Service-Learning Workshop on Participatory Learning and Evaluation

Dr. Tandon spoke at the workshop on 30 March, 1.30- 3pm (IST) on the topic – ‘Serving to Learn, Leaning to Serve.

Service and Learning has interrelated components – (i) serving to learn emphasises on students, faculty and teachers, who use service as a way to learn. (ii) Learning to serve emphasises on the communities. It assumes that because we are doing service-learning , it doesn’t mean that we know how to serve. There are 2 sides to this relationship – community and academia.

NEP2020 emphasises on (i) flexible curriculum and multi modal ways of learning i.e., to say that learning happens way beyond the classrooms and our curriculum must be flexible enough to adapt to that. (ii) learning in an engaged manner i.e., engaging with diverse societal actors such as governmental organisations, local institutions, CSOs, CBOs. (iii) local knowledge i.e., we tend to invisibilise the knowledge of the community because we usually refer to ‘knowledge’ as something that resides within the four walls of a university. As a result, community knowledge is not available to our students. NEP 2020 emphasises that we learn from local knowledge. (iv) Research local solutions to local challenges. (v) global citizenship i.e., when we expect our students to become global citizens, does it mean we want them to secure a well-paid job or do we intend to make them socially responsible towards the society. NEP 2020 is a step towards promoting this sense of social responsibility in our students.

Speaking of the four pillars of the UGC guidelines 2.0, Dr Tandon said that it emphasises on ‘engagement’ as a form of learning. Our teachers and students need to appreciate community knowledge and learn to understand the local settings. NEP promotes these new ways of learning. It also encourages the HEIS to act as an actor ‘within’ the society and not ‘from’ the society. We must learn to acknowledge the knowledge of the communities and build on that knowledge using our expertise. Therefore, advocating for a reformed pedagogy of community engaged learning.

It is important for us to reflect – what is it in our syllabus/ pedagogy that makes the community outside the four walls of university ignorant as opposed to the ‘experts’ within the walls? This absence of mutual respect is the most common difficulty. Colleges invest a lot in organising internships in industries and corporates. It is time we encouraged our students to engage in community internship. The students must engage with the community nit to ‘teach’ them but to ‘learn’ from them because what we have to ‘offer’ may not be what the community ‘needs’. They must learn to serve them through the lens of the community and not through the lens of their disciplines – learn with humility, respect and be open to the different point of views.