Higher Education Cell — Centre for the Study of Culture and Society

About the HE Cell:

HEC Logo India’s Higher Education (HE) system is one of the largest in the world, including over 300 universities and thousands of colleges. Access to HE is a crucial issue, with only 7 to 8% of the relevant age group enrolled in HE institutions. The 2006 CSCS Strategy Recommendations Paper on HE pointed out that the three key locations of HE – the research centre, the university, and the undergraduate college – seldom have strong connections with one another, and have structurally been devised to stay apart. Envisioning a strategic convergence of these three fields could redefine the structure and role of higher education in India. The Paper recommended that such convergence, in key areas such as curriculum building, research and teacher training should form the cornerstone of interventions in this sector. It drew attention to several recent developments in the field, including moves towards privatization and greater autonomy as well as the emergence of new kinds of institutions. The Paper emphasized the relevance of curriculum building and teacher training for both private and state-supported institutions which would increasingly create new spaces open to experimentation in curricular innovations and institutional collaborations across the higher education sector.

The Higher Education Cell-CSCS (supported by the Navajbai Ratan Tata Trust and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust) came into existence in July 2007. It engages with the Higher Education sector through collaborative Research in the field of HE (the outcomes of which include Analytical Reports/Reviews and Idea Incubation for the sector); Institutional Collaborations with key partners such as government agencies, research centres, universities, and undergraduate colleges for developing cutting-edge knowledge resources for higher education; Documentation and Archiving to create a rich HE database, and Grant Management for the Trusts.

The Cell has identified inter-institutional collaborations, interdisciplinarity in research and teaching, and integration of hitherto segregated forms of knowledge production (such as natural sciences and social sciences) as significant strategies through which the relevance of higher education could be increased and its capacity to address contemporary challenges enhanced. The interventions of the Cell work through five sectoral and thematic initiatives: Networked Higher Education, Regional Language Resources, Gender Studies, Social Justice in Higher Education and Integrated Science Education. The larger objective of the different initiatives of the Cell is to develop innovative approaches and efficient working models to address the current issues in Indian higher education. Through the work of the initiatives the Cell primarily supports activities including Curriculum Development, Production of Resource Materials, Teacher Training Initiatives, Skill-building for students and Building Research Capacity.

Networked Higher Education

The Networked Higher Education initiative seeks to address the common problems in curriculum building, pedagogy and research in the Higher Education sector through the process of creating digital networks of material and institutions. The initiative recognizes the drastic changes that are imminent in the systems of higher education, from the undergraduate college up to the highest levels of learning, following the digitization of both content and methods of delivery. In the light of this the initiative has developed a series of scalable projects with undergraduate colleges, universities and research centres. These joint projects primarily aim at:(i) tracking the impact of digitized education systems upon the classroom and the curriculum and enhancing existing pedagogic systems in undergraduate colleges through peer-to-peer learning strategies among students and instituting training in digital resources for teachers and (ii) using the institutional repository as a key tool both at the undergraduate and research levels to build a consortium of institutions for sharing resources and expertise and making this database available to a larger set of institutions in higher education. To achieve these ends the initiative partnered diverse organizations/institutions such as UGC’s INFLIBNET, select undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra and the southern states and select ICSSR and privately funded research centers.

Regional Language Resources

The Regional Language Resources initiative aims to intervene in Higher Education contexts where students do not have adequate access to English, which is the mandated medium of Higher Education in India. It seeks to bridge the disparity between the medium of instruction and students’ linguistic environment by producing multi-linguistic resources along with designing training modules for their use and by generating new research on language issues in India. The initiative has already embarked on pilot projects of survey into existing material and production of new material in regional languages across four Indian languages including Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi with key institutional partners. In addition, projects are ongoing to develop workshop clusters, produce interdisciplinary readers, work in translation projects and work with other initiatives in the Cell for addressing language difficulties in the under graduate space. The initiative has also planned a project for creating research training programmes for students at the PG level with the use of multi-linguistic resources and competencies.

Gender Studies

The Gender Studies initiative seeks to strengthen the scope and impact of Women’s Studies (WS), a field that was institutionalized in India in the 1970s with the mandate to provide knowledge inputs that would act as catalysts for bringing about transformation in women’s lives. In its efforts to aid the field’s objective of building relevant knowledge bases, the Gender Studies initiative i) incubates ideas with potential for revitalizing thinking in relation to gender in specific sectors; ii) develops new research models that can influence policy and advocacy practices; iii) collaborates with WS Centres and other university departments to reinvigorate classroom teaching; and iv) assists the production of materials that will inform debates in the public domain as well as support classroom pedagogy in different regional contexts. The initiative has made a significant beginning with respect to curriculum development, capacity building and materials production by partnering the Center for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram and the Women’s Studies Centres at the Jadavpur University (Kolkata) and Pune University. The initiative has recently commissioned a study on the gender training programmes in the development sector. The long term objective of the initiative is to function as a Resource Unit for Gender Studies that will work with state and non-state sectors in an effort to forge stronger connections between the WS Centres, policy-making bodies, implementing agencies and diverse groups of women themselves.

Social Justice in Higher Education

The Social Justice initiative seeks to address the crucial issues of equity and access in the higher education system in India today. The initiative tries to interrogate the centrality of the idea of social justice to education, by taking it beyond questions of policy and implementation. The broad objectives of this initiative are (a) to improve the quality of access to higher education at the under graduate level and (b) to build a viable model for social diversity on the campus thereby getting institutions to recognize its centrality to the sphere of higher education. The Pathways to Higher Education Programme, supported by the Ford Foundation, is currently the main project under this initiative. The focus of the programme is on skill-building for socially disadvantaged students so as to ease their integration into the mainstream of higher education. Activities under this programme will include (a) faculty and student workshops on curriculum development and training in new pedagogic strategies, and (b) campus initiatives with a view to sensitizing the institution as a whole to social diversity questions. The initiative also seeks in the long run to build a body of new research in the area of social diversity.

Integrated Science Education

The Integrated Science Education initiative is working to bridge the inherited gap between the study of natural and human worlds as also between knowledge and practice. The initiative argues for the need of an integrated approach of knowledge production both in terms of objects of enquiry and methodologies. At a more concrete level it is attempting to connect knowledges in existing Science and Social Science disciplines, as well as produce new knowledge which is inclusive of the perspectives of the user and recipient of such knowledges; the main attempt is to incubate new domains of knowledge. The initiative has commissioned reviews of existing integrated models of Science and Social Science teaching as well as into the history of integration efforts in Science education. Collaborative projects are ongoing with major science teaching and research institutions like IISc, Bangalore and IISER, Pune, for developing new models of integrated education and research. The initiative is also in the process of developing projects with institutions working in the field of public health for the study of the user pole with a long term goal of impacting curricularization in such areas.

ISE - Concept Note

ISE BLOG

Strategy paper on higher education

Strategy Paper

Analytical Reports, Studies and Reviews

Field Testing of Courses by HE Cell:

(1) Gender and Culture (at Christ University, Bangalore)
Visit the Gender and Culture Course Blog at http://genderandcultureathecell.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

HE news from the media archive

Click here to get news, materials and articles from the CSCS Media Archive.

The CSCS Media Archive is a multiple database compilation intended exclusively for purposes of study, research and review. The link above will show the listed articles and news related to higher education.

Conferences, Workshops and Consultations

a) Future of Higher Education
Date: 20-21 February 2006
Report

b) Consultation on Higher Education in India
Date: 16-17 November 2006
Report

c) General Education Consultation: "General Education in Comparative Perspective: Legacies, Transformations and Innovations"
Date: 21-22 July 2007.
Participants
Report

d) Consultation on Regional Language Resources
Date: 20th February 2008
Concept Note
Participants
Resource papers