In my professional life, I recognized the value an interdisciplinary degree such as ‘Development Studies’ brought to me in terms of understanding societal issues from different lenses. Often I found that students from conventional programs lacked the understanding that I was able to bring to the problem, that resulted in a very different program design strategy, eg. Including capacity building of panchayat representatives as a crucial component to rural development projects. Moreso, during my experience at my executive program in Public Policy, I remember remaining unsatisfied with only orthodox economics being taught with no exposure to heterodox theories. It struck me then that we are all a product of our worldview and exposure and how critical it was to bring in alternative dimensions to enrich learning and to help reimagine society to work on societal problems to start. SYAAD thus is also born out of this livid need to improve higher education curriculum for better responsiveness to societal needs.
While working on a research project to increase the carbon sequestration capacity of microalgae, I realized that these technical projects needed more on-field realities, hence I started visiting artisans and farmers across India to understand how their way of living and earning can be made mainstream. Also as a faculty of Environmental Management for graduate students and curating courses in environmental sustainability, one of the important observations has been that Environmental Education cannot be taught as a separate subject, or be treated as an extracurricular activity or project. It has to be seamlessly embedded in everyday learning by developing a lens to see things through this perspective.
India is reimagining its higher education system as declared in the ‘National Education Policy’ (NEP) 2020, whereby it seeks to transform the current fossilized system of rigid curricular streams into a more holistic and multidisciplinary one that integrates humanities, social sciences and environmental education across technical, vocational, and general streams.
While the policy recognizes the manifold benefits of such an approach including the cultivation of higher-order thinking capacities and improved quality of research among others, the roadmap to change remains blurry. Commitment to moving towards an integrated, holistic, multidisciplinary learning model akin to liberal education requires development of curricular models and supporting systems that are contextually suited for a country as diverse as India. There is a need for more robust research to support the design process for such a paramount shift for the world’s third largest higher education system.
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