National Workshop on 'Social Responsibility and Community Engagement in Higher Education Institutions: Policies and Practices'

National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, NIEPA, organised a National Workshop on 'Social Responsibility and Community Engagement in Higher Education Institutions: Policies and Practices' on 4th and 5th August 2022. 

Dr. Rajesh Tandon delivered the keynote address for this national workshop on 4th August. The session was chaired by Prof. N.V. Varghese (Vice-Chancellor, NIEPA). The presidential address was given by Dr. Pankaj Mittal (Secretary General of AIU, Delhi). In his address, Dr. Tandon said, ‘Responsible higher education is all about respectful engagement with the community'.

The purpose of the mission of higher education has been historically defined as teaching, research, and service. In today’s context teaching is more about facilitating the learning of students and young professionals. Research is more about systematization, mobilization, and dissemination of knowledge. Service is no longer charity – it is about empowerment. This is an important distinction because if we focus on research, teaching, and service, we only focus on ourselves, and what we do. But the moment we focus on learning, knowledge, and empowerment, we begin to take into account, other societal actors. In fact, the concepts of outreach, and service-learning have been critiqued because they have tended to be one-way engagement and not mutual engagement.

The NEP was launched on July 29, 2020 (just completed two years). There are several mandates in NEP, but from the point of view of community engagement and social responsibility, I have picked up three of them. Firstly, learning from engagement with society and our Hon’ble Prime Minister reiterated the same on July 07, 2022, at the Akhil Bhartiya Shiksha Samagam in Varanasi, when he said the following:

“It is no longer a question of taking the lab to the field, but also bringing the field to the lab. It is no longer a question of knowledge produced in academia to the communities but also knowledge available in the communities to bring inside the academia”.

Secondly, it is important to remember that NEP emphasizes research, which brings knowledge solutions for local transformation. It is imperative that when one looks at knowledge solutions for local transformation, one has to look at the challenges that the community faces, and challenges that development policies and programmes face. It is then that we realize that communities have challenges, but academia has departments. NEP has a strong emphasis on community engagement as a two-way process, valuing local, experiential, indigenous, and practical knowledge. These mandates from NEP are a very valuable assertion of national policy for the first time. This gives us an opportunity to move ahead systematically.

So, what is Socially Responsible Teaching in this approach? How are we preparing our next generation professionals- Engineers, Managers, Architects, Lawyers, Teachers, and Educationists? How are we preparing them to become sensitive to climate challenges? How are we preparing them to become respectful toward the diversity of knowledge systems? How are we preparing them to respect and understand multiple sites of knowledge and modes of knowing?

Referring to field research in indigenous communities in this country, he said that the communities are telling us their stories as to how they used local knowledge during the pandemic. Local knowledge about food, health, and water. Local knowledge, if it is respected, valued, and understood by our next generation of students and young professionals, and therefore build on that knowledge. Community knowledge is not complete on its own. It may also have alterations. But, if we listen to it, if we vocalize it, if we help/support systematization of it, then we can add value to our professional expertise and knowledge. This is where NEP has also emphasized the importance of place-based (which means local curriculum).

The Third World Higher Education Conference (WHEC) took place three months ago (in May) in Barcelona, Spain called the ‘World Higher Education Conference 2022’ (WHEC 2022). What NEP said two years ago, how UNESCO is re-articulating in its own way two years later in 2022. These are the three principles that this expert group set up by UNESCO in its document announced and Prof. Silvia who spoke on the behalf of this, the former Vice Chancellor and rector of Arbero American University in Mexico – explained this. The document is called ‘Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability. At the beginning of this document, they say that there are three things that need to be done for sustainable societies and therefore socially responsible higher education. The first is ‘the need to move towards inter – and transdisciplinary modes of producing and circulating knowledge. The second point, even more critically announced ‘the imperative of becoming open institutions, fostering epistemic dialogue and integrating diverse of ways of knowing. The purpose of epistemic dialogue is to transcend the monolith of knowledge systems and knowledge culture. To reach out to those societal actors and try to understand them including local communities, indigenous communities, and practitioners in the communities – trying to understand what knowledge they can carry. How do they produce that knowledge? How do they store that knowledge? How do they transfer that knowledge and how do they use that knowledge? Because that system is not similar to the one we are doing. The third is a global imperative that the demand for a stronger presence in society to proactive engagement and partnering with other societal actors. The demand, societal actors, community and local organizations, farmers’ cooperatives, women’s groups, SHG clusters, local businesses, and local social entrepreneurs.

He also shared the UNESCO recommendations on Open Science. These recommendations were approved by all the nation states (in November 2021), in the meeting of the UNESCO General Body (held in Paris). Historically, the debate about open science focused on producing open access to data, documents, and open reports that everyone can read around the world, which is basically openness to your fellow researchers. But this recommendation from UNESCO is talking about openness to practitioners. Data and the findings must be open to society and not just to fellow scientists. The recommendations also talk about openness to other methodologies. It emphasizes on Community-Based Participatory Research, Citizen Science, and other forms of knowledge-producing methodologies, which have been developing over the last 40-50 years and are beginning to gain recognition. So, openness to other methodologies brings the field to the lab, which brings community knowledge inside the academia and not just methodologies that take academic knowledge to the community. Finally, open science recommendations also talk about being open to other knowledge systems. It is not just those of us in higher education institutions who are concerned about a new way of engaging with society, it is also fellow scientists, the international science community, who are now beginning to talk about openness of science, openness to local knowledge systems, openness to other methodologies and in a way open engagement of science, a scientific establishment with society at large.

He also shared the roadmap for WHEC 2022 which emphasizes normative changes. The Higher Education system requires transformational normative changes if we are serious about community engagement and social responsibility. The three normative changes are: First is cooperation and not competition. Individualism in higher education, in teaching and research, individual students, competition for jobs and packages. The normative system does not produce inter-disciplinarity, it does not produce partnerships outside because it does not even encourage partnership in the classroom.

The second normative principle, that has been emphasized is diversity, not uniformity. Uniformity of curriculum, pedagogy, course structure, and levels in which people proceed – is not a norm going forward. We need a diversity of approaches. NEP has emphasized and repeated how much NEP carries resonance with what is happening internationally. Both are learning from each other and diversity of knowledge system, community engagement, pedagogies, and curriculum – the diversities of normative value. Finally, of course, looking beyond the boundaries of the institution, looking at society at large.

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