from the larger philosophical enterprise – the getting of

wisdom – of which it is part. And I will take comfort from the fact that Coetzee’s own declared objective,

of taking philosophy out of the university in order to save it, requires nothing less than the application and

extension of critical thinking. In Coetzee’s later novels, from The Lives of Animals (1999) through Elizabeth

Costello (2003) to Slow Man (2005), an aging woman writer, a celebrated Australian novelist called Elizabeth

Costello, tours the world giving talks on vegetarianism, sexuality, freedom, philosophy, and animal rights,

instead of speaking on literature as she is expected to do. In some ways Coetzee is breaking open the form

of the novel itself and altering our perception of what fiction is, what philosophy might become. For all that

she engages with philosophy and philosophers, Elizabeth Costello is not one – she is in fact a critical

thinker, engaged in applying her intelligence and rationality to fundamental questions of social and moral

life. I too am an aging woman, if not a celebrated Australian writer, and I would like to use the space of this

brief essay to reclaim critical thinking for the academy, rather than relegate it simply to the world outside it.

I will try to do so in the hope that by this act of reclamation, we will not be destroying or replacing the

humanities, but ensuring their renewal.

Most proponents of critical thinking as integral to the philosophy of education, such as Harvey Siegel,

Sharon Bailin, Robert Ennis, John McPeck and Richard Paul, argue that it is not simply a training in

applying reason to assess and evaluate arguments or evidence, but also a disposition to follow rational

choices: to be, as Siegel says, ‘appropriately moved by reasons’. In that respect, it is defined as normative – a

sort of ‘good thinking’ – in that it teaches ‘the ability to determine the goodness, or probative force of

candidate reasons for belief, judgment or action’, and also fosters the inclination to be guided by such

assessments. For these authors, critical thinking is a fundamental educational ideal, a form of training that

can be traced back to the Platonic Academy, and is central to the recognition of the independent moral

worth, intellectual autonomy, and capacity for rational choice, of each individual. So while a course in

critical thinking may appear to be inculcating, or refining, a ‘skill set’, as Coetzee calls it, it may be better

understood as providing the groundwork for the assimilation, understanding, and deployment of the

educational process as a whole. Siegel speaks of critical thinking as a type of ‘informal logic’ (or philosophy

of argument) applicable in everyday discourse and appropriate to the interpretation and evaluation of

arguments in a social, communicative context.

The notion of informal logic is a philosophically contentious matter, as is the advocacy of critical thinking

in the philosophy of education (a movement that gathered strength in the 1980s). It has been urged that

informal logic is unsupported by theory, and either requires the support of formal logic to test the validity

of arguments, or seeks corroboration of other, pragmatic kinds which are notoriously difficult to defend. In

fact the association of informal logic with the critical thinking movement has made both susceptible to



critique at various levels. I will not review the debate in its entirety, but simply point out that the normative

ideal of ‘good thinking’ may tend to privilege the views of dominant social groups, to put a premium on

‘rational’, linear, abstract thought-processes and devalue emotion, attachment, situatedness and even social

or moral responsibility, and that ‘reason’ itself is a problematic category. Indeed, to cite the Socratic

dialogue as a model is not particularly persuasive, given the tendency towards leading arguments, the

bullying tone, the exclusion of alternatives, and the exclusion of women in the typical Platonic account.

Reason often boils down to someone else’s reasons rather than one’s own. Is it possible, then, to make

critical thinking part of philosophy, even of a practice of everyday philosophizing? Should the ability to

frame arguments, to test evidence, to assess the workability of propositions, to accept reasoned conclusions

even when they run contrary to preconceptions, be taught as part of an educational curriculum? And – this

is the question that Coetzee is presumably putting – can it be taught in itself, outside the knowledge corpus

– by which I mean history, politics, economics – to which it must be applied? For us this is an important

question, because Indian universities in their colonial and postcolonial phases have not taught critical

thinking as such, just as they have ignored problem-solving and other applications of disciplinary methods

communicated largely in abstract and theoretical modes. This absence, this lack, is connected on the one

hand with the habits of obedience and slavish memory-work inculcated by a colonial regime and a

patriarchal society, and on the other hand with the unmanageable numbers that an instructor has to cope

with in the democratic, state-supported university classroom, necessitating recourse to communication

without interaction – which is not communication at all.

Let me suggest, then, that critical thinking is not a discipline, not an end in itself, since its limitations are

evident. Indeed it is self-limiting (and self-correcting) as a pedagogy, because if we started to ask the deeper

theoretical questions about the nature of reason and the grounds of morality, we would actually be doing

philosophy. But I think it would be too extreme to claim that critical thinking is not a part of philosophy, or

that critical thinking may not be a means of bringing the philosopher into the classroom, and giving the

humanities disciplines a sharper, more critical edge. Courses in critical thinking – and here I disagree with

Coetzee – can indeed be instrumental in a profoundly ‘freeing’ way, especially against the burden of rote

learning and derivative information with which the typical Indian student is encumbered from school

onwards. To learn how to assess an argument, to apply rational choice, to work with reasoned outcomes

must form part of a liberal education, even if it is not by any means sufficient in itself, and though the

practice of philosophy proper may lead to more radical, even more unexpected, counter-intuitive

conclusions.

It is likely, in fact, that critical thinking will lead to critiques of critical thinking courses, and indeed that an

element of self-criticism and self-correction, certainly of challenge to established authority (even the

authority of reason) will be built into the practice itself. This would be no bad thing. In fact it is worth

noting that the strongest criticisms of the standard critical thinking course have come from feminists and

deconstructionists, on the grounds that the supremacy of reason and the possibility of a ‘neutral’ or

objective view, as claimed by the critical thinking school, are obviously illusions, based upon the worst kind

of prejudice and self-deception, and neglectful of claims from – say – the logic of emotions, the duty of

care, and the connectedness of individuals in society, so that my presumed intellectual autonomy is false,

and my decision is not mine alone. If we are to integrate critical thinking into university curricula, we can

only do so by insisting on the duty of doubt, urging the necessity of debate, and teaching respect for the

opinions of others. In the ultimate analysis, though, we should bear in mind that ‘an unexamined life is not

worth living’. Critical thinking is a means of examining life.

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor (Emerita), Department of English, Jadavpur University and

Faculty Co-ordinator, EU-India Project E-QUAL

Email id: [email protected]




Reflections Akhil Katyal

You be tellin' me how to live

I be studyin', Miss, property

of flowers an' they be bloom,

an' they be wilt, an' they be

tellin' me how I live till to-

-day, in them, up an' down,

in them, crest an' tough;

I be studyin', Miss, the

property of stone, an' it

be tellin' me, how I got

by, all those many years,

against all bad weather,

I be studyin', Miss, all

them years, being meself

in flower, in stone, in sun, in

moon, in all them things you

say in the classroom, Miss,

you be tellin' me how to live.

One day, when he was

about ten or twelve,he asked his mother,

"What is my caste?

Some boys in the

school were asking,

I didn't know what

to say." The mother,

got up in the middle

of her supper, "Beta,

if you don't know it by

now, it must be upper."

(thanks to Gautam Bhan)

Peshawar, 16-12-14

Talib's a mad-man, Talib's a fool,

his biggest fear is you going to school, 'coz if

you spend all those years in the school,

you'd know Talib's a mad-man, Talib's a fool.

Akhil Katyal is Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social

Sciences, Shiv Nadar University

Figure 3: The photo is sourced at

https://sanamterikasam.files.wordpress.com/201

1/03/reflections.jpg



Exploiting Language Tulika Chandra

Language has representation, expression and appeal; it reflects the perpetual

dynamism in our world. It is simply not a tool that is controlled by us rather it seems

to control us. Students today are technophiles who comprehend easily the language of

the gadget they use, thus bringing in the importance of the language used in a

classroom by the teacher. This is a serious affair. For a teacher, the classroom is

engaging while for student it should be inviting. The style and the type of language

used establishes a delicate and individual bond with the students and to add to this, the teachers should

know a bit more about language. Surely, there are updates in the modern classroom, especially in the

urban areas or in small towns, now computers have made their way into the classrooms, older versions

have been replaced by slimmer and shinier ones, the blackboards from black to white to digitally smart.

Yet, basically the classrooms and how they function today appear to be almost the same as they have been

for ages. The teachers are still here, so are the students.

The debate is on what and how do teachers communicate with their students while they make use of the

modern technology in the classroom. What is required to be essentially known to teachers and are they

able to understand what is expected out of them? Focus of the debate clearly points towards the need of

the teachers involved at higher education to have an out-and-out understanding of how language is

realized while imparting classroom teaching. This would require systematic and intensive preparation. The

other vital point is to see how they engage the students while they are using the modern gadgets, do they

allow them to interrupt, comment, ask for clarification and how much does teacher talk in a lesson. The

general observation is that when the teacher has less to speak and allows students to talk more, the results

have been better. We get curious to set the stage for a responsive environment where learning is at its

highest.

Effective communication with students is one of the essential features in classroom teaching and to do so,

we, as teachers must know how to structure our own language. Teacher-talk in the classroom is expected

to have not only maximum clarity but have certain methods for understanding what students are

saying.This is much beyond asking our students “do you get it?” Also, understanding what our students

say is important to analyze about what students know, how they understand, and what teaching alterations

would be useful. We have diverse classrooms, where students do not share a first language or dialect or

native culture with the teacher. Knowledge of language structures can help teachers see that the discourse

patterns they have been using might create problems for students in comprehending their language.

The classroom ought to be a place where all the student look up to achieve success. Evidently it is

challenging to customize classroom language which can be fair and everyone benefits from it. I am taking

into account the language actually used by the teacher to

teach a syllabus where students understand what they are

learning, engaging, and producing. The teacher’s role is to

make certain that there is simultaneous progress of a

multilingual environment in which all the languages are

developed as academic/scientific languages. Meanwhile,

what emerges as a real challenge for the teachers who are

involved in higher education is, that the existing languages

of instruction do not serve as a barrier to access and

success. To take advantage of the digital age we would need to go for teacher training as well as

professional development which is equally important as an investment in technology and new

instructional materials. We ought to develop level specific content that targets at optimal application and

exploitation of technological tools.

Figure 3: [Source: 100 Most Hilarious Test Answers Ever; youtube.com]



Teachers often experience difficulties while trying to integrate classroom language into a lesson. Many

teachers are not exposed to authentic classroom language. All we need is an extra effort to seek out what

the correct language is in order to create the most authentic experience for the students. Students often

encounter difficulties when the content of the course is in a form of language that is difficult to

understand since language structures vary from one language to the other. I came across one of

assignment question that was uploaded as a jpeg file directly after clicking a photograph from the digital

camera by the teacher in a certain undergraduate course. The content was almost impossible to read as it

was hand written in not so legible handwriting, it was too bright and the content read ‘Bring out the

meaning by writing down in your notebooks’.

The language can be made easier by using a simple sentence like ‘-‘are you listening to what I am saying?’

instead of the complicated sentence ‘Are you participating in the discourse generated by me?’ Or a

sentence that is ungrammatical/ unclear like ‘planes comes on top, drop out pesticides and go’. The

example is somewhat like what is printed as the magazine headline:

Similarly, an audio-recording played as a course content can be

very useful but, it needs crucial and significant command which

would include clarity, fluency, interest factor because there are no

visuals. Smartboards can become a matter of inconvenience or

complexity for some because the level of learning capability and

attention span varies with each individual. Same is the case with

the pre-recorded course materials or power point presentations.

We are using various technologies in our classrooms now.

Learners, in the modern times are using technology almost all of

the time, be it text messaging, social networking websites, iPods

and more, it becomes almost compelling that instructors also

have the knowledge of the tools these learners are using and

find a way to engage these learners on the same technology

level. Diamanduros et al. (2008) have noted that ‘never

before, in the history of education, have more learners had access to so many resources’ (p.693) and most

of these resources derive from new electronic communication technologies that continue to evolve ever

more rapidly. Belsey (2008) states that, instant messaging is growing at a rate 30% faster than email did at

its inception. As instructors, we have to acknowledge that the astonishing range of new technologies can

offer mammoth educational possibilities for both instructors and students. Use of technology like the

films, short videos (for example from youtube), audio clippings, power point presentations, jpg image

files, posters, charts, graphs makes the

interpretation interesting and develops a coherent

and connected line of argument. The students

find it interesting to connect to the point to

discuss, compare and contrast.

There is, but, a word of caution too. In the

classes where teachers speak using a microphone

and tend to speak for a very long period without

verbal interaction with any particular student,

delivery of content gets less personalized and

personable. The use of microphone can prove to

be a more formal and less personalized instructional delivery.

Figure 4: [Source:https://cybertext.wordpress.com]




I will take another example from ‘Top 7 Video Game Translation Mistakes’ by Nicole (2015). The author

gives an instance of the language used for the US version of the video game Ghostbusters released for the

Nintendo Entertainment System. Originally in Japanese, this game was based on the popular film

‘Ghostbusters’. The complete screen in English reads: ‘…You have completed a great game. And proved

the justice of our culture. Now go and rest our heroes!’ The words used ‘proved the justice of our culture’

in the sentence leaves the student grasping for meaning and a vague idea of having missed out on an

explanation.

Teaching requires patience, motivation as well as

innovation as we, teachers have to encourage our students

to be critical thinkers, to exercise reasoned judgements,

have brain storming sessions, discussions, explanations,

crafting, drafting, arguments in our classrooms. The

‘question set’ recommended by Stephen Brookfield (1995)

can be a help to be exercised in our classrooms. The

‘question set’ takes four general categories of questions - epistemological, experiential, communicative and

political. He says “Asking a set of questions about a text provides a structure for critical inquiry that

makes this activity seem less daunting. The reader has a road map to take her into unfamiliar terrain.”

Most likely there will be heterogeneous group in the class with varied level of intelligence where these

question set can prove to be effective. Students, thus, would get involved in critical thinking and that is

when they would develop the ability to make rational, informed choices and be decisive. Hence, let us

exploit the language to the full.

Tulika Chandra is Associate Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social





The Challenges of Teaching Creative Writing in India Vikram Kapur

In popular perception, the creative and the critical stand poles apart. The creative is all

about the heart. It embodies passion in all its wild spontaneity and inhabits the world

of fancy. Its prime catalyst is inspiration. The critical, on the other hand, emanates

from the head. It is about logic and reasoning; a product of muchthought and

deliberation. To paraphrase Kipling: Oh, Creative is Creative, and Critical is Critical,

and never the twain shall meet.

That is the first misconception that anyone teaching creative writing has to surmount.

Even more so in India wherethe discipline is still in its infancyand people believe that writers are not

made; they simply happen. The realization is yet to set in that the writing of prose, poetry and drama is

deliberate rather than spontaneous, and anything that is deliberate has to employ critical thought. That is

not to say that inspiration is not important. It is the moment of inspiration that gives any creative work

its X-factor. That eureka moment, however, is arrived at after much deliberation. To paraphrase Thomas

Edison: Creative writing is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Furthermore, how well students do in creative writing is directly related to how much they have read. If

the reading habit is ingrained early in life then the student is much better placed to do well in a creative

writing class. A voracious reading habit means that the student will enter class with a well-developed

vocabulary and familiarity with at least some of the canon. Someone who has to imbibe all of that from

scratch and write creatively at the same time is far more challenged. In India, the latter is more often the

case. With the exception of some communities, most Indians do a negligible amount of discretionary

reading while growing up. If they read anything, it is a textbook. Hence, the instructor has to inculcate a

desire to read in students while educating them about the nuts and bolts of writing creatively.

Moreover, India is a polyglot society where English is constantly in dialogue with other languages. Unlike

Britain or America, Indians think and converse in more than one language which is something that has to

be taken into account while teaching them to write creatively in English. I have found that if harnessed

properly the polyglot nature of Indian society can be used to take English in directions that are impossible

in a society that is solely English-speaking.New word combinations are possible as well as a whole cluster

of fresh imagery and subject matter. Many students feel that if they are writing in English they must write

like a Briton or an American which is not the case. Generally, people write best when they write what

they know, and if India is all you know then it is best for you to capture the Indian consciousness which is

intrinsically polyglot.

All these factors make teaching creative writing an exciting challenge. The fact the discipline is new

within the Indian academic milieu leaves plenty of room for innovation. Most importantly, students from

all over the academic spectrum love it, which is something that bodes well for the humanities that have

been in decline in India ever since professional education became the buzzword in the seventies.

Vikram Kapur is Associate Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social

Sciences, Shiv Nadar University.



Why do I write? Aratrika Das

We write to tell what we think we know. We write to prove a point, to prove our worth.

We write on what we notice and in order to be noticed by all. Writing enables us to

develop our thoughts, grow and mature: broken words and fractured sentences do not

present us as responsible people. But often, this kind of writing is painful, laborious and

exposes our innermost vulnerabilities. Pushed by deadlines, writing is seldom a

comforting experience.At the same time, there is a certain relish with well-crafted sentences, a sense of

pure joy to see our ideas take the shape of words. When we write, we not only put our thoughts on a

paper, we also clarify those thoughts to ourselves. Writing enables both telling and knowingwhat to tell.

Thus, the impulse to write good sentences eventually leads to clearer ideas and lends coherence to our

otherwise random haphazard thoughts. But none of these are reasons why I write.

I write because I can see, hear, touch, feel and taste words. I write to be intimate with words, to share a

relationship.And this relationship is not always pleasant. When I write, words do not flow effortlessly. I

stop after every letter. I fiddle over punctuation, worry if the article used is correct, and finally try to

arrange words in a sequence that makes sense. I change the words, revise their arrangement, and try to

identify the errors in their structure until every sentence communicates my thoughts clearly. As my pen

moves from left to right, I, with increasing familiarity, feel a sense of ownership over words. Slowly and

painfully, words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs become mine.

I meet words unexpectedly and unashamedly begin to own them as if they were always mine. But the

truth is, I encounter words – see, hear or read them – and then create a communion with them. So a six-

worded story of Ernest Hemingway becomes my most used sentence for teaching close-reading technique

to my students –

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.

Words like “sale”, “baby shoes”, “never”, “worn” when seen individually do not provide much beyond

their immediate literal meanings. But when arranged in this order, these words evoke the reader’s

emotions, infuse a certain longing to know about the baby, why the shoes were not worn, and why were

they being sold. Was the baby dead? Was the baby still-born? Or was the baby born, growing as a healthy

infant, met a tragic accident, and then lost her feet? Maybe the shoes were stolen? Or did the parents

decide to sell the shoes because of hunger. Then were the parents homeless like the Syrian refugees? The

possibilities of interpreting a sentence like this are endless. These endless endings make the six words a

story. Within this story, there is a parallel life, a life that simply did not exist prior to this sequencing of

words. Hemingway’s artistic excellence liesarranging the words in an order that conjuresendless worlds of

words. And the reader’sexcellencelies in tapping into this endless reservoir, choosing a particular version

over others, and then unfolding a unique story that connects Hemingway’s words to her’s. In this process,

a reader makes Hemingway’s words her own. She feels connected to Hemingway for providing those six

words. And consciously or unconsciously lets Hemingway’s words get entangled with her past, her-story.

So while teaching how to close-read a single sentence, I enter the labyrinth of the innermost thought-

processes of my students. Their insights, pauses, stress on specific words, uncomfortably remind me that

meanings are always slipping away, spilling over. Each time I declare to have grasped the meaning of these

six words, my students create playful, sad, tragic, or ghostly endings –such that I once again step back in

awe. Words push me back and forth from Hemingway to my students. Moving between the layers of

meanings that pour forth once I pause over words, I learn that there is always a sense of entanglement

with words. The theoretical analysis does not bury the students’ voices, but is inseparable from their own



lived experience. For some, a close-reading of Hemingway’s words evokes a sense of wonder and

amazement; for others, it reminds a horrific memory. The six words, then, acquire a vicarious presence

inside the classroom, a comforting or disorienting force, ready to unlock and expose our (both students’

and mine) guarded selves.

A simple reading-exercise then makes me realise how intimately I am related to words. My hesitation to

write does not come much from a lack of a good vocabulary. I hesitate to write because writing

visibilisesmydeepest vulnerabilities. The empirical precision of arranging words reflects myuneasy

entanglement with life and its messiness. The intellectual, emotional and aesthetic preoccupation with the

accuracy of sentences comes from a deep investment to conquer this mess. I want to write an impeccable,

grammatically correct and elegant sentence not to communicate my ideas to the reader. I want to write a

perfect sentence so that I can make sense of my life perfectly. Writing is inhabiting, owning and feeling

responsible for the unsettling surroundings, the disorienting realities of life. If incomplete sentences show

bewilderment and apprehension, perfectly-arranged words allow me to approximate words and transform

the vulnerable me into a confident voice. I write because words remind me of my deprivation: I do not

have the perfect sentences always because I do not have the precision of thought. And by writing half-

broken sentences, I am reminded that uncertainties and hesitations are part of the thought-process. So if

writing makes me acutely aware of my lack, writing opens up the possibilities of rediscovering and

affirming connections that cut across time and space.Hemingway’s words and the words of 15 students in

a classroom in Dadri connect in uncanny ways, assuring me that attentiveness to just six words can lead to

somewhere worth spending time, effort and energies.

Therefore, I write. I write hesitatingly, frightened to make errors, scared to appear foolish to others’ eyes,

and at times, feeling overburdened, lonely and confused. But I continue to write. For writing is the only

way to push these confusions away. Writing is the only form of thinking I know of. Writing is the only

means of nurturing thoughts, transforming and generating ideas. As Chekhov writes to his brother

Alexander in 1886:

“I’m writing this as a reader with preferences of my own. I’m also writing so that you shouldn’t feel lonely

in your work. The loneliness of creation is a burdensome thing.”

Aratrika Das is Visiting Faculty, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social






TESTing the Possibilities: Critical Thinking in a Part-Time

Drama-Based Learning Course Manjima Chatterjee

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

– Socrates, Apologia Socratis

Our course at Shiv Nadar University (SNU) is called TEST – Theatre for Education

and Social Transformation. It is a part-time course for professionals, the first of its

kind at SNU and possibly in many senses, in India. It is a course that seeks to find ways for theatre to

create mini-revolutions in thoughts and ideas across a variety of spaces – schools, NGOs, community

spaces of different kinds – and open up a world of possibilities, an expanded universe, so to speak. When

I was applying for it in May 2015, I was quite jittery. The questions in my mind were multifarious – would

I be selected? What would the course content be like? How would it be delivered, given the paucity of

time in our lives? And how would I manage the workload with all the million things going on in my life

already?

Thankfully, the course designers had thought through the possible snags down to minute details, and even

more thankfully, they thought I was capable of taking it on! Two words that feature prominently in our

course are ‘constraints’ and ‘possibilities’. In course of time, these would feature prominently in our lives,

as well! The constraints, well, those were right here, bearing heavily on our backs – the load of tasks and

responsibilities that each of us came with, the ‘but’s of family and the jobs that sustained us – the

demands on our time and energies, as well as the varied backgrounds and experiences each of us came

with. But the possibilities – those were what we had come for! A whole world of learning, of experiences

that lay before us, in terms of gaining exposure to the ideas and practices that had shaped the area of

drama education , and coming into contact with some of the brightest minds in the field operating in

India and around the world. There was much to be explored, much to be achieved. And yet, in the true

spirit of drama, the possibilities had to be negotiated through the barbed mesh of constraints that govern

our lives.

Since it is a part-time course, one can imagine that the first difficulty the creators of the course felt must

have been to decide how and how many times the motley group of 11 would actually meet physically. In

the case of our batch this happened first up over a highly intense two-week-long Summer School at the

Shiv Nadar University, where we were introduced to various aspects of non-production-oriented theatre

by Ms Maya Rao (Professor, Department of Education, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv

Nadar University) and Dr. Ananda Breed (Reader and Programme Leader of Drama, Applied Theatre &

Performance at University of East London; Co-director, Centre for Performing Arts Development

(CPAD) research centre). Their sessions left our bodies feeling unfamiliar, and minds buzzing with ideas.

We were invited to consider, not what happens next, but what happens when… and the doors of

possibility were opened wide. But then, all too soon, the Summer School was over, and it was time to

move ahead into our mundane lives again. How would we continue our journey into the realm of

possibilities? It was at this point that we were introduced to Proboard.

In many ways, Proboard lies at the heart of the TEST programme. As a forum for the sharing of ideas, it

is an excellent space for the group to conduct formal conversations on their learning. The format is one

where various facilitators who have conducted sessions with the learners during the Summer School or

during the later, weekend classes, would refresh the learning of their previous sessions and throw out

intellectually challenging problems for the learners to engage with in terms of responding to specific

questions, as well as dialoguing with each other within the context.



There are many advantages to this format. Firstly, the video allows facilitators as well as their students to

revisit the flavor of the class, as well as the content itself. Furthermore, each student is expected to write

in a formal response to the questions shared by the facilitator, and also to comment on or respond to

another student’s response, creating a space for formal dialogue. As student, Mohammad Faheem shares

from his experience, this format is different from the structure of most online courses, which require

submissions by email, and do not have a provision for peer reading or reviewing. Another student, Kapil

Pandey, points out that, “Writing is in itself an act that involves critical thinking, and sharing thoughts and

responding to others’ thoughts in writing, results in deep reflection and considered opinions, as opposed

to frivolous and knee-jerk reactions.” For Faheem, another significant fact is that the responses and

opinions remain on the forum, to be revisited later if need be, allowing further self-reflexivity and analysis

to occur. In so far as critical thinking may be defined as "the intellectually disciplined process of actively

and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered

from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to

belief and action,"i the format may certainly be said to support the same.

Besides Proboard, another important area where technology supports the course is in the Skype sessions

conducted between learners and their mentors, which enable a comfortable rapport to develop between

mentor and mentee, and bring in familiarity between the two, which is essential for true nurturing to

occur. Beyond the formal devices, our Whatsapp and Facebook groups have been invaluable as we keep

each other abreast of developments both at SNU and in our respective lives.

The study of the arts per se is contingent on critical thinking, and theatre, particularly, is an art form that

cannot escape the examination of life, as Socrates might have put it. One of the major planks on which

drama-in-education stands is the development of critical thinking and self-reflexivity. Our aim, to put it in

the words of the great Dorothy Heathcote, is to burnish the minds of learners, to help them examine and

see possibilities in their own lives and expand their universes. Two-thirds of the way through the TEST

course, I cannot help but feel very lucky to live in an age where it has been possible, even as we balance

our working lives, to move towards our aim with the help of technology.

Figure 7: TEST Group Photo

Manjima Chatterjee belongs to the TEST Batch 2015-16, Shiv Nadar University.



Active Pedagogy: A Detailed Study on its Prospects and

Expectations Abhilasha Awasthi

Abstract - - Ancient pedagogies have often disregarded student participation. The basis of their module

functions on the conception of giving more significance to ‘teaching’ rather than ‘learning’. This is done by

bringing to practice the pedagogical approaches central to the unidirectional flow of knowledge. This pulls

apart the notion of conceptualized student friendly pedagogies in higher education systems, where the gap

between the conceptualized learning modules and the practical approaches is responsible for hampering

learning by constraining it to teaching.

Various pedagogical systems are designed keeping in mind student interaction and student participation,

but only a few are able to meet the required expectations. This paper focusses on the ones trying to meet

the student expectations. Active pedagogy is one of them. Unlike others it involves active student

participation yet profoundly involving instructors too. Active pedagogy necessarily involves student

participation by ‘flipping the classroom’. This ideology includes students participating in their own

learning. It assures their involvement with their own material and ensures instilling skills which help

‘learners’ solve problems on their own without being dependent on the instructor to spew them with

answers. This aids in creating learning environments and focusing on the range of information provided

by the instructor. The idea of active pedagogy focusses on making the instructor conscious about the

varied learning preferences of each student. It is based on experimentation and observation, which set

high standards for improved pedagogies. Finally, it helps in maintaining the mutual relationship between

students and instructors by allowing them to keep up a good rapport with each other. Therefore, this

pedagogical system helps in bringing to life the desired idea of “learning from learners”.

Keywords - Experimentation, Student friendly, flipping the classroom.

I. Introduction

Pedagogical approaches have a crucial role in determining the class environment. Student friendly

approaches are characteristic of breaking through the conventional system of teaching where knowledge is

“imparted” to students by teachers, lacking the sense of developing in them an approach of learning by

problem solving. This results in the kind of learning where one seeks knowledge from the teacher without

having any idea about how his/her approach looks from the eyes of their peers. Student friendly

approaches target at making the students comfortable with not only the teacher, but also the other fellow

students who are given the opportunity to freely criticize their work. This kind of approach paves way for

revolutionizing learning by subverting the conventional way which lacks peer involvement. Student

friendly environments are created within and outside the classroom space with these kinds of approaches

in hand. One such course which advances with this kind of approach is Academic Writing. Academic

Writing is a learner oriented workshop styled course designed to run entirely by and on student

participation. The course denies excessive lecturing and focusses on the approach where everyone learns

and grows by teaching each other about how to read better, eventually helping them with how to write

better [1].

The course is designed in a way that one gets to improve her/his grade based on how well the person

helps her/his peers to improve their work. This provides the “learners” the opportunity to exercise their

newly acquired skill. Student learning from each other is an essential feature of this course. This kind of

methodology is called peer review. Peer review forms a crucial step towards the development of this

course.

II. Organization of the Study



This paper takes the reader through the role of active pedagogy in creating student friendly environment

in and out of classroom space. The second section elaborates on peer review and its advantages in

achieving the same. The next section elaborates on how experimentation serves as a tool for shaping the

future of active learning techniques and sets forth a step in the path of achieving quality education.

III. Redefining Pedagogical Approach: Academic Writing

Logistically, Academic Writing is a course designed for training one in critical thinking, critical reading and

critical writing. This is made possible by giving emphasis on reading and thinking together for they aren’t

mutually exclusive. This course is designed to inculcate in one the skill of independent thinking which is

an essential tool in redefining the dynamics of the student learning environment [1].

The methodology is responsible for assigning five essays to read, write and work on. Every alternate

week one is expected to workon an essay. The mechanics of the course takes forth by submitting a rough

draft followed by a final draft each week. Usage of audio visuals in classes helps in understanding the

concepts better which are otherwise hard to visualize, or concepts which need to be strengthened so that

an argument can be put forward articulately. This pedagogical approach converts the classroom space into

a hub of group discussions, peer exchange, problem solving, etc., thus flipping the classroom [2]. This

kind of approach is directed at redefining the classroom as a space where the applied learning takes place,

restricting the conventional “classroom work” to be done at home i.e. readings, formation of analysis, etc.

The classroom becomes an area of exercising the concepts studied at home, and essentially for problem

solving.

IV. Peer Review

Experimentation and observation forms the basic steps in the process of revolutionizing learning.

Hopping over the conventional ideas of teaching, a new methodology as introduced in Academic Writing

i.e. Peer reviewing has brought to light the ways by which students learn from their peers. This

methodology is crucial in disintegrating the conventionally set notion of teaching as a unidirectional

process, where the drafts which contain essential ideas which students pen down are reviewed and

corrected by the fellow students. This is a revision session where someone else who is studying the same

thing in class is marking you according to his/her knowledge of the concepts studying in class.

Peer Review Details:

As the course proceeds, each student is handed out a copy of another student’s rough draft. He/she is

expected to review it carefully tracking the logistical syntax of the technical format which includes paying

attention to the MLA format, Introduction, body paragraphs, tracking the topic sentence followed by the

thesis statement. The next thing to jump to was the quote and its close reading. The unpacking of the

quote and an original explanation which derives from the idea one is trying to put forward is the next

step. Making connections to the other reading or quote is done with the help of the ECS (Explicit

connecting sentences). [3]

Peer review helps redress the loopholes left in the rough draft as it targets the weak points in the essay or

the irrelevant parts which a reader refuses to pay attention to. These are the examples of the kind of

questions that one has to address to while reviewing: “Does the essay answer the question?”; “which

paragraph is irrelevant?” “Which paragraphs are relevant?”

This procedure helps in sharpening one’s own concepts as everyone has to correct the paper of at least

one classmate. One needs to be well equipped with the concepts one studies in the classroom in order to

ensure that this kind of learning is effectively helping them learn from other learners [4]. It also makes the

reviewer conscious of the writing styles of writer whose papers are getting reviewed. This helps in

widening the lens through which the reviewer sets out to review the draft.

This takes place when students begin to feel the responsibility towards each other’s work. This is

efficiently executed when they review each other’s works by their own acquired concepts learnt in class.



Sometimes, groups work together to do assignments. This uses “flipping the classroom” approach which

helps one use the classroom space for productive activities instead of lecturing [5]. Here, a bidirectional

exchange of knowledge takes place as each student has to review someone’s work and in turn get his/her

work reviewed back and discuss it to make each other understand what does their scrutinized work mean.

Hence, if one isn’t clear with the format or the concepts of the syllabi, one won’t be able to progress in

the class, and therefore in the course. Along with this, the thinking mechanics of the students is shaped to

be directed essentially towards building a rapport with the fellow students.

V. Expectations from Active Pedagogy

Higher Education systems face the problem of the gap between the prospects of the course and the

outcomes of it been proving to be huge. The question of overcoming this divide is one which everyone

involved in the process of learning must ask them. Experimentation and observation reiterate to become

the bridge to this divide. Academic Writing is born out of experimentation, which with the writing styles

and the “flipping the classroom” approach which not only helps students learn but also subvert the class

dynamics by learning from each other.

This kind of experimentation bears fruits as it not only provides the instructor to give students an

opportunity to learn by themselves and guide them but also serves as a platform for students to develop

skills to take responsibility to use what they have learnt and apply it while learning from learners.

Experimentation and observation form the stepping stones for the process of bridging the divide existing

between the prospects and expectations of high level education, but they can’t work efficiently without

the proper updation of the same. A course, in order to successfully evolve, needs to encompass updation

along with the rigorous implementation of experimental methodologies.

VI. Discussion and Concluding Remarks

Therefore, courses like Academic Writing help enhance the cognitive abilities of an individual especially

when it comes to penning down the thoughts or arguments running in one’s mind articulately.

Experimentation opens a window for letting courses like these to flow inside the conventional

pedagogical methodologies and techniques like Peer review help the learners to understand each other

better. It lets them learn efficiently as when they correct someone else’s work, they understand better and

end up learning better. Therefore, approaches like peer review and courses like Academic Writing help

revolutionizing learning by re-envisioning it from the basic level.

References

1. Aratrika Das, Academic Writing Course Description, 2015, pp. 1-2

2. Notes on Active Pedagogy

3. Aratrika Das, Academic Writing Course Description, 2015 pp. 1-3

4. Derek Bok Centre for Teaching and Learning: Active learning.

5. Edu Cause, “Things you should know about Flipped Classrooms”, February 2012, sources at

https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7081.pdf

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Aratrika Das for introducing me to the “brain pain” course. Gokul, who gave

me the idea of writing about this course (my autobiographical experience with this course). Benny, who

helped with the editing (well IEEE is hard!), Raju for sitting through, helping me form clear arguments by

cross questioning, and my other friends for giving me honest reviews about my paper. Also, I would like

to thank my family for endless encouragement.

Abhilasha Awasthi is B.A. Second Year Student of Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Shiv Nadar University. She can be contacted at: [email protected]

https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7081.pdf




Systems of Knowledge and Exchange of Knowledge Samuel Berthet

The idea of a sharing of knowledge across border via the information technology relies on

the belief of the universality of knowledge and the universality of its access. Therefore this

idea is bypassing the processes and conditions of mediation, production, transmission,

reception and the incurring transformation at each of those steps. Our systems of

knowledge and technology as they are today, all the results are of processes of exchange,

transfer and hybridization.

Let us take the case of the exchanges between India and Europe. To name but few instances: zero (it

seems) and the resulting method of calculus, tales from the Panchatantra, Buddha under the form of

Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, spices, medicine, cloth printing technics resulting in what is called les

Indiennes, Indigo dying, most probably shampoo, soap, vast number of vegetal and fauna elements but also

botany and taxonomy, architecture and shipbuilding… the traffic continent saw a huge amount of

knowledge, believes and technology moving between the two parts of the Eurasian continent through

many mediations (geographical, human, economic, cultural, linguistic, etc.). While the quantity and the

quality of this sharing is yet to be assessed properly, its influence on our systems or knowledge and lives at

large are incommensurable. In the present context of exponentially increased mobility as well as online

technology the sharing of knowledge and course contents has become a major phenomenon. Therefore

the lack of studies and concern for this legacy of exchanges and the near absence of problematizing them

may call for attention.

For being undeniably important those exchanges took place in various manners, across different time

lines and with different layers of mediations. Though they might have in certain cases used the same or

some intersecting channels each of them is a different case. We can just raise basic questions. Given that

the potentiality always preexist their development, how did the particular knowledge or technology

developed in the first place? For instance why the zero took the importance and the function it has now

“only” between the 7th and the 14th century in India while it was technically known before and elsewhere?

What was the role and influence in fostering a new modern mathematical language of religion, Buddhism

for instance, and of trade? What was the compulsion for its sudden surge and spread while as some

authors remind, civilizations flourished much before the zero as we know it today came into use? Was

there a role played by intermediaries such as Arab merchants and scientists?



Figure 8: Attempt to visualize and problematize the coming into usage and the spread of the Zero.

All transfer of knowledge and technology raises a series of question on their coming into existence, the

modes of transmission, transfer and communication and their reception. Each stage involves multiples

possibilities, modalities and categories. Various modes of interpretation, appropriation and transformation

influenced by language, location, socio-cultural patterns (and here we include political and financial

constraints) are elements at play in those various possibilities.

Taking stock of the previous sharing, trying to understand how and why they happened as well as the

different variables may certainly help us framing future exchange in a more conscious and relevant

manner while trying to promote an all-out sharing of knowledge and technology.

Samuel Berthet is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, School of Humanities and

Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. He is also the Joint Working Group Member in Human

Ecology, EU-India Project E-QUAL



A Political Palette: Thinking Through Colour Cleo Roberts

Colour has meaning as chromatic studies offered by John Gage, David Bachelor so

expertly show.5Across these attempts to extrapolate its history and, as Bachelor’s work

does, advocate its use, colour lends itself to being a coordinator and conductor of

socio-religious and political rhetoric. One only has to tap at the vestiges of Western

political history to see the colours fall out.

This is a culturally specific field of study as Umberto Eco’s essay, ‘How culture

conditions the colours we see’, goes some way in suggesting.6This does not have to be over-stated.

Discrepancies in linguistic descriptions show that colour inhabits different conceptual registers.

Dictionaries of colour whether formal or informal, show how colour is calibrated idiosyncratically and

accorded metaphorical

relationships with

animals, actions, senses

and emotions.

5 John Gage systematically pieced together a historiography of colour and attempted to reconcile its principles. See Gage, J. (1999) Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism London: Thames & Hudson Gage, J. (1993) Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction California: University of California Press Bachelor, D. (2000) Chromophobia London: Reaktion Books Bachelor, D. (2014) The Luminous and the Grey London: Reaktion Books 6 This is not as Eco states an ‘easy matter’ (1985:157). This sensitive essay can be found in Blonsky, M. (ed) (1985) On Signs USA: John Hopkins University Press pp.157-175

Figure 9: Liberty leading the people (28th July 1830), Delacroix (1830)



Figure 10: GeorgeField’s Chromatics (1845)



Figure 11: Farrow and Ball Paint Samples (2016)

A discussion which plays with colour are perhaps best suited to an Indian context. For here colour is a

persuasive cultural lubricant. Although recently flippant exports of this in the shape of Holi

festivitiesthrows and rubs away its religious significance, it must be noted that according to Hinduism days

are coloured. From white Somvar through red, green, yellow, light-blue, black and orange for Ravivaar,

perspectives and routine form around these symbolic pigments which coordinate daily dress and food

choices.



Focusing on the continent’s colours, a

heady history emerges. This cannot avoid

indigo, which wasas we well know the

jump and leap towards mutiny and

riot.7We must touch onthe rich yellow

pigment, which was manipulated through

feeding only mango leaves to cows. A

turn to turkey red, carefully packaged for

commercial returns shows how colour

underscored colonial experience.

Relocating our view to contemporary

colour, a pragmatic political tool emerges.

Across India, we see a varied chromo-

spectrum used to coordinate political

attitudes, identity and oil the mechanics

of power. Colour’s usage can as Natasha Eaton asserts function ‘as and beyond a narrative subject’.8

Whilst careful not to apotheosise colour, it can

convincingly be thought through as a political

mechanism. This draws the eye towards Uttar

Pradesh. Roaming from here, across to Mangalore

before resting in Calcutta, colour can be seen as a

sharpened part of each regions’ political armature.

Sharpening however does not suggest infallible

usage. Peeping through the Gulabi Gang provides

such insight. The Gulabi Gang, founded in 2006,

have unsurprisingly adopted the semantics of the

colour gulabi (rose) to facilitate their political

presence and legitimacy. From their base in

Bundelkhand, this group, well documented by

filmmakersKim Longinotto (2010) and Nishtha

Jain (2012), use this colour to stratify their society

and circulate a new currency of matriarchy.9

7 A comprehensive discussion of this dye is offered in

Vatsyayan, K. (ed) (2014) Culture of Indigo in Asia: Plant, Product, Power New Delhi: Niyogi Books 8 Eaton, N. (2013) Colour, Art and Empire, Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation London: I.B Tauris p3 9 Longinotto, K. (2010) Pink Saris UK Jain, N. (2012) Gulabi Gang India

Figure 12: Street scene in South Calcutta, Jadavpur (2015)

Figure 13: United Turkey red packaging c.1898



As a pre-requisite for

followers, pink saris sold at

approximately 200 rupees

each and pink lathi (bamboo

stick), whether in use or not,

formalise the groups’ identity.

Adopted during mass

demonstrations, collective

trips and recruitment drives,

covering their activism in

palatable pink both marks

and conceals their

revolutionary and contentious

intentions. Whilst it is

sensible not over egg this use

of colour it has, given the

documentary footage,

subsequent Bollywood

remake, press commentary

and literature10, performed

for the group and engineered

their political narrative.

10 Sen, S.(2014) Gulaab Gang India

A selection of press includes:

India’s ‘pink’ vigilante women http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7068875.stm

Gulabi Gang: India’s women warriors

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/gulabi-gang-indias-women-warrriors-

201422610320612382.html

The Power of Pink, Business Standard

http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/geetanjali-krishna-the-power-of-pink-

110060500090_1.html

Berthod, A. (2008) Moi, Sampat Pal, chef de gang en sari rose,En collaboration avec Anne Berthod France: Oh

Editions

Figure 14: Gulabi Gang follower

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7068875.stm

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/gulabi-gang-indias-women-warrriors-201422610320612382.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/gulabi-gang-indias-women-warrriors-201422610320612382.html



Figure 15: Film Posters

This narrative bends both ways. Whilst the colour has certainly created a profile for the cause and created

visibility, which has somewhat naively been equated with effectiveness, it has simultaneously unraveled

the group’s intentions. On the ground, away from the media buzz and embrace, interactions within their

patriarchal society see the colour’s feminine associations nullify the sincerity of the group.

This could be considered subversive, a perfect masquerade and to an extent it is. The pink enables the

group to publicly mobilise, they are bright and therefore within the community’s panopticon. Yet this

pink also generates a culture of ridicule. The colourcan mock the potency of their ambition. Collecting in

these pink masses, brandishing lathis splattered with pale pink, has a juvenile quality which is picked up by

skeptics. In this their message and the sincerity of their presence is in danger of unraveling and becoming

registered as jest and novelty.

It perhaps falls as no surprise that the group’s former head, Sampat Pal Devi following her ousting in

March 2014, is now found at Hitchin station, coated in pink advertising Al Jazeera.



Similar critiques can be leveraged at the Pink Chaddi movement of

2009. Pivoting around pink undeniably consolidated the group’s

message and led its activism which saw thousands of pink chaddi sent

to the offices of a Hindu orthodox group, Sri Ram Sena in Mangalore.

Again whilst the use of colour certainly garnered the popular

imagination, it could not sustain the campaign and move it beyond

this short-lived burst of activity.

Where colour

connects and

calibrates a

sinister, thicker

message is in

contemporary

Calcutta.

Finding our

feet here, a

voracious blue and white washing of the city

provides perspective on political ownership and

colour.

For here, pigment is being commandeered by

those with an established power base and its use

incentivised by the institutional desire to

mainstream its ideology and revert the city’s

recourse to communist red.

Rather than grassroots groups who are harnessing

colour for dissent and subversion on a localized,

personal level here colour is setting the popular

stage.

This campaign of colour is systematically

changing the city’s built environment. Railings

around Victoria Memorial and other public boarders, bridges and boulevards are being retouched and

with pigment are signalling the city’s conceptual perimeters.

Figure 16: Al Jazeera advert

Figure 17: Pink chaddi

Figure 18: Painting in progess, Calcutta



Figure 19: Donning blue hues, Alipore Bridge, Calcutta

The blue and white bandied about the city is not overly popular. Aside from aesthetic displeasure, this

adoption of colour, which is invariably splattered across the city without finesse, gregariously foregrounds

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s dubious policies. Tentatively hooking into and seeking to emulate

Jaipur’s ‘pink city’ epithet, colour here is inscribing politically permanency and defining Banerjee’s legacy.

Joining her strategy to re-imagine the city as a global player, which has seen a gaudy implant of Big Ben

placed along Lake Town and VIP road, this new aesthetic can be dismissed as a gimmick. Although it is

productive to consider this criticism, the seemingly ridiculous suggestions to offer one year tax holidays

for those who coat their houses in these colours

and the rapid progress of this policy points to its

effectiveness.

Unlike the pink clothes adopted in Bandal and

Mangalore, these colours are far less disposable.

Lodging themselves into the city’s routines and

architectural landscape, they have a longer, slower

impact. Colour here, is decidedly more effectual, it

is unavoidably interactive. Its application is

contrived to create increasingly city-centric

responses. Be these positive or negative, colour is

parading someone’s politics.

Figure 20: Big Ben

Figure 21: Dhakuria Bridge (2015)



Skipping across this palette of political colours, the

discussion must be draw to conclusion with the

words of Abanindranath Tagore (1922) Rallying

against colonial chromatography and attempting to

define a theoretical alternative, he wrote that ‘colour

is the most difficult attainment of all’. This challenge,

as has been explored, remains and is recognized by a

range of political groups in contemporary India.

Attempting to inhabit what we traditionally think of

the tools of the artist’s trade, can be at once a

convincing and compromising political strategy. As

lurid saffron hues increase their coverage across

India, it is important to be visually astute and recognise the politics bound up in pigments.

Cleo Roberts is UKIERI PhD Researcher at University of Liverpool and Visiting Research Associate, Wolfson College, Cambridge University

Figure 22: Colours of Calcutta



Teaching and Learning Critical Thinking Saravanan Mani

Can critical thinking be taught in a classroom? To answer this question, I need to position

my response in my own years as a student in India, where I was trained to see intelligence as

a given that can be nurtured with practice and hard-work, and to consider critical thinking as

just ‘thinking’. This common-sense approach worked, in the sense, they managed academic

outcomes as rewards of practicing certain values and attributes that were encouraged.

Especially in the context where performance was measured as an exact number on a hundred-mark system,

questions of ‘why’ were always secondary to the question of ‘what’ and ‘how’. I learned calculus without

ever being explained its significance or application. Topics in sciences were generally taught without any

reference to other dimensions or topics even when they intersected. Things such as properties of sound

produced in different materials in physics were not sustained with explanations from chemistry regarding

the differences of the chemical composition or molecular arrangement of the compounds. Mathematical

problems that presented complex real-world situations about trains that cross each other at night were

fervently reduced to very specific formulae and steps that needed to be reproduced as they were. Even the

logic of a computer language was replaced with familiarity and memorisation. Any sort of understanding

was incidental to the main focus of being prepared for an exam. There is a real joy in recognizing the

significance of an idea in the context of another seemingly unrelated situation, and such an ability to

observe phenomena and identify patterns is often lost to many when it is treated as a magical ability

accorded only to a few. If not for any higher goal of teaching and learning, critical thinking should be taught

for the pragmatic benefit of greater engagement with and enjoyment of the subject that is being taught.

My years as a teacher of English Literature in a Junior College in Singapore were an experience of

unlearning some of the views about the manner in which critical thinking is delivered in a classroom. The

Ministry of Education, Singapore has historically introduced strategies that update the educational practices

to the changing demands of the society. Famous initiatives like Thinking Schools Learning Nation (1996)

and Teach Less Learn More (2004) aimed at greater deliberation and evaluation of content rather than rote

memory that were associated with Asian nations that have produced students who perform very well in test

conditions. One of the trickle-down strategies that I encountered as a teacher was the implementation of

Critical Thinking strategies in everyday lesson delivery. Through the use of Richard Paul’s framework of

critical thinking, we used explicit labelling of the elements of thought (such as point of view, purpose,

information, interpretation) that could be approached through a rigorous practice of universal intellectual

standards (such clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic). These were used as questions that provoked

discussion on many points of analysis during the class, especially with reference to character motivations

and broader thematic concerns. The learning that the students achieved at the end of such a process aims to

expand their schema as a method of practice that is transferable to other topics, even across different

subjects. The invocation of the thinking process as the primary objective while relegating content to a

secondary position is the only way we can prepare students for encounters that have no real correlative in

present circumstances.

Of course, such an idealistic vision of teaching critical thinking has to be tempered with an understanding

of the ground reality. The best possible outcomes mentioned previously are sometimes just that, the best

possible ones. Chief among the conditions necessary to achieve any meaningful dialogue through a critical

thinking frameworks that the teacher needs to relinquish the traditional position of authority stemming

from subject mastery. This is especially challenging for teachers who have not had their authority

questioned. Secondly, the practice of peer evaluation and critical dialogue has been hushed out from such

an early age, that students find it difficult to shift from an environment of ‘shut up and sit down’ during

their developing years to ‘stand up and speak up’ in their age of higher education. The uncertainties that a



student encounters at a higher level of learning could trigger the need for the comfort of the familiar –

however compartmentalized and exam oriented they are. And it does not help much that many teachers

deploy most of the new innovations and practices in critical thinking as a way of preparing their students to

perform even better in an examination. Reciprocally, it is not entirely unheard of for a student to use these

questions as yet another routine, and a mechanical process to consult in order to sharpen the focus of an

essay, or to arrive at an answer that would be received well, rather than to use them as a way of enquiring

after the complexities of the subject. Ultimately, teaching and learning is still governed by the exam

outcomes of a student, no matter how significantly positioned the critical thinking strategies are in a school.

To enable an entire generation to approach education with a critical and positive outlook, the changes that

need to be effected are more fundamental; in that critical thinking should be decoupled from exam

performance. If it becomes yet another performance indicator, as it has in some locations, critical thinking

is also bound to be reduced to a mechanical process.

To go back to the question with which this piece began, can critical thinking be taught in a classroom? The

short answer would be, yes, it can be taught. Many teachers profess dimensions of critical thinking that a

student must be familiarized with as a set of thinking tools or guidelines. But that answer would shy away

from a bigger question that looms behind the first, if it can be learnt. As a practice, critical thinking is also

situated at the interstices of curiosity, access and an environment that does not pose a fear of failure.

However, even to students who are not able to successfully practice it, the teaching of critical thinking has a

lot of positive benefits, such as clarifying the process and objectives of a study rather than to have a

compartmentalised and dogmatic knowledge disconnected from other topics in their study. And if only for

that advantage, critical thinking should be systematized and delivered to students who hope to grasp big

ideas through a personal understanding rather than a system of remember facts.

Saravanan Mani is a PhD Student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore



Critical Thinking and Knowledge System Saanika Singh Deo

World over knowledge system that have survived and contributed to the progress of

humankind has always had an element of critical thinking. Critical thinking in simple

terms means application of human cognitive capabilities in a systematic, disciplined

and focused manner to arrive at solution to the problem. The problem could be of

any type or dimension - mathematical, technical, medical, art, philosophy, politics or

economics. It essentially entails segmenting the problem and then finding solution for

each step. This is the engineering of the problem solving. Critical thinking as a

concept can be utilized to problem solving at each stage starting from macro level conceptual stage to

different segments and stages at micro level.

Critical thinking is capability to solve problems manually without heavy reliance on instant access to ready

information and facts as in the Internet. What does the critical thinking in this case mean? It means

capability to retain the idea and process while experimenting or observing a happening in one frame of

reference and use the same while trying to solve a problem at hand at other. One actually uses that as tool

to work out variety of difficulties. The more and frequent uses of that, the more confident one grows in its

application.

Critical thinking is the capability of human brain to identify a problem and find out a workable solution for

it. It relies on past experiences and learning tools that has been acquired by the person concern over a

period of time.

As an educator and pedagogical concern our job is to facilitate thinking and problem solving and not to

provide hands-on and hand-holding. As an alternative to this approach of learning, use of applied thinking

or applied learning is far more important and critical since the solution finding is not a function of right

hands-on. It is in fact dependent upon the kind of application of learning already acquired. It has wide

options to apply from. It is far from hand holding. With this in a group of ten participants we will have ten

different solutions to a given problem and all of them could be as unique and individualistic as the persons

finding the solution for it. We could not have this variety if the task was given to a group of participants

who had all been given hands on to solve this kind of problem. We may have got the expected solution

faster and with uniformity but we certainly could not have got the variety and originality of solutions that

we got in the case of applied learning.

Applied learning is like creativity that is individualistic and brilliant and that seems like an out of box

solution. Applied learning is also systematic approach to problem solving. There is no known path and

result to the problem at hand nor there is guarantee that a solution is available within the parameters, but

then the subject gets ahead with the task in all sincerity with the tools and learning available to him which

are often embedded in his psyche and comes to him as his second nature. This is what we also refer to as

manual problem solving. Manual in the same way as not using computer or Internet for looking for

readymade solution.

Today’s generation are so used to use of technology and Internet to look for solution to any problem that

they even lose sight of the risk of getting trapped in deliberate false information uploaded on the net by

mischief mongers. There is tendency to believe in the written words. It is not very easy to create mischief

by written words in books in paper forms since it is expensive and there are layers of editors and publishers

who own responsibility in ensuring that books are published only by serious and authentic writers. Whereas

due to relative anonymity of the net the mischief mongers and tricksters tend to post posts which sound



authentic but are downright false. In such a situation the millennia kids relying on the hands on solution

from net simply go haywire and realize at great cost that they had been conned.

Critical thinking is intellectually disciplined process of activity that conceptualizes, apply, synthesize and

evaluate information as a guide to future course of action. The information is collected through various

sources and ways like observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, interaction and communication.

Clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth and

fairness are the universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions. That is no matter what

the subject matter of deliberations, these values are essentials and implicit in all reasoning and critical

thinking.

Critical thinking is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking: scientific thinking,

mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, moral thinking and philosophical

thinking.

Critical thinking has two components: set of information and belief generating skills and 2. Habits based on

intellectual commitments of using those skills.

So critical thinking needs to be contrasted with

Mere acquisition of those skills and retention of information

Mere possession of a set of skills because it involves the continuous use of them and

Mere use of those skills without acceptance of the results

Critical thinking also varies according to the motivation underlying it. When grounded in selfish motives it

is manifested as skilful manipulation of ideas to serve own or groups vested interest. Such use of critical

thinking is typically intellectually flawed, however successful it might be pragmatically. Thus fair-

mindedness and intellectual integrity remains important to critical thinking. However this approach remains

open to charge of ‘idealism’ by those who are prone to use it for selfish use. There are others who would

like the critical thinking as a tool to remain neutral to the use it is put to.

However no knowledge system can be completely neutral and be devoid of a philosophy. Philosophy that

actually aims at elevating your life experience and that is for good of the humanity. A philosophy will have a

system and will have an ideal.

Critical thinking of any kind is never universal in any individual. Everyone is subject to episodes of

undisciplined and irritation thoughts. It is thus a matter of degree and dependent upon quality and depth of

experience and commitment to the cause. The development of critical thinking skills and dispositions is

therefore a lifelong endeavor.

Critical thinking is as self-guided and self-disciplined thinking that attempts to reason at the highest level of

quality in a fair-minded way. People who think critically try to ensure that their egocentric and sociocentric

tendencies are kept under check. They consciously attempt to love rationally, reasonably and empathically.

They diligently strive to develop Intellectual integrity, intellectual empathy and intellectual sense of justice

and reason. They understand that there is always scope for improvement in personal capability. They strive

to improve the world in whatever way they can and contribute to a more rational civilized society.

A well cultivated critical thinker raises vital questions and problems, formulates them clearly and precisely.

He then gathers relevant information, use them to reach at well-reasoned conclusions and solutions and

then test them against relevant criteria and standards. He is open to alternative ideas and thoughts

recognizing the need to constantly evolve his own ideas by way of communication.



Almost all the civilizations in the world have undergone major changes and progress due to the knowledge

system that they have and the element of critical thinking in it. For example the Indian knowledge system

with its element of critical thinking, purposefulness and empathy has made greatest contribution to the

world of material and spiritual science. Very few world civilizations have attained the level of sophistication

by great ancient siddhas yogi’s rishis. However unfortunately there is no written record of this nor is there

any time line fixed for such achievements. We possibly cannot write a history for this. These achievements

are timeless and it is very difficult to give life to it.

Among the western knowledge system represented by the use of English or Latin there is documentary

evidences of progress in critical thinking starting with Socrates about 2500 years ago who discovered the

method of arriving at the truth by asking probing questions – the dialectic. Similarly Plato and later

Machiavelli continued with the agenda for the critical thinking. So it is evident that Greek tradition emerged

over a period of time that emphasized systematic thinking. Machiavelli refused to assume that government

functions the way those in power say it did. He critically examined how it functioned and laid the

foundation for political thinking that exposed both the real agenda for the politicians and many

inconsistencies and contradictions of the hard cruel world of the politics of the day.

Another significant contribution to critical thinking was made by the thinkers of the French enlightenment:

Bayle, Voiltair and Diderot. They all began with the premise that the human mind when disciplined by the

reason is better able to figure out the real nature of the social and political world.

In 19th century critical thinking applied to the problem of capitalism produced the searching social and

economic critique by Karl Marx. At all times the revolutionary ideas and treaties have come by only due to

the application of critical thinking – applied to the unconscious mind it is reflected in the works of Sigmund

Freud. Applied to the culture it led to the establishment of the field of anthropological studies. Applied to

language it led to the field of linguistics and to deeper probing of the functions of symbols and language in

human life.

The tools and resources of critical thinker has been vastly increased during the history of critical thoughts.

Hundreds of thinkers have contributed to their respective discipline. However it is important to figure out

the baseline minimum for the successful application of critical thinking.

Critical thinking requires systematic monitoring of thoughts. Any thinking must not be accepted at its face

value but must be analyzed and assessed for its clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth and reasoning or

logicalness. All data or evidences used in argument must be interpreted. Such interpretations involve

concepts and all such concepts have some assumptions. Now these assumptions again has to be weighed

very carefully whether these have relevance to the thoughts or issues at hand. If they do not have relevance

or the expressed relevance are only a camouflage to hide the real intentions, the whole argument or

supposed critical thinking becomes a sham. Such are the times when fluent and glib speakers or writers are

considered doing critical thinking when in fact they are only engaging in assertive communication recording

one subjective reaction after another. In such kind of communication there is a lot of emotional exchange

asserted without evidence. Some of the claims are also questionable but since the speaker is so fluent and

effective that he deflects any questions to probe his assumptions and arguments. He often expresses

subjective preferences veiled as good reasoning.

For critical thinking another area of significance is the need to maintain an ‘intellectual standard’. For

example while developing a thinking skill instructor often asks to make inferences and use analogies.

However it is important to note that making superficial inferences are useless and defeats the purpose of

the exercise. It must maintain a certain high standard of interference. This is not difficult to achieve with

self-discipline and eye to logicalness.



Finally critical thinking is closely related to the excellence in communication, problem solving, creative

thinking, collaborative learning and ones sense of self-worth. Self-worth not in the sense of arrogance but

as healthy self-esteem that comes from competence, ability and genuine success. If one feels good about

oneself for no good reason then he is being arrogant or has a sense of misplaced self-confidence. As a

matter of fact the genuine self-worth also comes from ability for critical thinking. Collaborative learning is

good if it is grounded in disciplined critical thinking. If however it is not disciplined and the intellectual

standard is not maintained it is likely to lead to collective bad thinking and the worst is bad thinking gets

validated under group dynamics. For example gossip is a form of collaborative learning. Similarly peer

group indoctrination and mass hysteria are also examples of collaborative learning where disciplined critical

thinking is a casualty. It happens because the individual members of the group abrogate the responsibility

of self-critical thinking. And possibly the most significant aspect is the communication which includes

reading, writing, speaking and listening.

So now that we understand the criticality of critical thinking, its significance in our daily life it is important

to ensure that it becomes essential to education and pedagogical tools. The four modes of communication

as mentioned above becomes extremely significant in achieving the goals of critical thinking and its

application. This is different from surface communication or trivial communication, which does not really

require any education. Today’s generation have forgotten the art of manual problem solving and rely too

much on readymade solutions available on the internet without even bothering to verify the information

available. They would be thrown useless if their access to Internet is withdrawn.

The kind of information and solution that they have access to is all readymade. And therefore in a rare and

real life situation where they come across a problem which was not solved by someone earlier, they would

be at a complete loss because they have not understood applied learning. Critical thinking is applied

learning. Applied thinking needs to be embedded into our psyche and natural way of doing things. It is

more than a process; it is a mind-set.

The ability to spot the problem and finding out probable solution for it has a lot to do with the process of

critical learning and ability to apply the learning. It is just to reiterate the point because paradoxically in the

information age when communication is fast and available from diverse sources, it is the ability to think

critically which has become a casualty.

Bibliography

1. Alec Fisher, Critical Thinking: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom,

2001, pp. 2-4.

2. Madhucchanda Sen, An Introduction to Critical Thinking, Pearson Education, 2010. United States.

3. Colin Swatridge, Oxford Guide to Effective Argument and Critical Thinking, 2014, Oxford

University Press, United Kingdom.

4. Brian Ledger, Critical Thinking: Learn to Make Decisions, Think More Logically and Use your

Intuition, 2015, Kindle Edition.

Saanika Singh Deo is a B.A. Second Year Student at Department of English, School of Humanities

and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University.



Critical Thinking: Thinking about Thinking Oshin Shakdwipee

I. Introduction

From apes to human, the only difference this evolution period has is the utilization of the

grey matter situated at top most part of the body in a cup shaped structure, commonly

known as The Brain. The brain has eventually evolved with time and has given us the

powerful weapon of “Thinking”. This weapon has revolutionized the way we see things

and has facilitated us in every aspect of life. Let me add a threshold to the thinking

process by adding the word “Critical” to it. What difference does this word make? What Is Critical

Thinking? Have you ever think about your thinking? Have you ever questioned your questions? Or

accepted the facts as world presented to you.

Critical thinking is the disciplined art of ensuring that you use the best thinking you are capable of in any set

of circumstances. It is defined as- the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it

[1]. It is a rational thinking involving critique.

Life is the mirror reflection of our inner thoughts. We lead our lives as mere followers not thinkers. The

moment we start thinking, the situation becomes challenging and that becomes the key for innovation. Had

our ancestors not thought; would there be any difference between 19th century and 21st century? The

answer is No!

School is considered to be a temple for learning. At this crucial stage of a child's life, he/she is taught what

to think and not how to think! We are forced to adopt the method of rote learning (without thinking and

questioning) hence leading to the murdering of the development of critical mind at an early stage.

II. Brief Conceptualization of Critical Thinking

As told by Linda edlercritical thinking is “thinking about your thinking, while you’re thinking, in order to

improve your thinking [2].”She also said that critical thinking is not just thinking, but thinking which entails

self-improvement. To put it briefly, it is self-improvement (in thinking) through standards (that assess

thinking).

But why is critical thinking the need of the hour? Thoughts are the basic elements for existence just as the

atoms, molecules for matter and cells for a physical body; the quality of thoughts defines us and leads to

success or failure in our lives. We don't realize that the quality of life is directly proportional to the quality

of our thinking.

It all started 2500 years ago, Socrates was the one who started questioning things and not adopting them as

they are presented to us. He was the one to face lot of challenges as he was the only one to think out of the

box. Similarly, since the time of Adam and eve apple is falling down. But did anyone dare to question, why?

III. Critical

What was considered a good education 50 years ago, however, is no longer enough for success in college,

career, and citizenship in the 21st century. We are at that point of the road where from dusk to dawn; we

have to choose. Choose the correct option. How to choose? How to think? Is our process of thinking apt?

Critical thinking is considered the fuel of 21st century. There is only one thing constant in the world- that is

“change”. Over a passage of time changes taking place in all walks of life, then how can education system

remain unaffected by the wave or rather more appropriately “tsunami of change”? The world has become



much more complex and complicated in the last 50 years with opening up of the trade, globalized economy,

fast paced advancements in the technology and the communication. To cope up with these rapid changes

the education system has to match with the rising demands of the society and trade to have a work force

skilled enough to face the rapidly changing requirements and the aspirations of the youth.

As rightly said by Albert Einstein “Education is not the learning of facts but the training of minds”.21st

century skill set requires “4 Cs” (Critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration and communication)

along with the basic “3 Rs” (reading, writing and arithmetic) [3].The modern companies want students who

are the future workforce to be able to think critically, solve problems, collaborate, or communicate

effectively.

IV. How to develop Critical Thinking?

Now the question arises, how to develop this thinking? Obviously, this should be initiated at a very early

stage for better results. The students should be taught “how to think” and not “what to think” – which is

the theme of the current teacher centric education system. In development of the critical thinking habits,

environment plays a vital role. The seeds of today should be given proper guidance by the mentors such

that in this process, the student becomes the discoverer and teacher acts as a facilitator. With this change in

the basic orientation of the learning process the tools too are changing from the black board and the text

books (main tools for the teacher directed learning) to personal computers, online learning, video lectures,

e- books, etc.

These changing electronic realities in life in general and education sector in particular have the potential to

change the way people thinks, but again we know for sure that no matter how advanced the technology gets

, it will always remain only the part of the solution

In order to develop critical thinking, first we need to understand

the dimensions of the critical thinking as shown (figure-1)

To make our normal thinking a critical thinking, we need to

command the “universal intellectual standards” [4]. These must

be infused in the thinking pattern of the students for a better

reasoning by the teachers at an early age. The most significant

universal standards are Clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance,

depth, breadth and logic.

Critical thinking is thinking about thinking, questioning the

questions. The image below (figure 2) depicts the essential

universal intellectual standards of critical thinking and a question

mark symbol in the human brain depicting questioning the

questions and going deep to find answers with the help of

intellectual standards.

V. Conclusion

Hence my friends, the road remains the same only the way of commuting has to be

changed. Whatever be the century we are living in; Books will be our vehicles to road of

knowledge. How you take that knowledge and how you impart it to the coming generations is

the real key to success. In the growing world of uncertainties,we need more critical thinkers

who can travel ahead of time and seize opportunities.



I would like to end with the words of Franklin Roosevelt-“We

cannot build the future for our youth -but we can build our

youth for the future”.

References

[1].The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and tools-Dr. Richard Paul and Dr.

Linda Elder -The Foundation for Critical Thinking

[2].Lindaedler(educational psychologist; president, Foundation for Critical Thinking)

[3]. Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society- An Educator’s Guide to the “Four

Cs”- National educational association, USA

[4]. The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and tools-Dr. Richard Paul and Dr.

Linda Elder -The Foundation for Critical Thinking

Oshin Shakdwipee is a Second Year B.Tech Civil Engineering student at Shiv Nadar University


Figure 23: Critical Thinking- Thinking about thinking, questioning the Questions

(Image by- OshinShakdwipee)




Details: Pixels of reality Vinay Krishna

We live in a society that uses ideas and concepts, created by human beings, as building

blocks. Since the advent of civilization, concepts like religion, sociology and patriarchy

have always shaped the social norms, cultural stereotypes and mindsets of the masses.

Emily Martin's essay "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance

based on stereotypical male-female roles" provides a cautionary overview about how

seemingly mundane details that describe egg and sperm are used to create patriarchal bias, even in biology.

In Alok Rai's essay "Out here: An English Teacher in the provinces", Rai discusses how education enables

one to keenly observe and perceive these minute, often detrimental, changes in the bigger picture of society.

The ways ideologies propagate are never obvious to the common mind. Often they pass unnoticed in the

details that make up a reality which is not same for everyone. The problem arises when people lack the

knowledge to grasp this fact and impose biased judgments that often lead to unfavorable outcomes. This

knowledge, that enables one to be critically aware of these nuances, the undeniable truth that reality is just

an image that one creates using details as its elements and the perception of these details that make up

individual realities, is the most vital part of human development that defines society as a whole. Acquiring

this knowledge, hence, enables one to shatter the notions of a one-sided reality and help mankind view the

world from different perspectives.

The changes that sculpt social norms start from the usage of language itself. Linguistic devices are used to

distort neutral ideas and principles to promote misconceptions. Martin talks about a medical text in this

regard, which describe sperm production as ""In an adult male these structures produce millions of sperm

cells each day. How is this feat accomplished?""(487) and egg production as ""Only a few [eggs] are

destined to reach full maturity during her active production life. All the others degenerate at some point so

that few remain by the time she reaches menopause"" (487). The words like "feat" and "accomplished" to

describe the "millions" of sperm shows how the world perceives the male organ, a metonym for the male

gender itself, to be productive. On the other hand, most of the eggs are "destined" to "degenerate" and

"few remain" in the end. Biologically, the egg-sperm relationship was never about dominance, but rather

co-operation. Unfortunately, subliminal messages that flaunt masculine abilities using sperm as a metaphor,

are immortalized using subtle, biased descriptions. These elusive themes are deeply scrutinized under

humanistic studies of society which Rai describes, gives people "An alertness to language, to nuance and

inflection, to the insidious influence of submerged metaphors and implicit conceptual categories - the ability

to scrutinize critically the symbolic messages, the sign systems of a culture" (313). The "ability to scrutinize"

and comprehend the "insidious metaphors" and "symbolic messages" is difficult, but necessary, to acquire.

Awareness of a "nuance and inflection" in political speeches, biological texts or even academic essays help

us in noticing subtle undertones that are masked by language. These abilities, thus, need to be inculcated in

every human being, to be aware of the instances where opinions are disguised to generalize human

concepts.

The failure to perceive disguised human concepts results in the misunderstanding of predetermined

principles by the common man. This is often the result of making critical mistakes in formulating the

ideologies, a theory Rai explicates "It is almost inhuman actually to expect them to want education rather

than just the degrees that they, unreasonably, expect will get them jobs" (304). "Education" is intended to

be learned, "degrees" are the result of education and "jobs" are the result of those degrees which brings

economic sustenance. Unfortunately, the learning part is skipped by a majority of students, and trying to get

the "jobs" just for monetary reasons ultimately becomes a harrowing task, because of their lack of

knowledge. To "expect them" to "unreasonably" get employed without proper motivation for students to

learn seems counterintuitive. Students are forced to favor jobs over education because that is how the



system is inherently designed. This inability of the common man to make proper judgments and

understand ideologies thus create misconceptions. Martin further explicates this as she says "An electron

micrograph of an enormous egg and tiny sperm is titled "A portrait of the sperm"" (491). The comparison

between the "enormous egg" and "tiny sperm" is obvious in their descriptions themselves. Nevertheless, a

major publisher went ahead to call the graph "A portrait of the sperm". The title looks completely normal

to a non-biologist, but it subconsciously alters his/her viewpoint about the egg. Despite the facts being

correct in the case of sperm magnitude or the expectations of the education system, misunderstanding these

concepts due to lack of conscious, humanistic thought is counterproductive to individual development.

More often than not, to do away with these misunderstandings by humanistic thought becomes nightmarish

if the society is under a dominating ideology. This effect is both clear and corrosive to societies that firmly

believes in fixed or forced principles, a statement which Rai asserts "If the humanities- as they developed

under the colonial dispensation and as they continue to be practiced in Independent India, in a state of

conscious or more often unconscious reconciliation with their stuntedness and emasculation- had not

dwindled into triviality and irrelevance, there might at least had been a whimper of protest at their

unceremonious deletion"(309). The averment that the Humanities "developed" in "colonial" rule is itself

ludicrous since colonialism aimed to suppress independent thought. The reluctance of the Indian education

system to teach humanities because of their "stuntedness" and "triviality" compared to other branches of

study, cannot be an excuse to its "unceremonious deletion" because of its vast contribution to social

awareness. This is made worse when "Independent India" "continued to practice" the dumbed down

versions of humanities that lack the essence that makes the humanities worth learning. Hence, the revised

education system actually degraded thinking. This idea of revised ideologies proving detrimental to dispel

ignorance is debated by Martin as she states: "All these revisionist accounts of egg and sperm cannot seem

to escape the hierarchical imagery of older accounts" (498). The "revisionist accounts", ironically, failed to

improve egg's status as an equally competent cell. The egg, instead, succumbed to the "Hierarchical

imagery" as it could not "seem to escape" the reality that it lives in a gender-biased world. The "older

accounts" about the egg-sperm relationship are firmly rooted in the people's minds. The ways these revised

ideologies, education or gender bias, are implemented, failed to help though their proper implementation

could have easily obviated misbeliefs.

Ideas and ideologies are the most important things that bring people together. These ideologies are

embedded in the core of what we call the existence of a society. A society is not just a group of random

people living together, but people that believe in the same ideology. But when these ideologies hinder the

growth of society as a whole, it is time to re-evaluate the bigger picture. Martin criticizes how the most

mundane ideas cannot simply be stated as they are, but how the added details create misleading ideas. Rai

struggled to explain how Indian education system utterly failed to impart knowledge that enables people to

carefully assess the social conditions and notice the devil in the details that surreptitiously change the

outlook of the society we live in. Without this knowledge, harmful ideologies emerge - the result of ignoring

the subtle nuances that shape our cultures and social norms as a whole. With it, however, people are

unlikely to blindly follow principles. With this knowledge, they are capable of grasping the idea of multiple

realities of society which discourages human conflict. Acquiring this critical awareness and dispelling

ignorance, ultimately, is the key to building an ideal reality.

References:

1. Rai, Alok. "Out here: An English Teacher in the provinces", in Joshi (ed.), Rethinking English, pp.

298-320.

2. Martin, Emily. "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on

stereotypical male-female roles", in Signs, Vol. 16, No. 3 (spring, 1991), pp. 485-501.

Vinay Krishna is a Third Year B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering Student at Shiv Nadar University





Reflections on Two Essays on Critical Thinking Harini Kapali

The paper is a study of two essays; “Out Here: An English Teacher in the Provinces” by

Alok Rai and “Dinosaur Dreams: Reading the bones of America’s psychic mascot” by Jack

Hitt. These two essays unearth the immense significance of Critical Thinking and its

attributes.

Veracity: Through the portals of Seemingly Innocent Subtleties

In an attempt to decipher the crux of all the reasons that craft the wide world around, one is bound to

reach the inevitable conclusion that there is more to every instance in reality than what meets the naked eye.

Indeed, what is meant by reality itself is something that is debatable. The very term assumes diverse

connotations in different circumstances. “Out Here: An English Teacher in the Provinces” expounds Alok

Rai’s proposition that critical, analytical awareness is a prerequisite for discerning the seemingly innocent

subtleties that smear a screen of mist over the horizon leading to the real world. There is manipulation

rampant everywhere, in all measures and degrees. This is why nothing can ever be described as being

objective. An eye for details is of paramount significance in recognizing daubed doctrines effortlessly

embedded within everyday trivialities. Such a cognizance would enable one to acknowledge quite dangerous

utopian maneuvers that infiltrate societies’ aboriginal self-consciousness, further validated by Jack Hitt in

“Dinosaur Dreams: Reading the bones of America’s psychic mascot”. What is often taken for granted as

the truth need not necessarily turn out to be so. Therefore, one’s views should never be polarized. It is

necessary though not sufficient; to be inquisitive enough to probe into perhaps established facts that may

eventually end up exposing big games of diplomacy, tact and skill. Only then is it possible to obtain a

comprehensive idea of what constitutes the real. In

all such instances, one cannot agree more to the fact

thatthe real is, in reality, conceived, configured and

re-envisaged by commonplace details that form

parts of it.

More often than not, dispassionate retrospection

works wonders in clearing the mist that blocks the

way to enlightenment. Someone who is an active

inquirer unearths invaluable treasures – words, ideas

and principles that completely change the face of

what was earlier considered as authentic, an analogy

thatHitt elaborates on, “In a sense, the scientific

reality of the King of the Tyrant Lizards has laid

bare our symbolic uses of him” (Pg34). Research

has aided the process of refuting the constructed

reality that the dinosaur T. rex was the “King” and a “Tyrant”. The dubious yet unflinching undercurrent

movement in America that made “symbolic” use of the dinosaur to project a mighty imagecan thus at best,

be dismissed. This connection provides evidence to show that awareness does help in decoding a scenario;

by giving a more accurate picture of reality. Generally, people tend to accept that a larger quantity of

something presents a better situation. But the domain of knowledge is not contained in this assumption,

observed by Rai when he states that, “Otherwise, one might have visualized sundry Congress-I mobsters,

for instance, rioting about the fact that a college (or even a university) had been established without any

books or journals, with nothing except a few rickety chairs and tables” (pp.303). The “rickety” colleges that

had been “established” encourage the deception that education is imparted. Yet, the apathy of the people in

Figure 24: Sourced @ http://darlingtonsmithgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Creative-thinking.png



power prevents them from “rioting” about the dilapidated condition of higher education in the country. If

only some energy had been devoted to examine the existing state of affairs, the current position would have

been easily palpable, disproving fallacious claims. From this it is obvious that through diligent inquisition, it

is possible to transform what is believed to be real into that version of veracity havingminimal erroneous

variations.

Such a critical evaluation is essential not only for knowing the

world better but also for avoiding the fallouts that may be

caused due to a lack of organized thoughts. The presence of an

unflustered assessment of worldly phenomenon is vital to

thwart the distortion of an image that is essentially genuine. Rai

exemplifies this rationale with respect to the predicament of

Humanities, “The urgency of the need which this flood of

students represents in its dumb and inarticulate fashion has,

over and above the secular impoverishment of the available

facilities, done a lot to pulverize whatever little, tenuous

rationale the humanities might have developed in the past

century or so in this country” (pp.304). It is apparent that

the “dumb” and “inarticulate” nature of students who display great “urgency” for getting jobs has smashed

down all progress in the field of humanities. Lack of cognizance leading to the downfall of an already

established entity is illustrated by Hitt too, “If the Pacific Rim was poised to take over the world, then this

dinosaur was our response; an image that reflected how we conceived of our enemy as much as how we

conceived of our new selves” (pp.39). The end of the nineteenth century in America saw Edward Cope of

the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences confronting the construction of dinosaurs from random

bones (pp. 35). Yet, as late as 1993, Americans continued to respond to political upheavals through the

“dinosaur” and “conceived” Japan, that is, their “enemy” as a dinosaur too. Such a display of frivolousness

emerging from a plain lack of alertness only pulls Cope’s earnest claims down. Thus, the dearth of details is

indeed very efficient in degrading already existing efficient canons.

As a consequence, conscientious attention to specifics isarguably the most important accessory that is

required to surmount the peak of intellectual

illumination. Even a minor deviation can lead to

catastrophic consequences, causing almost

irreparable damage. The vicious circle propagated

by the deficiency of devotion to attention and

rationality is propounded by Rai when he declares

that “the failure of the education system really to

educate anyone at all has finally come to haunt it

in the shape of illiterate policy-makers. Its own

grotesque and deformed products are come back

to pass judgement upon it” (pp.309).

Callousness has made the education

system a “failure” and this has in turn

reduced the system into a “grotesque” and “deformed” namesake entity;all credit to the system’s own

“products” who are “illiterate”. The irrevocable dent that gets etched in history during this process can be

inferred from Hitt’s statement, that, “Each subsequent discovery will conceal new messages in its bones,

hints of our superpower’s new place in this world and our hearts” (pp.41). Failure to awaken to the

consciousness (that“discovery” of dinosaurs was just America’s attempt to cement a dominant standing in

the globe) conduces the breeding of “new messages” regarding America to obtain a better, “new

Figure 25: Sourced @ https://passengershawn.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/ideabulbs.jpg

Figure 26: Sourced @ http://mayfairconsultants.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Critical-Thinking-Skills-Tuition-and-Courses-London.jpg



place”.This creates repeated provisions for the idea of a great American resurrection tobe portrayed as a

perpetual reality. One needs to be wary enough to realize that the ability to question is imperative to

acknowledge inflected ideas. This would then go a long way in avoiding spurious depictions from becoming

perennial, thereby provisioning for mitigation strategies in the wake of bogus theories.

Being curious and seeking answers for perhaps

unexplainable phenomenon has always been

associated with intelligence. It is this attribute

that enables one to reach great heights. Hitt’s

assertion that “What really marks our era are

the new tools – amino-acid mapping, the CAT

scan, treadmill-energetics studies – that permit

us once again to read meaning in the bones and

to imagine the world that was when they held

up flesh” (pp. 33), can be employed to

deduce that if there had not been the

urge to “read meaning” and “imagine”

the world of the dinosaurs, then, the technology that had been used for such a futile purpose could have

been operated in a much better way, for meaningful endeavors. Development and progress would have

then been possible. In this context, Rai questions the spate of insensitiveness endangering the quality of

education in the country: “is someone up there who is beginning to worry, in the intervals between

seminars on job-oriented education, about the urgent need to create some education-oriented jobs?” (pp.

301).The need to “worry” about the inherent fallouts in the education system becomes obvious only when

one ventures into the arena of critiquing. This would then enable the system to revamp itself to facilitate the

creation of jobs that are “education-oriented”, paving the way for progress in the society.

Thus, the need of the hour is to be conscious of the seemingly simple, yet subtle common politics that is

played out in the open, splattering veracity in an attery fashion. Depictions that may seem humdrum and

innocent entice one to overlook the excessive exploitation that is active behind every portrayal made.

Change is said to be the only constant that is omnipresent – right from one’s immediate surroundings to

the most complex of premises. This change needs to be identified through patient analysis and scrutiny.

Only then would there be clarity of thoughts that lead to clarity in understanding, and thereby, to

rationality. Rai vouches for such a revolution in mental capacities in order to appreciate the dynamics that

play out in configuring what is called real, aptly backed by Hitt whose claims can be used to point out how

significant rational behavior is when attempting to discover the true form of any narrative. Thus, there can

be no two ways about the fact that critical thinking would singlehandedly provide the ingredients for a

balanced diet, benefitting those who wish to partake of the feast that is the real world.

References

1. Jack Hitt, “Dinosaur Dreams: Reading the bones of America’s psychic mascot”, The Harpers

Monthly, October 2001, pp. 33-42.

2. Alok Rai, “Out Here: An English Teacher in the Provinces”, Rethinking English: Essays in Literature,

Language, History, OUP, Delhi, 1994, pp. 298-320.

Harini Kapali is a First Year Student at Department of Economics, Shiv Nadar University

E-mail id:[email protected]

Figure 27: Sourced @ http://www.cheerscreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/creative-thinking-560x376.jpg




Learning to Think and Thinking Critically in Learning Ritopratim Mukherjee

“In youth we learn, in age we understand”

- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

It’s true that with age we understand all that we had learnt in our youth. Our

reasoning skills and the ability to perceive our surroundings are enhanced with the passage of

time. Evolution is a remarkable process, that happens with every passing second without us even

realizing it, and it’s only that with time one understands the true significance of ‘growing up’.

However, in the twenty first century, ‘time’ is one of the resources that is in very short supply

and along with other resources on the earth, it is fast depleting. With exceptional improvement in

modern technology that has reduced not only the barriers of communication among the people of

the world, but also accomplished this feat by reducing the time required by older technology to

do the same thing earlier. Every new invention, every new electronic gadget that is launched

every other weekend promises to deliver its best within the shortest time possible. With the

introduction of the improvement of digital cell phone communications standard allowing for voice

calls and limited data transmission or in other words, 2G, 3G and 4G, it certainly proves the

fact that if desired, the world can be brought to the fingertip within a few seconds ! Thus, if

observed carefully, our efforts of modernizing the world a bit more and enhancing the present

technology further have not only resulted in mankind taking a step into the future, which

apparently appears to be governed by the word ‘digital’, but also have considerably reduced an

individual’s utilization of time on different activities in his/her daily life.

Evolution of living beings has always depended on the survival of the fittest among the surviving

species. Needless to say, competition among or between various life forms have existed and

above all with time acquired more complexity. In today’s world, the competition gets even

tougher. Although one has traveled far from the days of hunting and gathering of food, in this

era of technological revolution, man is hunter of ‘data’ and a gatherer of ‘information’. In such

times, man is not only ‘civilized’ but also a ‘digital’ beast. Moreover the one who gathers the

most data and information in the shortest span of time is judged as the lead runner in the rat-

race for the achievement of resources and thereby proving their ‘superhuman’ qualities! However,

the job isn’t completed with just the collection of data. As eminent historian Irfan Habib had

argued that one of the reasons for the downfall of the erstwhile Mughal Empire was hoarding of

personal wealth and ineffective utilization of economic resources11, similarly mere gathering or

rather ‘hoarding’ of vast amounts of data and information is of no use till one learns to ‘critically’

analyze it. As already stated, with every new invention, the presence of time in the lives of

individuals get reduced drastically. Thus, although time remains constant, it appears to shrink with

every new technological invention and advancement every second, and hence quick understanding

and critically analyzing information assumes supremacy among the savages of this ‘digital age’. In

such cases, the above quotation needs to be rephrased where “in youth we learn and in youth we

understand” !

Individuals need to think intelligently about the “myriad of issues”, that confront them for if

they fail to do so then they happen to be in a situation of having all the solutions to their

queries but not knowing what the solutions exactly mean. There is a need to think critically and

11 Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri ed. ‘The Cambridge Economic History of India’, Cambridge University Press, 1982 ,p. 183



also learn to think critically. The twin abilities of knowing how to learn and knowing how to

think clearly about the “rapidly proliferating information”, that one must select from are actually the

most important skill set that is required in the twenty first century12. Even in this age of

globalization and improved methods of teaching and learning, the need for critical thinking

emphasized owing to following examples. In a telephone survey conducted by the Public Opinion

Laboratory at Northern Illinois University, it was found that over 20% of more than 2000 adults

surveyed believe that the sun revolves around the earth ! When they were asked to justify their

answer, 6% of these 20% claimed that the moon landings were staged, plus with the help of

organizations like the Flat Earth Society, such answers will always challenge rational thinking !

Here is another example that highlights the need to think critically. It was calculated that over 2.5

million people had purchased the Power Balance Wristband, that claims to improve energy,

flexibility and balance. The product became so popular that athletes like David Beckham it and

CNBC even declared Product of The Year in 2010. However, in 2010 after the demands from

the Australian Government were made to Power Balance LLC, the latter admitted that there was

“no credible scientific evidence” to support their claims and they offered a full refund to

customers !13

These incidents never seem to end and its depressing to infer that many adults do not have

adequate thinking and learning skills. According to the American Management Association,

“Proficiency in reading, writing and arithmetic has traditionally been entry-level threshold to the

job market, but the new workplace requires more from its employees. The employees need to

think critically, solve problems, innovate, collaborate and communicate more effectively”.14 In

addition to the mentioned requirements, the ability to carry out all these by effectively utilizing

time is also an important aspect. Most importantly, there is an increased demand for a new type

of worker, the ‘knowledge worker’ or rather a person who can carry out multistep operations such

as manipulating abstracts and complex symbols along with complex ideas, acquiring new

information efficiently and remaining flexible enough to recognize the need for continuing change.

However, if the occurrence of the above stated examples are in abundance, then the path to

clear thinking and reasoning would not be an easy one.

In regard to clear thinking the role of schools should be evaluated. Traditionally schools have

required students to learn, rather memorize how to try to make decisions and analyze arguments

and solve problems without ever teaching the students how to do so. Most colleges and

universities aspire to produce graduates who think critically, who can judgments in complex

situations on the basis of rationality, adequate evidence and articulated values15. Applying

knowledge in real world settings, analyzing and solving problems, connecting choices to actions

and being able to innovate and be creative are the necessary skills that a student must learn. Most

importantly development of communicative skills also forms an important part of one’s learning.

Students are required to communicate effectively both orally and in writing followed by critical

thinking and analytical reasoning skills. Needless to say, no one cannot communicate clearly if their

thinking isn’t clear.

12

Halpern Diane F., ‘Thought and Knowledge : An Introduction to Critical Thinking”, Psychology Press, 1985, pp. (3-6) 13 Ibid. p. 4 14 Ibid. p. 5 15 Kurfiss Joanne Gainen ,’Critical Thinking: Theory, Research, Practice, and Possibilities. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No.2’ , Washington D.C. Association For Higher Education, 1988.



In this respect, the role of higher education institutions should be observed carefully. There are

three perspectives that dominate the current research on critical thinking and its development in

higher educational institutions- argument skills, cognitive process and intellectual development.

Moreover, there are even three kinds of knowledge interaction, “ the declarative knowledge, i.e.

knowing the facts and concepts in the discipline, the procedural knowledge or knowing how to

reason, inquire and present knowledge in the discipline and finally metacognition, cognitive control

strategies such as setting goals, assessing fruitfulness of line of inquiry etc”16 Students may acquire

considerable ‘declarative knowledge’ in their college courses but their knowledge isn’t effectively

organized in solving particular problems and most importantly, procedural knowledge is rarely

taught. As a result, the metacognitive skills of a student are poorly developed and hence they

would face difficulties in completing assignments that require critical thinking. Apart from that,

one must also take into account the number of students who are not enrolling themselves in

colleges and universities for higher education and also the keep in mind the evolution in higher

education where digital technology is gradually becoming an important part of it. With nearly

most of the students in this age being technologically superior than the previous generation, they

come with different technology related experiences, attitudes and expectations. Moreover, they

developed their first learning of information skills “in digital world with computers, videos and the

internet”, thereby earning the name digital natives rather than those who got introduced to digital

culture much later in their lifetime and thereby becoming digital immigrants of this digital world.17

Forms of education are changing with every passing day. It should be remembered that with the

internet forming an integral part of our daily life, learning is after all not restricted to schools,

colleges and universities alone. Moreover, with computers becoming almost a necessity, the idea of

a learning partially based on books and partially based on computers is gaining momentum,

signifying a ‘blended learning’. In this era, not all practical problems can be solved via the

learning of an individual discipline and so students, research scholars and academicians of various

disciplines are coming together in order to critically analyze the practical problems in everyday life

and come up with solutions. Also “learning the skills of clear thinking can help everyone recognize

propaganda and therefore not fall prey to it, analyze unstated assumptions in arguments, realize

when there is deliberate deception, consider the credibility of an information source, and think of

problems or a decision through the best way possible”18 Thus, the necessity of critical thinking in

daily activities is emphasized. Most importantly before one acquires the ability to think critically,

one must also keep accumulating knowledge about diverse topics that aren’t restricted to

bookshelves of a library. It is only then that one understands the idea of critical thinking.

Professionals, students, teachers all recognize the critical importance of critical thinking as a primary

objective of education. It must be understood that ‘thought’ and ‘knowledge’ are power. This is

because knowledge is powerful only when it is applied appropriately and thought is powerful only

when it can utilize a large accurate base of knowledge.

Ritopratim Mukherjee is a Second Year Student at Department of History, Jadavpur University

16 Kurfiss Joanne Gainen ,’Critical Thinking: Theory, Research, Practice, andPossibilities. ASHE-ERIC Higher

Education Report No.2’ , Washington D.C. Association For Higher Education, 1988. p. 6 17 Toldeo Cheri A., ‘Digital Culture : Immigrants and Tourists Responding to The Natives’ Drumbeat’, International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education,( volume 19, number 1), 2007. pp. (84-86) 18 Halpern Diane F., ‘Thought and Knowledge : An Introduction to Critical Thinking”, Psychology Press, 1985, p. 11



News from Partners

Project E-QUAL First Teacher Training Workshop Critical Thinking in Writing Pedagogy at Shiv Nadar University on February 18, 2016

The sprawling green campus of 286 acres; a home to a significant population of migratory birds coming

from as far as Siberia and Europe; across the wetlands of Dadri is India’s emerging comprehensive,

multidisciplinary and research - centric Shiv Nadar University. On February 18, 2016 the University

organized an innovative, enriching and an interactive first Academic writing Workshop amidst a high

spirited gathering of teachers and writers from Universities across India and abroad. Under the rubric of

project E-QUAL (Enhancing Quality, Access and Governance of Undergraduate Education in India), Shiv

Nadar University has contributed a course unit in teaching critical thinking through academic writing. The

workshop in particular intended at engaging participants in understanding Critical thinking as thinking

about thinking and questioning the questions.

Highlighting the theme of the workshop, Critical Thinking in Writing Pedagogy, Prof. Ajay Dandekar,

Director, School of Humanities and Social Sciences highlighted the importance of writing in curriculum;

and a need for an efficient system that would encourage writing pedagogy. Leading the workshop, Dr.

Anannya Dasgupta, Assistant Professor, Department of English, emphasized that a writing teacher would

run a workshop style class to engage student participation in teaching a course that not only requires

intensive and repeated writing, revising and feedback but also a way to facilitate student led class

discussions and feedback loops to maximize engagement in the class. Through the workshop the

participants were introduced to - how a semester long course may be organized in a blended way that uses

online tools to enhance classroom learning along with the essential skills and strategies needed to teach

critical reading and writing.

To enable active participation, the participants were asked to complete the pre workshop feedback form

and prepare assignments based on two readings. The workshop thus discussed many issues and

perspectives towards writing through panel discussions and paper presentations by eminent scholars in the

field.

The workshop had an exciting participation of nearly 100 participants, majority being faculty and students

along with researchers and staff.

The Highlights of various panels are as follows:

Session 1: Thinking Through Readings for Writing, - by Subhashim Goswami, Shiv Nadar University

The session was an attempt to state how reading, selecting and thinking through readings is crucial to work

out the pedagogy of the academic writing course. The purpose of reading is to illicit an argument

extractively from the text which helps in turn to build one's own argument. The bridge between reading and

writing is critical thinking and the process of thinking through reading is the first step towards building that

faculty.

Session 2: On Framing Questions, - by Suchismita Chattopadhyay, Jawaharlal Nehru University and

Anannya Dasgupta, Shiv Nadar University

The session highlighted the intricacies involved behind framing a question; along with an emphasis on

enabling students to come out of their comfort zones, combining evidence with opinion to produce a well

written content.



Session 3: On Feedback and Thinking through Student Writing, - by Madhura Lohokare, Syracuse

University and Aratrika Das, Shiv Nadar University

The session acknowledged on one hand the vulnerability of writing especially for the first time writers and

thus introduced the importance of constructive feedback. It acknowledged that, Peer reviewing, online or in

classroom,encourages students to read responsibly while emphasizing that the comments need to be

specific, and not leaving room for ambiguity.

The sessions were followed by apaper presentation, on Acknowledgements: Gratitude, Empathy &

First-Year Writing Workshop Pedagogy by Marion Wrenn, New York University, Abu Dhabi that

articulated the importance of including important aspects in an academic paper such as acknowledgments

and empathy. The session explored questions such as whether or not it is possible to extend a sense of

gratitude to conceptual history along with people as sources or how citing a dorm room conversation “acts”

as an acknowledgement.

In the second paper, titled,Code Switching: Developing Academic Writing Voice through

ConversationLauren Seamen from Yale-NUS, College, Singapore, argued that voice is a form of reflection

and students tend to write better when there is clarity of thought and reflection.

The presentations thus focused on restructuring methodology adopted in teaching an academic writing

course.

In conclusion, a

reflection

session was

organized that

summed up the

arguments that

were discussed

during the

workshop. Led

by a panel, the

discussion

unpacked

notions and

questions

pertaining to

critical thinking;

structure of a

writing course;

methodology

and an institutional setting of a writing center in terms of Indian pedagogic arrangement.

With over 100 participants, the workshop had a representation from 17 institutions,

Faculty staff Reaseacher student others



Following is the glimpse of the workshop through some photos

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jawaharlal Nehru University

BITS, Pilani

Shiv Nadar University

University of Hyderabad

NYU, Abu Dabi

Yale-NUS College

Glocal University

Delhi University

Galgotia University

Ashoka University

Flame University, Pune

Ambedkar University

NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad

Azim Premji University

TERI University

British Council

Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016 E-QUAL · PDF fileVOLUME 3, ISSUE 2, MARCH 2016 E-QUAL NEWS ......

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