Proceedings of the Two day UGC sponsored National Seminar on Teaching Social Sciences. Challenges and Opportunities in the New Millennium held at St.Joseph’s College (Autonomous) Bangalore 29th and 30th November 2012
Designing the Syllabus
Chair: Dr. Sandeep Shastri `
Prof. V.S. Elizabeth (NLSIU)
Dr. Chandan Gowda (Azim Premji University)
Prof. Anil Pinto (Christ University)
Prof. Shalini Pujari (Mount Carmel College)
- Contextualizing content
Curriculum framework, methodology, evaluation.
From spaces of teaching to zones of learning.
- Benchmarking: Who sets the standards and how?
Role of the stakeholders: future employers, students, alumni.
- Need for a dialogue within the social sciences.
- Subjectivity of research – thickness/phenomenological dimension of the subject – decontextualized.
- Design a syllabus that steers clear of straightforward application of imported syllabi.
- Imbalance in the volume of scholarship on various topics.
- Help students get attuned to ethnographic acuteness of impulses in our society.
- Give them Conceptual tools to engage with; a flavour of how others approach the social.
- History as being mainly political or about military conquests.
- Lack of female role models other than warrior queens.
- Ideology as the starting point of designing a syllabus.
- Help students understand the complexity and diversity of the world we live in – socioeconomic context.
- Being able to recognise larger shifts in civilisation Higher education is based on a script culture; modern universities on a print culture.
- Demographic shift in the classrooms.
- Syllabus needs to have images of those who are on the other side; self-learning components.
- Need to avoid import of best practices from the West.
- Curriculum depends on design, development and delivery.
- Syllabus should include a specific learning program – what, why and how students should learn.
- Benchmarks – science, society, and students as sources.