Creative Pedagogy and Structural Constraints

Creative Pedagogy and Structural Constraints

 

Anthony Joseph

Research Scholar

CIE - DU

 

 

When four speakers, Prof. Avijit Pathak, JNU, Prof. Avinash K Singh, NUEPA, Dr. Jyoti Raina, Gargi College, Dr. Naresh Kumar, NUEPA, came together to share their thoughts on ‘The Scope and Need for a Creative Pedagogy despite Structural  Constraints’ at NUEPA on Jan 07, 2016 – one looked forward to some interesting insights!

 

Against a backdrop of rising student aspirations, frustration, casteism, class inequality, and environmental degradation - a setting familiar today, to most in India, particularly in academia - the need to evolve a genuine and revolutionary momentum to counteract against the structural constraints, by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of society, has never been more urgent.

 

The recognition that ‘all being’ and ‘all knowing’ are socially conditioned is one of the most important developments in the episteme of our time.  Bereft of any or ‘perpetual conjectures and refutation and falsification’, ‘appropriation of dissent’, education in India appears to be degenerating into a kind of ‘conspiracy theory’.  In India, where scientists peddle myth, superstition and fancy as science, little wonder then, that the 103^rd edition of the Indian Science Congress (2016) merited dubious distinction, when it was described as, “a circus where very little science is discussed”. This recognition raises the question of subjective creativity. Is creativity or innovation possible? What is the locus of creativity? Is it the subject or the structure of the structures of being of which it the subject is part? It may be argued that any notion of creativity that takes seriously the condition of being is therefore bound to deal with the dialectic of freedom and determinism - the struggle between the self and structure (structural constraints).

 

Scarcity, the fundamental economic problem, is a perfect foil for ‘structural constraints’.    While scarcity faithfully serves to be the raison d’etre for the ‘science of economics’ ‘scarcity and structural constraints’, particularly in a welfare economy, as India, are conveniently villainized and eulogized in the creation and provision of public goods and services.

 

The paragraphs that follow, briefly describe the thoughts shared by the three speakers. Prof. Avijit Pathak’s thoughts however, merited a more detailed discussion.

 

Dr. Jyoti Raina, briefly described three creative practices in teacher education practiced in her college. She made ample references to social justice/s, distributive justice, compensatory education, teacher expectancies and self-fulfilling prophesies, inclusive inter-disciplinarity, pedagogy of hope, voices of resistance, critical consciousness, and marginalization.

 

Prof. Avinash Singh, hesitant to share his untutored thoughts, rather bravely, declared that the inherent anarchy in his thoughts could lead him to say something that ‘may sound a little bizarre’. He briefly spoke of the tyranny of straight-jacketed-thinking which neglected the myriad thoughts of a large number of people, for the mere fact that their ‘thoughts’ do not ‘come to us’ in familiar patterns and thus highlighted, the invaluable loss and the popular and dangerous tendency to ignore the multiplicity of knowledge and multiple ways of knowing embedded in and around us.

 

“A little louder, please” a voice called out to Prof. Avijit Pathak, JNU, hardly two sentences into his brief address. In his inimitable style, his brief thoughts on the dialectics of ‘determinism and freedom’, ‘critical consciousness and constructive will’, and ‘difficulties/constraints and possibilities’, served to transform our understanding of creative pedagogy and structural constraints - lucidly revealing the malleable nature of these concepts and their openness to positive reinvention.

 

Prof. Pathak with Joseph Dietzgen and a host of other thinkers argued that thinking is a process involving two opposing aspects - and all thought is therefore a dialectical process. The principles of dialectics assert that everything includes its opposite, that there is an ongoing conflict between the poles, and that this inevitable conflict creates pressure that leads to a continuous alteration.

 

Exploring the dialectics of education in terms of its active embodiments, Prof. Pathak, recast the notion of structural constraints as a process of change, rather than mediation, between dialectic and deconstruction. Expanding this analysis to the realms of education, he argued that "structural constraints" viewed from the dialectic of ‘determinism and freedom’, ‘critical consciousness and constructive will’, and ‘difficulties/constraints and possibilities’, is not fixed but susceptible to human action.

 

Some Questions?

 

1.      To consider the emergence of dialectics in education (‘determinism and freedom’, ‘critical consciousness and constructive will’, and ‘difficulties/constraints and possibilities’) removed from the spirit of structural constraints and trace the relation between the two calls for experience and erudition. What is the dialectic, Prof. Avijit refers to, is it the dialectic that is necessary to destroy incorrect theses and attain thinkable being, or the dialectic which becomes the driving force behind the constitution of a rational philosophical system. Conceived as a logical enterprise, can the dialectics of education at any point strive to liberate itself from social constraints which is viewed as merely accidental and even disruptive of thought, in order to become a systematic or scientific method. How would you view, ‘Can education exist without structural constraints?’

 

2.      How does one establish the connectedness between the self and the world of today and yesterday, the biography and the world? ‘Wonder and solitude’ competing with the world of ‘selfie’, to discover and or establish our connectedness! What, vital ingredients, do we have or, in us, would lead us to discover and dance with the ‘rhythm of time’?

 

3.      For want of better ways and bred on a staple of 2minute snacks, instant tattoos, compounded mixes … modern ways of connecting is often woefully/wonderfully limited to ‘veni, vidi, vici - selfies’ thanks to technology! So when Prof. Avijit stands dumbfounded and in reverential awe at the relics of a museum, silently acknowledging the ‘connectedness’ that links millennia with millennia, one wonders at the ‘connection’ the good professor feels with most other visitors, who callously saunter into the hallowed premises, concerned only about a convenient pose, flash their best smiles, even at the most tragic Jallianwala Bagh massacre site and ‘click, click, click away’!

 

4.      The vast chasm between the rarefied world of the university and the community was perceived vital to reinforce the paradigm of the top down model, I suspect, to create and perpetuate the notions of scarcity and structural constraints. While calls to reestablish a redefined connection between the university and the community sets off pathways to explore the possible and desirable, would Universities be willing to/for a more participatory and collaborative approach to understanding?

 

Some thoughts …

 

Prof. Pathak’s thoughts on the dialectics of ‘determinism and freedom’, ‘critical consciousness and constructive will’, and ‘difficulties/constraints and possibilities’ captures the rise of a forceful style of pedagogic activity urgently needed to engage with regressive structural constraints, that plagues the standards of education and research in India. 

 

For the discerning among us, the future is understood not simply as a moment in time, but as something malleable and constantly open to change through our individual interpretation. However, for the vast majority, uninitiated and raised on the staple of ‘scarcity’, and paralyzed by the strangle-hold of social constraints, their sense of reality and reason are clearly limited and thus condemned to a dialectic of ‘adapt or die’.

 

Pedagogy is, and was never concerned merely with articulating and affirming absolute truths, but also with exploring and negotiating the complex links between certainty and uncertainty. By bringing to light this fascinating and hitherto largely unexamined side of the dialectical thinking process Prof. Pathak revealed that culture was a vibrant laboratory for many of the issues that we face today - it was a world of fractures and fractured truths which we, with a heightened sensitivity to discrepancies and discontinuities, are now better-suited to understand, are we?

 

Biologists have long puzzled at what, exactly, tips the ordered world of many social insects - rigidly divided by caste, function and hierarchy - into murderous mayhem of sometimes Shakespearean dimensions … not any more, scientists now claim it is, ‘all in the beewax’.

 

Speaking of wax, didn’t one person in the hall, at the talk, mention the need for ‘listening’? Any proponents, for earwax as a structural constraint?  And, yes… along with the eager participant at the back … I’d love to add… Dear Prof. Pathak, ‘louder please …!’

 

A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong.

-Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935)