Keep Revisiting your Campus!

While interviewing for new faculty positions, I came across a young faculty interviewee who has neither attended seminars, workshops or any professional development programmes nor done any publishing. That happens occasionally. More interestingly, the person hasn't been to any college other than where the UG and PG Programmes were done by her. On asked about the reasons, it was said that her college gives all importance to students and doesn't want students to suffer because of faculty absence. That sounded a very interesting way of ensuring student support to me! The institution seems to have completely skewed it's strategies in terms of faculty professional development with the  apparent belief that eternally tying the faculty down to the campus with their constant presence is the best way of putting the students first! This 'old school' approach neither ensures the student growth nor satisfies the need for teacher growth. 

Home is where you keep returning to, rather than the space you eternally stick to. Home is home coz one keeps coming back. You keep coming back not just because that's where you belong, you keep coming back also because it belongs to you. The emotional ownership and the unwordable at-homeness make one accept the all-roads-lead-home feel. But you don't step twice into the same home. Or into the same home campus. One shouldn't. 

Getting out of your college /institution is as important as getting into it. This applies equally to getting out regularly to attend PD sessions or any related or non-related activities or getting out for good! Walk around in another campus for no reason and watch how they do their businesses. Pay attention to what happens and what doesn't. Obviously while the visit unfolds, you may often have the benchmark of where you teach, where you taught, where you studied at the back of your mind. The relative quiet or the commotion, the presence or absence of learners in the corridors or the classrooms, the knowledge-building festivities or the knowledge-barring lectures, the chat in libraries or studious once squatting on floor  and refering in, faculty who debate DA shortages or those who build conversation around student conversations- there are umpteen takeaways for the visitors to all away-home campuses. Depending on where and when, these other campus drop-ins help us upskill ourselves and unlearn a lot. 

The meet up with other faculty members,  casual chats over cups of tea can provide plentiful in terms of attitudinal and process-wise changes which faculty and leaders may take home. But it can be embarassing for all of us to simply walk into another college for no reason! Just like that. 

Apparently there is nothing to shop and there isn't much happening except the expected, supposed teaching learning processes underway. Campuses are no parks to stroll through, we may rightly feel. Though Higher Education is famously resistant to change, such break-ins promise good purchase. For anyone who is observant, keen to learn and transform, such visits open up new frontiers to explore. Self-questions on what's being practiced at your home campus and theirs, what's displayed on the notice boards, the novel and the relatively non-existent controls in other institutions, have their educational value. More than anything, the readiness to be in another space which deals in what we deal in, which runs what we run, is always exhilarating. 

Rather than the infrastructure or the looks, there are microelements which a casual academic visitor can zero in on. The students who are lining up the walkways and the way they behave, the floor mats and potted plants, the graffiti or the absence of it, the music which is played during the recess, the quotes on the wall of the library, the waiting benches or the empty spaces, the breadth of the corridors, the length of the lecture halls, the old world smells and charms in certain 'pedigreed' campuses, the extreme silence of certain other learning spaces, the snatches of words and lines you catch from the lectures of the faculty members as you walk across, the trees and sit arounds: there are plenty of micromarkers which shout out / whisper the cultures of campuses. It is vital to be in the midst of those other spaces and get back home - musing and talking to oneself. 

Depending on which campus we visit, it can either lend you more confidence or let us know that there's some way our institution has to go, we have to go, before we can declare that we have arrived. Though no institution of education can claim that it has truly arrived as education always is a work in progress! 

Babu. P. K., Ph D.