There was something in its chemistry of ideas and information that made it different from any other course I had taught. In the mid-1990s, Jesus and Mary College (JMC) in the capital admitted the first batch of young women in this new course. For quite some time, people found its acronym name hard to pronounce, partly because it referred to an unfamiliar territory of knowledge: “Elementary Education”. What does a university have to do with it, people asked when the proposal was placed on the agenda of the Academic Council of Delhi University (DU). The then Vice-Chancellor, Upendra Baxi, was a teacher and theorist of law. He successfully argued for its approval, and a course that gained global fame within a few years started.
Every Friday morning, I drove from the north campus to JMC across the city for a double period. I carried on for two years. The excitement of teaching the first batch of out-of-school students whose aim was to become elementary school teachers has survived intact in my memory. It is time to place it on record, when the B.El.Ed course is facing an uncertain future.
What is contemporary India like? Once it had settled in their minds, the question never stopped rocking the students. They wanted to discuss every shred of evidence they had picked up from their own life and from the other segments of the B.El.Ed. It was a rollercoaster chemistry of knowledge. An unusual ingredient of this chemistry was the analysis of the primary and upper-primary curriculum that the students were required to do. And then there was an investigative project to study the genealogy of an industrial product. The first year at college could hardly be more exciting.
The first batch graduated as the 20th century ended. By then, the course was running in eight colleges. Delhi’s educational world noticed something uncanny as the B.El.Ed trained teachers started to get jobs. Principals felt their spark. Their grasp of school subjects was just as good as their knowledge of the way children think. Teachers trained by other, more conventional, courses also knew child psychology, but the B.El.Ed teacher understood that neither cognition nor learning can be dissociated from a child’s social context.
© The Indian Express (P) Ltd
First published on: 02-06-2023 at 07:17 IST
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