Bringing Back the Absent: Some Reflections

Abstract

Does the social background of a learner affect the learning process? If so, how can instructional design be sensitive to the sociology of a learner? What would be the starting point for introducing abstract ideas for those to whom both the experience and the language that constructs the idea are alien? What would be the takeaway for those students whose social location has recurringly denied them the time to pursue career in the area in which they are trained? What could be done to make learning more reflexive and take it beyond the reproduction of the jargon of the discipline? These are some of the questions that have accompanied me ever since I started teaching political theory and political thought, some 20 years ago. These questions emerged while observing a variety of learning environments. Classrooms in metropolitan cities are diverse in terms of language, linguistic skills, social background, financial capabilities and number of other ways. In smaller cities, classes are comparatively homogeneous in terms of language but other kind of diversities and hierarchies do exist. Engaging with a diverse classroom creates issues not merely pertaining to the medium of instruction but also for creating a frame of reference that makes sense to everyone. Different social locations come with varied political ethos and they also imply diverse learning environments available to the learner. These locations to a large extent define the facilities available for students’ schooling, to develop their language skills, to the time they are allowed to claim every day and in life as their own and number of such factors that may play crucial role in the teaching and learning process. Bringing together different temporalities and spatiality in one common frame becomes a big challenge for the instructor. Paradoxically, neither the learner nor the instructor is necessarily aware of the ethos of the varied location. To teach meta-political narratives to someone who is ignorant of the politics of her location by someone who is equally indifferent to her location as an instructor is not just paradoxical but is also self-defeating. It leaves a learner under an impression that politics lies somewhere else, far away from her own environment. Sadly, training of a professional political scientist doesn’t necessarily require interrogating the politics that shapes a particular learning or teaching environment. The thrust is on transmitting the jargon. What is acceptable is familiarizing oneself with what the celebrated scholarship produced. Learner thereby engages herself in only reproducing the ‘norm’ even while she tries to achieve the higher learning objectives identified in Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956). The evaluative, analytical and creative abilities of the learner if unleashed, remain shaped in a particular paradigmatic framework that has percolated in her learning environment. Any contribution in order to be significant has to confirm this framework, else is denounced as outdated or irrelevant.