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Digging
into the foundational rationale of academic refresher courses,
one may run into layers. There is the advertised layer, and then
there are others.
The
advertised layer can be sighted in statements of objectives: acquaintance
with the latest developments in one's area of teaching; review of
one's teaching practices; an opportunity to think laterally; re-motivation;
etc.
Corrupted
beyond recovery by excessive academic abuse, the word “refresh”
has finally given up the ghost. The spirit has departed, and the
letters hang dank and withered like leaves. The primary specific
implication that as a teacher I need refreshing is simply too painful.
It hurts vanity. Not that modesty is absent, but it sure isn't spilling
over either.
Often,
then, a refresher course is received as a paid holiday in a sanatorium,
a time to doze and booze, with its compulsory regimen of indoctrination--the
forced ingestion of a handful of ill-digested intellectual fads
normally thrown up the moment the dispenser has turned his back.
Only after you have attended a refresher course can you comprehend
how seriously and chronically most teachers are afflicted by an
obscure allergy to professional refreshing. And the nasty environment,
getting nastier by the day, only aggravates the affliction.
At a
recent course, one of my colleagues tearfully begged the course
coordinator to be delivered from “this academitis”. The poor woman,
who had just concluded her inspirational discourse on the virtues
of academic refresher courses, smiled and smiled and looked utterly
disconsolate. No one before had voiced his apprehensions about the
course so prematurely and boorishly. It was inauspicious.
She
nonetheless rose to the occasion like a veteran and peered into
every abashed eye. With the silence that followed, an unholy alliance
was negotiated, signed and sealed. All agreed to suffer together,
to lend one another their shoulder to cry on. It would be a pure
sacrifice, with no priest!
And
so time began to drag. Superlative poverty of intellect and pedagogy
moved arrogantly in a procession of overdone pageants. Mediocrity
reigned supreme, to be officially archived as excellence. One decade
of compulsory academic refresher courses has spawned a school of
resource persons among whom the majority has been devoutly parroting
the same discourses to consecutive groups of participants year after
year. Even the introductory fumes and concluding whimpers are at
times indistinguishable.
One
retired professor, after gratefully suffering a prolonged introduction
as “an internationally renowned authority on Shakespeare,” read
out a paper that he claimed was his very recent work. During lunch,
the participants put their heads together and mutually confirmed
that he had made the same claim for the same paper one year before
too and at different staff colleges. Another resource person, having
taken it into his head that college teachers needed a diet of grammar,
chirpily spent three hours reading clauses from a book and copying
them on the blackboard. His marvelous resourcefulness was only surpassed
a few days later by another who, giving cheaply tuneful readings
from his shoddy translations of Shakespeare's sonnets, endeavored
hard to elicit a few words of gushing praise from the ladies. What
he achieved, instead, was clear universal disapproval, nay, disgust,
so that in the following session he conveniently abandoned what
he had set out to do and proceeded with an impromptu sermon on the
contemporary meaning of dharma. In a shining display of metaphysical
wit that must have dazzled the worm-eaten eye-holes of Dr. Johnson's
corpse, he gravely described the Constitution as one of the sacred
shastras and exhorted us to shape our lives in deference
to this timeless book.
Not
all persons, though, turn into muscle-flexing and foul-mouthed porters
under the load of learning. Indeed, they become lighter and brighter.
The best resource persons were clearly those who didn't derive their
weight from the label of “resource person”, who didn't try to be
seen as possessing any special knowledge but felt, like children
feel, that they had found something exciting and ought to share
it--a sense of discovery, an exploratory outlook, an aesthetic transaction,
even a few moments of frank, honest conversation. They were, obviously,
few; but they were the persons who could have got better audiences
and yet had come to talk to us. They had not stooped to earn money,
nor climbed atop a shaking pole to dance to someone's tune and shout
down at others. And they did not ferociously defend their perceptions
like poor fanatics who have nothing more to hang on to.
Unfortunately,
even they showed little inclination to engage with the most pressing
issues of living and teaching today. How easily the academic life
castrates the intellect. Intellectual adulthood gets reduced to
sucking the confectionery of shoplifted theories and licking the
walls of ivory towers. They will cheerfully discuss the techniques
of teaching language and literature, but they are not prepared to
question whether what we do in the classrooms makes much sense and
whether what we are doing is really the best we can among our students.
It is a dreadful barrenness; questions are simply not being conceived.
Ideally,
colleges should be the places where we can bring together what we
have learnt from teaching in the classrooms and then find out what
best we can do in order to help the students do their best. With
the expertise and the fruits of research made available by the resource
persons, we can attempt to devise better educational practices.
What happens, instead, is that the refresher courses are reduced
to sentences to be undergone in order to earn a promotion in grades.
Non-monetary benefits are extremely rare and derive strictly from
personal transmission on the one end and receptivity on the other.
But
then, even a prison sentence has its lessons provided one will suffer
to read it deviantly.
By a
fair estimate, the refresher courses for college and university
teachers in India consume Rs. 100 million annually. Since the institution
has entrenched itself into the system that survives chiefly on inertia,
there is no evidence of any inclination to examine either its efficiency
or its usefulness. Information technology, for instance, finds no
place in the training equipment of academic staff colleges. Two
or four courses in a teacher's career that spans three or four decades
should invite ridicule in an era when work normally requires continual
re-skilling. It would be better, therefore, if these colleges are
restructured and transformed into Virtual Centres for knowledge-sourcing,
research, pedagogical training, creative work, academic exchange,
and peer interaction and evaluation. In place of the occasional
ritual of refreshing, a properly functioning system of self-driven
academic training, exchange and knowledge creation can be put in
place much more affordably. The consequent arrangement will be far
more useful, efficient, responsive, and engaging.
Copyright
© 2001 Rajesh Sharma. All Rights Reserved.
Rajesh Sharma is a writer and commentator based in Punjab,
India.
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