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The Integrated Science Education Experiment - Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS)-Indian Institute of Science and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society ( CSCS), 2006-14. - A Conversation between Raghavendra Gadagkar and Tejaswini Niranjana.

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Integrated Science Education in India

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Anup Dhar

Tejaswini Niranjana K. Sridhar

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The Integrated Science Education Experiment

Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS)-Indian Institute of Science and Centre for the Study of

Culture and Society ( CSCS), 2006-14

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN RAGHAVENDRA GADAGKAR AND TEJASWINI NIRANJANA

This discussion between a natural scientist and a humanist ranges over the different nodes of the institutional collaborations that made possible the piloting of the Integrated Science Education initiative. It throws light on early twenty-first century institutional and disciplinary compulsions and the possibilities for the integration of knowledge created in the interstices of both. Raghavendra Gadagkar has been the Chair of the Centre for Contemporary Studies since its inception, and Tejaswini Niranjana was Director of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society when the collaboration between CCS-IISc and CSCS began.

TN: It is good to be having this dialogue today about the 8-year-old experiment in 'integrating' science education and all that has been initiated at liSe and elsewhere through the collaboration between CCS, a Centre from one of the oldest science institutions in India, and CSCS, a small autonomous social science research centre.

Perhaps you should say something first about CCS and its mandate within liSe.

RG: CCS started in 2004 and has just turned ten [this conversation took place in 20 14]. For a long time, I wanted something like this to

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happen, because I was really concerned about the lack of any exposure to scholars and disciplines outside the narrow boundaries of natural sciences. It wasp't clear how we could address the situation, but the experience of the Wissenschaftskolleg [an Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin] gave me some idea, because I had been going there since 2000. The dream was to have a mini Wissenschaftskolleg here, to bring people for short periods of time to engage with the science students and faculty, to show them that there are other people in the world who create and evaluate knowledge by using a different set of rules and procedures. Generally, the tendency of scientists is to dismiss scholarship outside the natural sciences as unscientific, and to nurture the hope-if they even care to think about it-that they will eventually catch up with us. And this attitude went along with almost complete ignorance of what was happening outside the natural sciences. My simple goal was that they should be aware of what was going on, and then they could have their opinions about it.

The Institute fortunately made the decision of setting up the Centre for Contemporary Studies and I was appointed as its founding Chair and immediately started work. It came as a surprise to me, because I didn't know that liSe had actually made this bold decision to set up CCS as a full-fledged department. The first thing I said to myself was that I must go and talk to people outside the Institute, and you will recall that I first came to CSCS.

TN: But if you were not in the know before you were appointed the first Chair, what enabled something like this to be established at liSe?

Any speculation on how it came to be established, after more than 100 years of not dealing with anything that wasn't natural science?

RG: I in particular, and also some other people at liSe, have always felt the need for exposure to the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. And in fact there was an initiative in the early 1970s called the Centre for Theoretical Studies. It appointed only natural scientists, in Physics and Biology, and in Atmospheric Sciences. Then the biologists split off and started the Centre for Ecological Sciences where I am now, and the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences also got created. The physicists who remained converted it into a centre for physics, perhaps not consciously, but that's how it happened.

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TN: So the 1970s experiment was simply about interdisciplinarity within the natural sciences, and it was not abo~t engaging with the humanities and social sciences? I

RG: It was indeed about interdisciplinarity. But it was also mentioned many times that we should get people from the social sciences and humanities and engage with them. But it never happened, and I don't remember a single occasion when it did. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was clearly a centre for physics and other natural sciences, and now it has actually been renamed as the Centre for High Energy Physics. I think there was a requirement to re-look at this question in terms of funding. I believe a committee was appointed to advise the Institute as to how to deal with the situation, and I believe-this is hearsay, since I have not seen the documents-that the committee said liSe should split up the Centre for Theoretical Sciences, let the physicists have a centre, and create a new structure which would try to re-do the original aims of the Centre. That is how CCS came into being, I believe, and I was appointed its first chair. I was given a complete free hand to do whatever I wanted to do. There was no blueprint, no constraint of any kind. I was given space and a budget. And that's when the collaboration with CSCS began. I found out about CSCS though my friend David McDougall, an Australian documentary film-maker who was coming to Bangalore. He was to show his films at CCS, but he also wanted to visit CSCS. So I went on the internet and found out where it was!

TN: Any thoughts on what the new collaboration enabled you to do that you wouldn't have done otherwise? Or how did it strengthen your hands, so to speak? What new kinds of conversation developed at that point?

RG: At that point the aim was to bring interesting people to the campus, have seminars and discussions. There was no thought of a teaching programme at that time. Even the advanced course we eventually taught, before the undergraduate programme started, was not envisaged at that time. The idea was to have lots of one-off

events, maybe workshops and seminars. I made three decisions at that point-that I would not hire anybody on a permanent basis;

the reasoning here was that if one person was hired, he or she would

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need more colleagues in the same discipline to form a critical mass, and then that discipline would hijack the Centre.

TN: This Wa$ your old experience from CTS.

RG: Yes, and if people asked me what the scope of CCS was, I would always say, 'the Universe minus liSe'. So it was impossible to conceive of hiring faculty to cover such a large agenda. And the other decision I made was that if we offered courses, they would not be formal for-credit courses at liSe. At that time, anyway, there was only the Ph.D. programme at the Institute. Because in many cases if you offer a course formally, you have to follow certain rules: you have to put down a curriculum, you have to declare who the faculty are, and it has to be passed by various bodies like the Senate, and after that you lose control. You don't have much freedom to change anything, until after a few years. I wanted to do it opportunistically, depending on who was travelling here-most of my visitors have come on their own, we haven't paid for their travel-no international fares. That worked quite well for a long time. In fact, out of that grew the demand to start a course. And the third decision I made was to make all our events open to the public. That was another boundary I wanted to break, between academia and non-academia. Anybody was free to come and participate, rather than us doing things behind dosed doors. So we advertised in the newspapers and publicised our events widely. We have always had about 50 per cent of our audience come from outside, often different people for different kinds of lectures. Consequently, there was a lot of buzz and we got written about in the papers. There were some people in the city who discovered liSe because of CCS!

THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE COURSE

TN: When the two of us first met, my colleagues and I at CSCS had not really explored the science question. We had friends and acquaintances whom we met once in a while, who were scientists, but they were not closely associated with our activities. We did indeed teach a course once at the NCBS [National Centre for Biological Sciences], but that remained a one-off. I don't think we

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even had lectures by scientists at CSCS or anything like that. So CCS brought us an opportunity that allowed us to glimpse a different set of possibilities, to take the interdisciplinarity that we were so concerned with at CSCS into another domain altogether. So I'm shifting the conversation partly to the curricular aspect, and partly also to the question of integration. I know there is a transitional moment that we've talked about many times, from interdisciplinarity to integration, but assuming that this is the broad direction we took and where we have now arrived, we could maybe look at 2006 as a starting point of that conversation. Because the earlier moment of CCS was simply the idea of an open space where all kinds of things might come in, and that aspect of CCS still remains. But one aspect of that engagement has led in this direction, of actually trying to make that conversation more concrete, between natural sciences and social sciences-humanities. Any memories you might have of that first iteration of the Production of Knowledge course? I can't now remember how we came up with the name!

RG: We came up with the name in one of our conversations.

TN: And I asked my colleagues, whoever was there at the time, to come up with topics we could address in a joint course. So it depended a bit on their interests, and covered a range of things, from cognition and artificial intelligence to the notion of interpretation in history and the biological sciences. [See the syllabus appended.] We from CSCS, with our own limited experience at the time of trying to do interdisciplinary work, felt strongly that the research we should support with our Ph.D. students should be problem-oriented, and not necessarily concerned with disciplines. This legacy has remained to this day, even in the liSe UG Humanities course. This orientation frees you up to do a number of things you can't do

if

you have to give people potted histories of each discipline, of psychology, history, or whatever. However, many of the visitors who come to CCS do speak from within their disciplines. But even those boundaries are shifting, and we are seeing a kind of opening up that was not there ten or fifteen years ago. So now even interdisciplinarity is sort of passe! We have actually moved beyond that. And the attempt to have a problem-oriented discussion is what led to our looking for

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problems that we could foreground in our Production of Knowledge course.

RG:

These two approaches have always ' complemented each other at CCS. Disciplines exist, you can't wish them away. And a lot has happened in the disciplinary structure which you have to glean in order to create something new. So, especially when we invite speakers who are not directly engaged in our courses, one-off speakers, I tell them that in the first half of their talk they should introduce us to their discipline. How do people work in your discipline, what questions do they ask, how do they try to answer these questions, and how do they know that they have a valid answer? In the second half, they should give us an opportunity to understand their own individual contribution to their discipline. So these one-off lectures are often disciplinary, not interdisciplinary. But that allows us to see what has happened in that mode and then see if we can create a new structure. On the other hand, our courses have been free of these disciplinary boundaries.

TN: What do you remember about the 2006 course? Let's focus on the course content, for example. The content was very new to an liSe context, and a large part of our audience was from the Institute.

Who else took part, and how did this experience help us to reshape

theoou~efurthen~tround?

RG:

We began by contrasting knowledge production in the natural sciences and social sciences. We explicitly addressed conflicts, contradictions, dichotomies between the natural and human sciences.

We discussed C. P. Snow, the two cultures debate .... 1 I remember your lecture where you defined science, and talked about how it came into being as a term in the English language. The distinction from art, and how artisanship led to technology. How the earlier distinction was between philosophy and art, and now it is between art and science.

TN: And in many ways, social science drops out of the equation, as though it simply represents a commonsensical knowledge of society.

RG:

In a regular university, a biology professor cannot even imagine sitting in on a Ph.D. exam of a history student and understanding

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what is going on. Even to this day it is largely true. I felt that there should be at least some familiarity with other domains of knowledge.

So that's why, in the first course, we started by looking at the conflicts between the disciplines. We explicitly addressed the differences ....

TN: How did the liSe community respond to the course? If you're talking numbers, we had a full house each time, about fifty or sixty people. And most often, we went beyond the three-hour limit.

RG:

Several Ph.D. students audited the course. We had assignments, we gave certificates. There was a core group that registered for the course, although it was not for credit.

TN: For CSCS students, it was part of their Ph.D. coursework, and therefore for credit.

RG:

Then there were liSe faculty, even some administrative staff.

'IN:

And NIAS [National Institute of Advanced Studies] faculty and students used to come.

RG:

And members of the public. Some people had no background in anything we were saying, so their questions were very na·ive, but that enriched the discussion. But our questions to each other were also very naive! I think it was very useful to have the general public participate. It gave a sanction for asking 'stupid questions'. It became easier for everyone to ask questions, and that broke a barrier of some kind. This has continued in all CCS events to this day.

WORKING IN THE 'PROJECT MODE'

TN: I think it was right after this 2006 course that we started discussing the possibility of doing this work in a 'project' mode.

I'll speak a little bit about the Higher Education Cell, because that programme of CSCS allowed us to put the relationship with CCS on a very strong footing. The middle of 2007 was wh~n the Higher Education Cell was established by the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT) at CSCS for designing and partnering key interventions that would transform higher education in India. Part of the Cell's work involved grant-making for the Trust. Even before the formation of the Cell, we at CSCS were developing a plan for the science institutions. By

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2008, we had asked you and CCS to develop a proposal in close collaboration with the Cell for a grant from the SRTT. I don't want this part of the history to drop out of our discussion, given all that happened subsequently with the SRTT. We actually enabled some very important things through that connection, and there should be a record or a mark of that somewhere. What did we aim to do with our Integrated Science Education initiative, which was a collaborative effort between CCS and the Higher Education Cell- CSCS between 2008-11? The main objective was to develop new models of teaching science, models that would create the conditions for new kinds of research. We also wanted to test out these models in science institutions, and thus prepare the ground for replicating the model in other places. We should discuss what the project mode enabled, since that's something other institutions may want to take up. Let us put the difficulties also on the record.

RG: We taught the Production of Knowledge course again in 2008, and it was in the middle of that course that the SRTT grant to CCS came through. Part of that course was then supported by the grant.

TN: We were struggling to find a name for the Cell's science initiative, and finally chose 'Integrated Science Education'. And the CCS grant was the biggest and most significant grant under that initiative.

RG: Surely there were other grants that were made?

TN: No, nothing, except a couple of what the Trust called Small Grants. We were encouraged by SRTT to go and look for other funds for the science work, and then IISER Pune [Indian Institute of Science Education and Research] supported us through an MHRD [Ministry of Human Resource Development] grant to develop our Strategy Paper. And after the Higher Education Cell broke up with SRTT in 2011, we got the CUJ [Central University of Jharkhand]

grant to develop courses for them under Integrated Science. If we go back to that experiment where we worked with corporate philanthropy and_ what it could make possible in a project mode in a science institution, the CCS grant was the only example. So it is worth revisiting that and asking ourselves, what are the benefits, what are the downsides? Would we ever do this again, if at all

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corporate philanthropy were to be interested in this kind of thing, which I doubt they are now. So I would want us-to spend some time thinking about that moment, and whether it helped us in any way to understand our collective collaborative mandate beyond liSe.

I think what it did enable was the functioning of CCS as an incubator, where we would put together ideas and courseware, even people, and create networks, which could then travel to the USERs, for example. I remember that the USERs and IITs were very much part of that imagination of the project. I think we were partly successful. We had decided on having an Advisory Board, which was a very important body in terms of the project. It was somewhat disparate, but at the same time people across the natural sciences and humanities got to listen to one another with mutual respect.

We had some good discussions in those meetings. And it is because of the Advisory Board that we met [Professor L. S.] Shashidhara of IISER Pune, and then fairly quickly, he was able to obtain the MHRD grant that allowed the Higher Education Cell to develop the Strategy Paper and hold the consultation in Pune. The Paper includes interviews with a large number of scientists and social scientists2 in India and abroad. Anyway, the idea that we, sitting in a postgraduate space, should be taking UG education seriously, the fact that we began devising ways of intervening in it, this came together because of that grant. There was also an effort to consolidate the courseware, and that happened quite systematically. An important aspect of the project mode collaboration was that it allowed us to think beyond liSe, and beyond CSCS too. So while a lot of the activities happened between liSe and CSCS, including hosting Library Fellows and so on, the ambition was to look outward and to make a difference in science education itself.

We had several conversations with other institutions, and finally the Jharkhand one worked out. So our initiative, so far confined to elite institutions and safe environments in which tQ develop the course ideas, was then actually tested out in a mainstream university like CUJ. So what does it mean to take an idea developed in a hothouse atmosphere and throw it into the mainstream? Were we successful? To what extent? What were the roadblocks? Could we

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overcome them? And can more intensive work in the smaller, more contained environment help solve the problems? And addressing those problems in an IISER or a CUJ, how does that help us re- envision the kind of work we do here?

But coming back to the difficulties of the project mode, and taking money from corporate philanthropy, what were the issues that you faced? liSe is used to taking money from the government, and so are other institutions within the public sector. So it would be important to convey to those other institutions what the problems you faced were. Of course, the Higher Education Cell also had its difficulties with SRTT, since we were only nominally inside that structure, but I'm more interested right now in understanding what CCS faced.

RG:

I had somehow naively thought that a non-government funding body would be much less bureaucratic than the government bodies that I'm used to. I found exactly the opposite. With the government funding bodies, although there is a certain amount of bureaucracy, two things help: first, you can talk to them, they have been doing this for decades, there is a well laid-out structure and you can discuss if you have a problem; second, most of government funding is through committees which consist of scientists. So there is only a background bureaucracy. Whereas the private funding bodies such as the SRTT have no experience. And they don't have recipients of grants helping them make decisions about other grants.

TN: See, that was the role that CSCS was supposed to play, as a long-term SRTT grantee. But they could not understand how that worked. They set us up [the HE Cell], then they had to dismantle us because they did not know how to deal with us. First they say, you are experts in higher education, you deal with this field. Then they do not let us deal with that field because 'they' have to exert the control.

RG:

I think it is pri~arily lack of experience. They do not know how to deal with this field.

TN: They also decided only to deal with NGOs. They did not want to deal with the big institutions we were bringing on board.

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RG:

They did not have the ability to make a distinction, to see a distinction between an N GO and an liSe.

TN: So the nature of accountability that is different, the way we have to proceed, the silly difficulties about bank accounts, their insistence that every single grant have its own bank account ... would you say that most of the difficulty was in procedural terms? Because the project was conceptualised jointly by us-the SRTT did not have a say in how to conceptualise it, but because of that, they also did not understand it. And they finally did not know how to understand the outcome. We had a huge problem even getting the Review done for the initiative; they kept saying, this is not a review, where are the numbers, exactly how many students were impacted, how do you measure that impact ... so the modes by which they understood even what impact is were so impoverished that they could not understand the objectives of the project. Just think how many people and institutions we reached out to. To understand then what kind of change was being brought about in higher education because of this intervention-they had no way of grasping it.

RG:

There was nobody there who was engaged with these things.

There was no higher-level person who was looking at our project and trying to make sense of it. It was just done by lower-level administrators. The second surprise I had regarding the SRTT was that they were even more inflexible than the government agency. If I have a grant from the DST [Department of Science and Technology], and I tell them that my first experiment gave a totally unpredictable result, and so instead of doing the planned second experiment I'll do a different kind of experiment, they would understand. Because the people I speak to are also other scientists doing the same kind of thing. There was no such mechanism here with the Trust. Whatever you had written down had to be done exactly like that.

TN: That's also because accountants run the Trust. It's r~ally reduced to that.

RG:

So on the whole, it was not a very useful experience. It certainly gave us more money, we could do more things, but if we had a little more flexibility, we could have done so much more than what we

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actually managed. All our energy was lost in answering those queries and saying whether we had satisfied Clause F and Clause G ... even the governmeiu agencies don't do that.

TN: So no one else at liSe gets that kind of money?

RG: No, that was the other problem. liSe was also not used to this.

They said, this is not how we do things. Our accounts are audited by the Auditor General of India, so we cannot provide any details to anybody. We just provide a certificate saying that the money has been used and for this purpose. liSe is not used to dealing with this, they were not used to dealing with liSe, so it didn't work out. I don't think I would do anything like that again.

TN: I think it is important to put this on the record. The difficulties in dealing with private philanthropic grants as opposed to dealing with private universities, which we can talk about later. When we seek any form of non-governmental funding, what would be the strings attached? So the SRTT grant opened up a few avenues, it allowed us to have the Advisory Board meetings, it allowed the collaboration to take place, but beyond a point it may have become counter-productive because of the Trust's narrow understanding of accountability and outcomes.

CONNECTING UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

TN: I remember when we were discussing the SRTT proposal before submission, you said that we should be intervening in undergraduate education. liSERs were just coming into being then, and you were on the Board of one of them. You said it was very important that the idea of integration should get into the undergraduate mainstream. We at CSCS took to this idea very warmly, because our own philosophy had been-from the time we started in 1998-that arty cutting- edge research that ·we do should connect to the UG space. Because our diagnosis of what was wrong with higher education was that all the way down you were not preparing a firm foundation at the UG level, so what kind of researchers would you eventually have? In

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1998 itself, CSCS was starting to teach a course in an undergraduate college in Bangalore. So your comment abouf science undergrads came as music to our ears. From the science context, can you say why it is important to focus on the UG level?

RG: First of all, even if you're doing something in the old-fashioned disciplinary mode, it is clear that you have to start at the UG level.

You can't really convert a person who has been educated outside the context of research, educated only in the mode of acquiring knowledge with the express goal of recapitulating it for an exam.

That's how our courses are in India. Our B.Sc. and M.Sc. courses are all like that. For a Ph.D., you have to stand all this on its head.

TN: You yourself have said often that science in India exists in imitation of Western science. Surely their UG programme doesn't work like that. So why did we follow this model? I imagine it's a larger higher education problem, not just a science problem.

RG: Many universities relegated UG teaching to the colleges which were only administratively affiliated with the university. So the university faculty do not teach undergraduates, and do not even make the curriculum. This happened across the country. Hundreds of colleges were affiliated to the university, but the university only had the Ph.D. or occasionally a Master's programme.

TN: This affiliating system problem goes back 100 years.

RG: Most state universities are in bad shape. They have been like this since the 1950s. Immediately after Independence, one of the major decisions that was taken was that we would have elite research institutions where research will be done (and not in the universities).

The entire set ofCSIR [Council for Scientific and Industrial Research]

laboratories, the TIFR [Tata Institute of Fundamental Research], the BARC [Bhabha Atomic Research Centre ]-now there are more than 100 of them. So universities first got rid of undergraduate teaching, and then they lost out on the research.

TN: So what did the powers-that-be imagine as the location where researchers were trained to become researchers?

RG: For a long time, they didn't think about this question, and just kept complaining about the quality of researchers. So it was in

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response to this problem that the IISERs were started. To an extent the IITs [Indian Institutes ofTechnology] helped-because although they are techn~logy institutions, a lot of basic science is taught there.

For example, many people got a B.Tech from liT and then went on to do a Ph.D. in basic science. In fact, even today many of our professors in Physics and so on have UG degrees in B. Tech.

TN: So the IITs were doing the work that colleges were supposed to do?

RG: Exactly. And now the IISERs were meant to be the IITs for basic science.

TN: This was sixty years after starting the research-only institutions ....

RG: Yes, finally people have woken up to the fact that UG teaching should happen in a research atmosphere. In the IITs, the education was good, but there is not that much research happening there. And when we start looking at interdisciplinarity, all the more reason why we should start early, at the UG level itself Up to high school we still have more or less a liberal arts education. At the UG level, we have been telling the students that this is all unnecessary, and now you should become a physicist or a biologist to the exclusion of everything else. Even the one year of language that is taught in the UG courses is treated so lightly and given so little respect. So if we want to break disciplinary boundaries, all the more reason that we should start at the UG level. Once people's minds are set, they do not see the value in breaking boundaries.

TN: What about the negative reinforcement from the larger context, which we saw happening in Jharkhand, for example? A complete disregard by the faculty of the work that we were doing, and a refusal to come and attend sessions, saying to students they did not understand why they were doing our courses.

RG: There is a lot of that. In some places it happens more silently, in some places more explicitly. People who have been brought up in a purely disciplinary tradition firmly believe that our courses are a waste of time.

TN: You're saying that those people who criticise humanities inputs will also criticise inputs from other disciplines in the natural sciences?

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RG: Yes, yes.

TN: So what we're arriving at here is that if there is a disposition towards ipterdisciplinarity, a disposition towards integration will follow.

RG: And for us in India, there is a second reason why this is very important. In the natural sciences we are running a race, and it is a hugely competitive world out there. By and large, we are disadvantaged because of the need for large investments of money and infrastructure. All we do is run as fast as we can on the same track.

And on an average, we won't succeed, although there will always be a few exceptions. So the obvious solution would be to find a different track, a different perspective, a different way of doing things. Then we have a chance of leapfrogging in spite of the technology problem, a chance of overcoming our handicaps. A good way of doing this is to look at our research questions in the light of the wisdom of another discipline. If we train our students to be proficient in other disciplines, they will look at things differently and run on a different track.

TN: It seems to me that there are two big issues here, and in different ways we've touched upon them or moved around them in the CCS- CSCS collaboration as well, without deciding in favour of one or the other. One, you're suggesting that inputs from or exposure to disciplines that are not natural science disciplines allow the scientist to be a better scientist-because something may shift in their heads about how to conceptualise a problem. I'm with you on that.

Similarly, social science people may look at the natural sciences and say, why not think about a problem in that way? But second, what we attempted in the Jharkhand courses in 2011-13, which in some ways has come back into the liSe UG Humanities programme, is something different. There again, we didn't go the disciplinary route. To do something that is problem-oriented is different from getting inputs from another discipline. So to think in a somewhat

utop~an way, if undergraduates are trained in methodologies rather than disciplines, the way they conceptualise a problem will itself be different. Whereas in the earlier mode that you were describing, the student is conceptualising a problem in the natural sciences, and

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getting some input from sociology or economics, right? Here, I'm saying that they will conceptualise the problem differently if it is not coming from ,within the discipline. It will also be different because of the social and political context they're embedded in. Do you see this happening at all?

RG: That would be a second step. First, we have to remove the mindset that what is happening outside natural science is not rigorous, not objective, is primitive. CCS started with the aim of exposing people to different methodologies from different disciplines. Once the mindset is changed, then the possibility of conceptualising differently might follow. It's a long process ....

TN: I understand. What I was getting at was that the earlier curricular intervention was aimed at the PG student or the older person. And the later interventions are aimed literally at 18-year-olds. I think there may be some difference in the way we can envisage the outcomes for each intervention. In the first, the people are already quite formed, in disciplinary terms. So they have to be exposed to other, very rigorous ways of asking a question in the hope that they will find it of interest and then engage with those. But undergraduates who are, as you said, not so formed, for them we do not have to say, here is the discipline of sociology or psychology or whatever; you can just say, here is the problem of how you think about the world around you, you get inputs from all these sources .... So they are already being exposed at a very young age to a different way of asking a question. But the UG Humanities courses do not really engage with the sciences in the way the Production of Knowledge course does.

RG: I agree, but I'm conscious of the difficulties we're up against.

Two kinds-one is that we are only a tiny fraction of the inputs that UG students get- the rest of it will come from a diametrically opposite philosophy. We saw this clearly in Jharkhand, but we will see it elsewhere too. Two, the UG students who go through our kind of teaching will not get Ph.D. supervisors who wilt think like us. Today, in the way experimental science is done in most places, the graduate student is not supposed to conceptualise the problem.

That has been done by the supervisor. The student basically has to gather the data that is required to test something. So we will have to

(19)

wait until these undergraduates become professors who will become Ph.D. supervisors!

TN:

By that time, they will already have been finished off by the system.

RG:

Not necessarily.

TN: No, my worry is that really fine students like in IIT will say that engineering or technology is not for us and just switch allegiance, and go into philosophy or history .... Whereas we are saying that you do not need to make that switch. Can you be a scientist who is a different kind of scientist?

RG:

I think it will happen. These 18-year-olds are so receptive. Things stay with one for so long. For a long, long time they'll remember what they learned as undergrads. Out of practical necessity they may compromise, but they won't forget. Especially if we do this in a place like the liSe ....

TN: I guess we've been attempting something in the larger context of science education, which is by and large plagued by rote learning, inflexibility (rigid combinations of disciplines), lack of connection to research ....

RG:

There are sub-features of that lack of connect. If your goal is only to pass an exam, you should position yourself in a comfort zone. Whereas in research, you must learn to position yourself in a zone of discomfort, you must get used to not knowing the answer, feeling stupid, failing all the time, then there's some hope that you'll find something new. If you go and do research in an area where you know the answer, that doesn't make any sense. Most research in India is done with the mindset of passing an exam. People are afraid to fail, and this attitude is carried into research. So people choose safe problems. I know a professor whose student came with some results that were unexpected. The professor said: 'Show me at least one publication in the literature where this has been done, and I will believe you.' People who come to research have not studied in a research atmosphere. So the bigger impact of the new kind of teaching is that the mode of research will change, not just the mode of teaching.

(20)

TEACHING SCIENCE/LEARNING SCIENCE

RG: My own misgivings, even at that time, were that introducing new modes of teaching science is a tall order. Teaching is done by the teachers, and we were not really addressing teachers in our project.

Teachers were invited to sit in, if they were interested, but we were addressing the students, not the teachers. So in my mind, I always phrased it as 'new ways of learning science', rather than 'teaching science'. And that has translated much better into the liSe UG context, which we will talk about later. Let the traditional teachers do what they want to do, we don't have much control over that.

But if we change the mindset of the students, who are absorbing everything, it is entirely possible that they will interpret what they are being taught even by other teachers much more broadly than what was intended by the teachers themselves.

TN: I think we had understood this problem, and I remember it was part of the original SRTT proposal. We had said we would conduct workshops for teachers. That didn't really happen in the way we envisaged it. But I'm wondering whether the Library Fellowships tried in some small measure to redress that. Because we did get a few interested teachers, and the whole idea was that we expose them to all this so they take back some of the learnings to their own contexts. But yes, we have to keep the teacher question in mind when discussing future work. Shifting to talking about learning science is one way of thinking about it, but we can't just ignore the teacher problem.

RG: It is also the ability of students to be receptive to what we are saying that's at issue. I think teachers are generally not going to be receptive, unlike the students. I remember at one of our events, An up was talking about teaching science, and a distinguished liSe Physics professor said: 'I don't understand what you are saying. What is the new way of teaching science? I've been teaching physics for so many years. Tell me, how are you doing it differently?' Anup gave what I thought was a very good response, but the professor said it was too abstract for him. 'Give me an example,' he said. 'Should I teach Newton's laws differently?' So we'll have a lot of trouble convincing teachers that what we are doing is worthwhile. By saying 'new ways

(21)

of teaching', we're encroaching on their territory. 'New ways of learning' doesn't encroach on their ground, and also absolves them of having to do anything themselves.

TN: How about putting it like this? Not 'new ways of teaching science', but 'new ways of teaching science students'. This doesn't then mean we're teaching them science, because we're teaching them other things, right?

RG: But then they will say it doesn't affect them at all, and all they care about is not taking time away from their courses. Whereas if you say 'new ways of learning science', it also feeds into research nicely.

Because research is about learning new things. So it would be both practical and strategic to put it as 'new ways of learning'.

TN: But when we come to UG Humanities at liSe, it won't even seem that we are talking about new ways of learning science, because science doesn't even feature here, or not overtly. We're only talking about the humanities.

RG: At the liSe, the humanities curriculum we've jointly developed and implemented actually creates a milieu in which students learn science. And the way they're learning science is really impacted by the fact that they have our Humanities curriculum. This is an easy way to do this, because we're not tampering with the existing situation. All we're saying is, we will provide a certain environment in which students learn science. For example, when they learn the methodologies emerging from different disciplines, the way they look at the science being taught to them changes.

TN: We've been discussing learning science, teaching science, is what we teach 'science'-what we did in Jharkhand or IISER was a version of the Production of Knowledge course. We were putting problems before the students that required an integrated approach. The UG Humanities course at liSe is not quite doing this, although it tackles the larger issues; but let's bracket that for now.

Shall we talk about the IISER experience for a bit? Both Anup and I spent a lot of time over a year and a half engaging with the IISER Pune space. You were one of the early mentors of IISER, and that's the reason we also went there. What do you think are or were

(22)

the possibilities of that space? So in 2010, when we went to IISER Pune, what was the potential of that space in terms of absorbing what we had, to offer, taking up the learnings from CCS, and then what actually happened .... You remember, we were able to teach only two courses there, and then they hired their own faculty to do what they called integration.

RG: At CCS at the time, I believed we should offer courses only in the non-credit mode, and even in the UG Humanities instance, we use only guest faculty. This means we can do whatever we want to do, and there was a great deal of flexibility. But IISERs are trying to have all in-house courses. This is not very different from the liT model and it has not worked very well, I think.

TN: Hold on, I would differ slightly here. It is not because of in- house faculty that the liT model has not worked. It is because the imagination of what needs to be done in a science-technology institution has been rather impoverished. So with a different imagination, don't you think the in-house model would have worked? Because the difficulty of operating only with guest faculty is the difficulty of finding suitable people, and in the long run, the quality of teaching will suffer.

RG: The problem is that a science institute will devote no more than 5 or 2 per cent of its faculty positions to the humanities. So you will have three assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences, and 400 in the natural sciences. Then what happens is you will not have a critical mass of people who will also feel that they are getting something out of it. They need a community, they need to talk to each other, they need to develop their own research programme, and so on. Even in the best IITs, you have one department of humanities and social sciences with four faculty.

TN: They are much bigger now and they have also started their own MA programmes.

RG: In a social science institute, if you have one department of science, with one-physicist, one mathematician, and one biologist, it is not going to work.

(23)

TN: Then maybe the university model is the one to look at, where there's an equal distribution of faculty. So for mainstreaming our ideas, maybe the general university is a much better location.

RG: That was the potential in CUJ, but it could not be achieved for other reasons.

TN: Another thing to explore is whether, in the science institution, we need a different model of how the humanities-social sciences component works. You can still have only two or three faculty members, but you could make funding available to bring in other instructors as and when needed; and this 'unit' will build its community or network of other modules of the same kind in other science institutions. So if an liSe, and the USERs or other institutions, have only a few faculty in humanities, there could be a collective mechanism by which they could do course correction for each other. So the stimulation comes from the network, rather than saying that we need forty people at liSe to provide the required stimulation. Also, if you have a humanities unit, their task is not just to teach x number of courses. One has to re-imagine what kinds of functions they might have. They might well be doing communication and language, they might be doing a foundation course, so if you have four or five things on the menu, it is probably worth having a sort of humanities unit. Here, I'm thinking aloud as to what could be the models for the future.

RG: If the USERs had courses similar to ours, we could have learned from each other. They do not have anything like the equivalent of our UG Humanities courses. All they do is disciplinary teaching-a couple of people from specific disciplines teach from their expertise.

No institution in the country is teaching humanities to science students in an interdisciplinary way like the liSe is doing. They will at best teach one course in history, one in philosophy, one in economics. Then the student can always say that s/he would rather take one more chemistry or physics course instead ofwasting time on humanities. But the way we're doing it here, that question sort of disappears. It is not one more discipline that they are learning.

TN: And CUJ? That was a very different kind of space. You went there to teach one course on Environment. The students, of course,

(24)

are very different from the liSe students, but they were quite interested in what we had to offer. I would say nearly 50 per cent of the students-were engaging with us, and this is evidenced in the kind of assignments they did and the group work they took part in. So what was your experience there?

RG: CUJ was not only physically and geographically remote, it was also intellectually remote for me, in terms of student-teacher relationships in particular. If we ever do that kind of thing again, we should think of a preparatory session, where we prepare students to ask questions, speak to us as equals, be curious. Students in traditional universities are not expected to do any such thing. They are expected to listen, make notes, and reproduce them in the exam.

Students would always come and ask me questions outside the class.

But inside, they would be silent.

TN: I suspect it happened to you and Sridhar because you were science professors. Whereas with all of us, they were happily interrupting, there was a lot of in-class engagement. We also made sure the instructor walked up and down. Often, we also devised exercises through which the teaching was done. So even in the morning lecture sessions, they had to talk to us. And with their inputs, we would go on to the next point to be covered. I fear that the authority position you occupied as a science professor may have had something to do with the interaction. So it is clear that in the science classroom, they are not supposed to ask questions.

RG: There is the idea that there is one truth, and there is no debate.

That's how science is taught, as a fixed universal thing, where there is a gradient between professor and student. Whereas in the humanities, there is no single correct answer for many things, so automatically there will be discussion and debate.

TEACHING SCIENCE DIFFERENTLY

TN: So you found in Jharkhand what we see elsewhere too: an assertion of the universality of science, and a very conventional and hierarchical way of teaching science. The new Central universities were set up to try and do things slightly differently, and that's how

(25)

we were able to get this opportunity to develop new courses for CUJ.

But there was no buy-in of any kind from the teachers. They came a couple of times, were distracted, helped out in the 'invigilation', but otherwise were not really engaged. So once again, we come to the teacher training problem; and if this is to continue as a widespread initiative, we will have to tackle this in some way.

[RG explains what he does in his Biology UG class; getting students to collect data before and after training, and then getting them to reflect on the difference in results and interpretation. He indicates that his teaching mode has been influenced by the CCS experience.]

TN: I'm still trying to understand why this is a post-humanities intervention. You're, after all, still teaching 'Biology'. Or are you teaching it differently? This perception would be internal to your teaching practice, I suppose. And while you know how it has changed, I don't!

RG: One of the things that we would like to convey to the students is that there isn't a single universal truth, that there isn't a single answer to everything. That there are multiple ways of doing things, and some if it is context-dependent. If you're trained in a particular discipline, you look at the problem one way, if you are trained in another, then you would see it differently. This idea is very hard to convey while teaching science. It's relatively easier to do while teaching humanities.

And then we hope that when we teach humanities, it will spill over into how science is taught and learned.

TN: Would you say the whole question of interpretation is also crucial here? The students need to conceptually understand what the work of interpretation is, as required in science or humanities. Because otherwise, there is the insistence on empirical fact that seems to be beyond interpretation.

RG: For example, I show my students a graph with two coloured lines, showing the frequency distribution of the income of men and women in a factory or somewhere. So now, we have to interpret this graph. What does the spread mean? What does the peak mean? And what does it mean that the peak for women is less than the peak for men? And then-why should it be so? Remember, this is in a science

(26)

class. Why should wages for women be less than those for men? What are the possible explanations for this? There is no single right answer for this. You ean't go to the internet and copy from there. What are the possible reasons? Then the students start thinking-maybe the women do a different kind of work, or maybe it's an inequality that should be changed .... Before I do this exercise, I show them another graph, about the life spans of men and women, with the latter having longer life spans. So perhaps it is a little bit more science here, and in the other graph it is a little bit more sociological, but the students begin to think of possible interpretations.

TN: Let me ask you about your own teaching practice and the kinds of changes it has undergone-how long has it taken to evolve?

RG:

I guess the transformation began with the birth of CCS. But I really got the opportunity when liSe started its UG programme. Teaching senior Ph.D. students is very different. Participating in CCS activities and courses has made me teach very differently, and I see this with my UG students. But it is true that I didn't have this opportunity before, of developing a UG curriculum.

TN: It's really interesting how your move into the UG space is linked to the possibility of opening up to humanities and the social sciences.

RG:

Absolutely.

TN: It's also a matter of the level at which you're able to teach, also where there's more receptivity, as you said earlier. Any more thoughts on CUJ?

RG:

We should realise that our task at the liSe, where we are doing the teaching ourselves, is different from our task in a place like CUJ, where we need to make things happen. And there, it will only work if we can empower the teachers. Because if you only deal with students,

teachers will be uninterested; also, they will feel that you are taking away their space. And the feeling will be there that you are doing something different, and the students are also more interested in it.

This will not work in the long run. If you want to intervene in a space where there is a self-catalysis afterwards, you have to work on the teachers rather than the students.

(27)

TN: Yes, I'm with you. We've identified the problem, we had even put it into our CUJ proposal that we would do some kind of teacher training,· but we could not get the teachers to come and take part.

RG: Maybe we should try a different model in the future. A teacher training programme should not involve students.

TN: We did want to meet them separately in the evening to figure out the pedagogic implications ....

RG: No, but it was linked to the courses. They must have already felt threatened. Perhaps we could do it through the Academy [INSA, the Indian National Science Academy, of which RG is the current Chair], where we frequently have two-week teacher training programmes in different subjects. People come out of interest and there is no promotion incentive attached. So perhaps we can have a teacher programme in Integrated Science Education ....

TN: Why not? Nothing's stopping you, except level of interest! And now you have enough people who can come and teach, or anchor such a programme.

RG: Yes, we could do this, and there is money for it. We don't have to seek separate funds. Yes, so we need to empower teachers, if this idea has to have a life of its own, without us being around.

TN: That will have to come with the effort to mainstream this idea, otherwise it will remain a niche experiment.

UG

HUMANITIES AT

liSe

TN: At the moment, the UG Humanities course is a three-semester course, with three modules-Ways ofKnowing, Ways of Seeing, and Ways of Doing. I remember when you called me to say that CCS had been given the task of handling UG Humanities at the Institute, you also said that while they were working with an inherited understanding of what humanities meant, we could ' perhaps see it as a platform for our ideas from the Integrated Science Education efforts. If we taught humanities somewhere else, that would be different, but here we would be teaching science students. We already had a well-developed theory and philosophy of integration,

(28)

and perhaps there is some way in which we could bring that into the UG Humanities programme. It would continue to be called by that name, but under that, we could do a combination of the Production of Knowledge courses and the CUJ courses. So drawing on all of that, we were able to assemble this curriculum fairly quickly. You've been closely connected to the actual teaching of the course, and you see the students all the time, so why don't you say something about the experience so far? In my limited engagement with the students, coming in to teach a part of the Cognition session or observing other sessions, I found the students very engaged, very responsive, and I hear from the other instructors that this is generally the case. Do you want this level of responsiveness different in this course than in others at the liSe?

RG: From the beginning, I've been conscious of the fact that we are teaching neither science nor humanities in a conventional way.

AT CUJ, our explicit goal was to teach science differently. But here, what are we doing? My interpretation is that we are creating a milieu in which, when the students learn science, they are learning it differently. We are sowing seeds of doubt, dissent, debate, non- universality of truth ... so that they will learn science differently.

TN: You are, of course, a very senior professor, but will the course cause trouble down the line in terms of the Institute's understanding of what it stands for, and its own understanding of science? Don't other colleagues feel threatened in any way?

RG: I don't think so. If at all, they may worry about there being less time for them to teach science in their way. I don't think there is any kind of disagreement with our intentions. I think most people would say, lovely, but let someone else do it because I can't, or I don't want to, or I don't have the time. But to make the contrast clear, at a place like CUJ, we need to empower teachers. Here, at the liSe, we can't change the teachers, but we can empower students, so that even if the teachers do exa~tly what they always do, the students imbibe it differently because of our intervention. I think the real impact of our work will be in how they approach science subjects. Not just now, but later on, when they do their research.

(29)

TN: You're not simply saying that we hope this will happen, you've actually seen something happen. Are you already seeing evidence of that?

RG: In private conversation, students tell me they ask questions differently. They feel they can question things. I have not talked to other teachers, though. In my Biology course, I can see clearly the impact of all this in the way they behave.

TN: So it's not so much content, would you say, as a way of thinking about a problem or asking a question that they are really absorbing from this?

RG: That, I think, will be the long-term impact. But to achieve that, you must engage them, you must have an interesting assignment, you need to do that. All this is not easy to measure, but I believe there will be a long-term impact and the experiment has been worth

It.

One thing we haven't done is to spend more time with the students. There are 'lab sessions', but we haven't always made use of them in the Humanities. Those would create more intimacy with smaller groups, and more people would ask questions.

NOTES

1. C. P. Snow, 'The Two Cultures', The Rede Lecture 1959, Cambridge

University Press.

2. http:/ /cscs.res.in/dataarchive!textfiles/strategy-paper-on-integrated- science-education-he. pdf.

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