The Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru Campus in collaboration with Kanaja Youth Research Cell, Samvada organised a one-day Faculty Development Programme titled ‘Teaching Life Skills through the Lens of Social Justice: A Faculty Development Programme’.

The objective of the workshop was to enable educators

• with creative pedagogic tools to understand and teach the connections between life skills, social inequality and self worth;

• to learn how to teach complex issues of caste, gender and disability in engaging, student-centric ways.

Resource persons included

• Dr. Maithreyi R, Life Skills Researcher and author of the book Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India

• Anita Ratnam, Founder and Executive Director of Samvada with more than 30 years of experience in educating youth

• sumathi nagesh teaches English literature at Manipal University of Higher Education, Bangalore. Her teaching philosophy is student-centric and she uses theatre games and techniques to facilitate a fun and experiential learning of literatures.

The workshop drew upon a research study undertaken by Kanaja Youth Research Cell to understand innovative education programmes supported by Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures, India.

The workshop began with a session on how life-skills has been understood in conventional educational settings and how it can be reimagined differently. The subsequent sessions dealt with how gender, caste and disability play out in classrooms and the need to inculcate sensitivities towards that in pedagogy and thinking of it as a life skill that can be incorporated among students and teachers.

Feedback:

To the question of what learning outcomes participants took away from the course, participants responded thus:

“We gained an understanding of life skills and, most importantly, a perspective on life skills through the lens of social justice. In a very individualised academic culture, the workshop helped me understand the importance of working in/as a community and hearing and sharing thoughts on questions we ponder. This was definitely not about strategies for raising your API scores. This workshop model should reach a larger audience across academic institutions.”

“I think of the important outcomes of the event was a open ended discussion about the different experiences. I took back home the experiences of others which is going to make me think when I am in a class.”

“Being honest in putting up views before audience, being kind and supportive to people in need of academic support, being in the mode of letting audience break the ice thereby taking part in activities in classroom to learn stuff in letter and spirits.”

“Meaningful discussions regarding the intersections - caste, class, gender, religion, disability, etc.”

“All sessions were thought provoking...especially the activities I did take part were amazing...and outcome centric.”

“Session 2 was the most impactful because of the design of the exercise. There was a considerable amount of thought and research behind it. It helped one reflect upon the judgments that we make initially and then revisit the same.”

“I think working on the gender audit for the courses was an eyeopener. Now I will always be forced to think about gendered perspectives while designing a course or content.”

‘The module on disability - a twenty-five-minute screening was long for a one-hour session. The session on understanding gender - the interactive and theatrical mode was thought-provoking. But, it ended abruptly without concluding remarks, especially after the gender audit. A quick concluding remark would have helped us to connect with the challenges that we face in the classroom as well.’

Analysis of the Feedback: The feedback has been generally positive, with some participants requesting that it be a two-day event and some seeking concluding remarks for the different sessions.

Outcome of the Event: The activity and discussion driven nature of the faculty development programme made the participants to reflect on their own teaching methods and relations within the classroom and in building course syllabi