Overview

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What role does education play in achieving sustainable development goals? How can education drive transformative changes leading to environmentally and socially just societies? How can key stakeholders be involved in creating inclusive, equitable, and empowering learning environments that prepare individuals and communities for a rapidly changing world? This course addresses these questions by first examining and problematising the role education has played in sustaining social inequalities; and then deliberating on how education can be transformed to create empowered teachers and students towards attaining an equitable, just, and sustainable future. The course derives from the results of a four-year, four-country research programme on ‘Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures’ or TESF. It is led by Professor Poonam Batra, a TESF co-investigator and one of India’s leading academics with four decades of interdisciplinary experience across elementary, teacher and higher education practice and policy in India. The course is designed to make TESF research and examples of transformational education accessible to practising teachers, student-teachers, the wider teacher education and policy community, and other stakeholders with an interest in education.

Syllabus

Welcome to the Course

In this introductory module, you will learn a few important details about the course, including the objectives of this course, who the instructors and the course team are, as well as important information to navigate the course. You will also find a link to a Pre-Course Survey – please do fill this as it will help us get to know you better and prepare the course accordingly.

Module 1: Education Aims, Policy and Teachers: Evolution of Perspective, Measures, and Impact

In this module, you’ll become familiar with the development of the education system from Colonial India to Independent India and the continued impact of policy trajectories on school and teacher education. You will also have the opportunity to reflect on the potential role of teachers in achieving high-quality education.

Module 2: Childhood, Child, Curriculum, and Pedagogy: Evolution of Perspective, Practice, and Challenges

By the end of this module, you would develop some insight into how the concept of childhood evolved and how this understanding is critical to designing school curriculum and pedagogy. Engaging with the progression of the Right to Education Act would help in understanding how children’s rights are sought to be met in a plural and hierarchised society and how the role and accountability of the state is critical in safeguarding children's rights and their well-being.

Module 3: Teachers, Curriculum, and Pedagogy: Subject Content, Context and Interdisciplinarity

This module helps you recognise children as epistemic entities and the importance of encouraging children’s voice and agency in achieving their true potential. This module will assist you in cultivating capacities and dispositions to appreciate the diversity of children’s backgrounds and to integrate their lived experiences in the teaching-learning process.

Module 4: Education and Inclusion: Identity, Caste, Inequality, and Education

In this module, you will develop tools and capacities to understand, engage with and integrate diverse lived experiences of students in the teaching and learning process. You will be able to understand how formal schooling processes, communities, larger social and political contexts facilitate or hinder the inclusion of children in classrooms.You would also engage with ideas of decolonising school curriculum as part of a wider project of ‘decoloniality’ which implies dismantling relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that tend to reproduce hierarchies based on caste, gender, class, community, and region.

Module 5: Gender, School, and Society: Perspective in Curricula, Pedagogy, and Educational Arrangements

This module of the course offers you opportunities to reflect upon the nuanced and deep influence that socio-cultural structures of class, caste, and community have on gender and how classroom pedagogy can be reinvented to equip teachers to become sensitive and socially responsive to the unequal nature of gender and to seek transformative pedagogies.

Course Assessment and Conclusion

In this final module, you will get the opportunity to check your understanding of all that you've learnt so far with the graded assessment in the form of a multiple-choice questionnaire. You will also hear from our instructors on what they hope the ideal key takeaways are for you from this course. Finally, please fill in the Post-course Survey – this will help us understand your journey during the course and improve it to make learning more meaningful.