M.A. in Elementary Education

It has been a while since I made an entry. Thanks for your patience. It might be hard for you to believe but I have been actually kinda busy these days. In a moment of madness I had reasoned that I require higher education on the education front and hence enrolled in M.A. in Elementary Education offered by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and I now don’t regret it at all. It has been a fantastic 3 weeks in Mumbai.

It is a 2 years with 4 semesters, each having a month of contact classes in Mumbai and rest of which can be done online. It is far more rigorous than I ever expected with 3 assignments to be submitted every month. So it is not really like a correspondence course. Through special software we are expected to continue our discussions with the faculty online throughout the course. The three courses in the first semester are Philosophy of Education (PoE), Sociology of Education (SoE), Child Development Cognition and Learning (CDCL).

PoE as the name suggests is a broad philosophical analysis of role of education, its aims etc. The course is being jointly offered by Rohit Dhankar of Digantar and Alok Mathur of Rishi Valley (Krisnamurthy Foundation). It has been an excellent course. They have been very careful to provide us just with aids and readings such that ‘a philosophy’ is not thrusted down our throat but we develop the capability to philosophise. Our first reading was from the concluding chapter of John Dewey’s book Democracy and Education. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the field of school education. There have been other readings from Dearden, Hamlyn, Logic and Ten Theories of Human Nature. Though the readings have been heavy I have enjoyed them very much.

SoE is two-semester course and expects to give the students an understanding of the relationship between the society and education. We have so far dwelved to some Sociology basics like Social Struture, Sociological Imagination, Social Stratification, different theories like the functionalism, conflict-theory (Marx) etc. It has been quite illuminating and some of the readings have also been very interesting. Currently I am reading some chapters from the selected works of B.R.Ambedkar and his views on caste along with Andre Betelie on Caste, Class and Power. There have been lively discussions in the class (19 out of the 25 are women) about gender and education. Reading from Kamala Bhasin on gender issues is good.

CDCL has a lot to do with child psychology and theories of learning. We were introduced to

• Behavorism by Pavlov, Skinner and Gestalt
• Construtivism by Piaget
• Social constructivism by Vygotsky
• Information Processing

CDCL also covers aspects like nutrition and child development and how self is constructed. I have to read Erikkson’s theory in this subject and then read a autobiography (I am planning to read K.M.Panniker’s) and analyse how he has constructed his self. Shouldn’t that be interesting?