Contextual, Participatory Pedagogy: My Experiences in Teaching Economics
By Kashif Mansoor
Teaching economics to undergraduate students in a college in Bihar for more than a year has enabled me to gain some context-based experiences. These experiences have shaped my understanding of the teaching vocation as an ethical, emotional, and responsible engagement. Additionally, I learnt that the pursuit of teaching has to be, quite unconventionally, exciting and entertaining, where students’ centric pedagogies are used making learning a stimulating experience.
Our classrooms often comprise students of multiple identities, creating ethnic, religious, regional, gender, class, and caste diversities. Therefore, teaching a pluralistic classroom needs a pedagogy by which students acknowledge the oppression of some identities by other identities, and are taught the values of empathy towards and solidarity among these (oppressed) identities. For me, a classroom is the best place to sow and promote the seeds of harmony, equality, and justice. It provides the most conducive environment to prepare the revolutionary ground against supremacist/hierarchical orders embedded in caste, gender, race or religious notions.
One might wonder if teaching economics can really help in this regard. I would say that while teaching Development Economics and various theories, the teachers of economics can discuss racism, casteism, religious supremacy and gender hierarchies. Here is one example. When we discuss the meaning of development and define it ‘as a progressive shift in the structure of production away from agriculture towards industrial activities with consequent improvement in the material well-being and eradication of poverty and its correlates of illiteracy disease and early death etc.’ We as educators, have primarily three responsibilities here: firstly, we need to enable students to take a critical view of the negative externalities of such development and how the costs are borne by different caste-gender-religious communities; secondly, we need to enable them to assess the benefits of development in a holistic manner by looking at who has gained and who has lost in the journey so far and; thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, as educators, we need to make them see development in not merely instrumental terms (GDP, poverty ratio, mortality rate etc.), but more broadly, as having a ‘human face’. In other words, ‘humanising’ development. This way of teaching can be made possible only when we locate economics, as being gradually done in academia, in a historical-sociological milieu. A mere textual approach to economics without locating it in the context, is for me, inadequate and incomplete. Making textual economics extra-textual, that is, elucidating with context-specific examples and scenarios, and explaining how the text interacts with the context, is a way to not just understand the text effectively and practically, but to also enable us to revisit some of the long-held textual dogmas in the light of the context-demanding necessities.
This pedagogy, which I call ‘contextual pedagogy’, has to be participatory. To borrow from Paulo Freire, unlike the banking model of education, where educators (teachers) deposit, in a unidirectional way, stuffs in students’ minds thinking that they know nothing, our participatory pedagogy has to acknowledge everyone’s presence and engage her/him in discussions, enabling them, especially the unheard, to speak and share their experiences of the lived reality. Every student’s lived reality, in such pedagogy, has to be treated as valuable information which can then be synthesized into contextual knowledge. If students are encouraged to use contextual knowledge to process new knowledge, they will be able to engage in a participatory process of learning and knowing. In this pedagogy, teachers (educators) have to be tolerant, accommodative and enablers of this participatory process. They cannot be rude, authoritarian or take sides as is often the case in our educational institutions. This requires us to build an emotional and friendly connection with the students so that we are able to sew their contextual knowledge with the textual knowledge and help them evolve into critical thinkers rather than merely rote learners.
Let me provide here one or two examples from my own classroom as to how we can foster a participatory pedagogy. A student of mine is engaged in his family business of manufacturing and marketing towels (gamchas, in Hindi). Before starting the chapter on production function and firms’ behaviour, I asked my student to make a presentation in the classroom on his manufacturing firm, asking him to specifically discuss the manufacturing technique, various costs incurred in the manufacturing process, inputs used, how the input mix varied as per variations in inputs prices, the demand for the output (towels), etc. Simplifying the subject matter of his presentation and trimming it to appear closer to the textbook analysis, I then built on concepts like production function, production technology, types of costs, short-run and long-run production function, average and marginal product of inputs, returns to scale, etc. Rather than repeating examples from textbooks (Gregory Mankiw, Robert Pindyck or Daniel Rubinfeld) with which my students coming as they did from rural backgrounds and unorganized sector experiences do not feel associated, I try to draw examples from their own contexts. This way of teaching enables me to connect to students beyond textbooks and also empowers them in their journey of learning, which is enhanced by their active participation in the teaching method.
If we are able to recognize the presence of each student and enable students to acknowledge the presence of each of their classmates, we are successful in making the classroom a communal place. ‘Communal’ here implies a collective unit and not sectarian conflicts which has become the dominant meaning of the word. In making a classroom communal, efforts have to be taken by both students and teachers. The participatory pedagogy can help create a communal classroom. This communal rendering of the classroom is a sure route to fostering an ethos of pluralism and inclusivity and instil values of empathy and solidarity. Moreover, the practice of teaching-learning has to be full of excitement and fun. The real challenge is to create enthusiasm in classroom sessions. In this regard, the first thing we can do is to draw examples from students’ social contexts to explain concepts and theories.
Drawing from their social contexts entails, among other things, making use of their colloquial parlances and spatial familiarities. Their learning should, hence, evolve into knowing and feeling, and not be confined to information only. Arousal of ‘feeling’ is for me the first step towards building a communal classroom. The next aspect to think of is classroom readiness, that is, to adopt flexible methods and not strict adherence to a standardized, fixed style of teaching. Flexible methods are impromptu and experimental and can take the form of trial and error. Activity-based learning exercises involving writing and speaking tasks and; communal reading and discussion are some of the ways of building interest.
Therefore, a good teacher is one who is informed by the three elements that I have mentioned above, contextual practice, participatory pedagogy and flexible teaching methods.
AUTHOR
Kashif Mansoor, Assistant Professor of Economics, Mirza Ghalib College, Gaya Bihar. He may be reached at kashif.mansoor18@gmail.com
Featured photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash
