Introduction to the HCEF Blog

This is a blog for exchanging drafts of possible and extant curricula in the humanities. 

While the blog focusses on the higher education scene in India, particularly the humanities, it is also open to ideas from related disciplines and fields. The paucity of good curricula is one of the important lacunae in Indian higher education. While a select number of elite universities and their research-oriented faculty have been successful in producing good curricula for their context, a majority of institutions reconcile to curricula which are of indifferent quality. It is not always the case that institutions do not have freedom to design good curricula. In the present age of autonomous institutions, private universities, self-financed programmes and innovative courses, there is ample scope for designing curricula which are relevant to the specific contexts and robust in terms of instilling the desired competences in students. 

Even while there are many laudable individual attempts at creating curricula, there is a systemic failure in making these curricula scalable. This is a challenge that most curriculum designers would ignore rather than deal with. With the exponential increase in the number of higher education institutions, it is impractical to assume that these institutions will generate enough in-house research to create new curricula out of them. Centralised curriculum-framing procedures have faced criticism in the recent years becuase it is claimed that they are insensitive to local needs. However, replacing them with local agencies for curriculum development has only helped in decentralising the incompetence. This shows that the problem is not merely one of whether the curriculum is framed centrally or locally, but it is about whether there is diversity of options, frequency and flexibility for change, presence of feedback loops to revise curricula in the light of past experiences and most importantly whether there exists a bank of easy-to-use resources, to constantly feed into pedagogy. 

Another shortfall, particularly in the humanities, centres around the question of relevance. A generation of literature students would remember growing up with talk about the crisis in English Studies in the 1990s in India. This was both a reflection and a response to the changes that had happened a decade earlier in the American academy and the Anglophone African and Caribbean world. Beginning from clarion calls for the abolition of English Studies to some highly qualified proposals for internal reform, the response was fervent, radical and haphazard. Whatever be our response today with regard to those particular positions, one thing was clear from the very beginning: the overwhelming consensus regarding the need for change. However, as the dust settles on these controversies, most educational institutions have reverted to business as usual. For instance English literature departments, despite the debates around postcolonialism, crisis in English studies and calls for the abolition of the English department, have continued to design their courses in the way that a good 19th century colonial school would have done, by introducing students to Chaucer and Beowulf. The problem is not that Chaucer and Beowulf have the blood of colonialism smeared on their hands. No, they don't. It is that unsuspecting students from small-town India do not know what to make of strange English words in even stranger English stanzas. What is it to educate someone in a classical liberal learning is a question that needs to be revisited every time that one initiates a novice into humanities. Equally important is to understand the place of such learning in the contemporary world. 

Even simple things which might appear as commonsensical become labyrinthine challenges. For instance, English Literature curricula in the country do not have the first clue about how to use Indian languages, that most students have some native competence in, as a resource for teaching aspects of English literature and Western culture. While a typical classroom in India is a collider of many languages, and most often instruction is mostly an exercise in translation, the curricula and the syllabi are only embarrassed and silent about it. There are many exceptions to this mindless norm indeed; but the unsettling news is that this is still the norm. 

A curriculum without an elaborate reflection on the relevant methods of teaching and evaluation is simply a wish-list with no practical use. Most curricula in India end up becoming rival reading lists based on the momentary whims of curriculum framers. Instead, we hope to produce curricula which will centrally take into account the teaching and evaluation procedures that might be most relevant for the particular curriculum. A good curriculum can be taught well in a number of ways. But it is important to articulate those ways rather than leave it to the spontaneous genius of the pedagogue. Spontaneity is all very well but it is unfortunate if others cannot learn from an impassioned teacher as it is unprofessional if teachers do not allow their methods to be reviewed and improved upon.

Therefore, in this blog, we hope to upload draft curricula, methods, materials and evaluation procedures that could go into it, broadly in the field of humanities. Anybody can dip into it, use, alter, recycle, destroy and reuse the material here. You could also contribute by sending your draft curricula and more importantly by commenting on the curricula that we upload here. 

Bookmark this blog and we will have interesting stuff lined up for you every time you visit us. 

(The usual disclaimers apply: we have sourced the material here from different corners. Sometimes we have reproduced others' courses verbatim and sometimes we have tried to rework it to suit our context. Wherever possible and relevant, we have shown the sources from where these curricula have been drawn. For others, we would be happy to acknowledge copyright if brought to our notice. This is a completely voluntary initiative with only educational and no commercial purpose)