Making of ACAS 12: 'Ente Vayana' ( My Reading)

To make faculty members read is one of the biggest challenges. It needs no debate whether faculty should read or not. A teacher who doesn't read is a teacher who doesn't grow. And a teacher who doesn't grow can by extension create generation of learners who are left behind. This is extremely damaging in the long run and it is reflected at multiple levels in the performance of the faculty members too. For the emotional and intellectual growth of both the teacher and the learner, it is important the teacher keeps grounded and connected. Reading helps achieve that. This explains the decision to make an effort to encourage reading among the faculty members. To the number of Continuous Professional Development initiatives, one more was added: 'My Reading: Teachers' Reading Experiences' 

The Plan 

The general gut feeling is that majority of the faculty members in HEIs are not good readers. Or perhaps they couldn't find time to read what they would love to. As we all know it is not easy to differentiate between intentional forgetfulness and forgotten intentions. The question was how do we encourage the faculty to read? We know the interest in reading among the faculty members is not even. For that matter, it is not even among the students or the public either. But when it comes to the faculty member of an HEI, being a reader, gatherer of knowledge, immersed in others perspectives, is not a choice but a necessity. 

This need argues that the reading has to be vertical as well as horizontal too. Vertical reading refers to the reading in one's own domain, area of specialization, while horizontal reading indicates the general reading spread across ones areas of interest. It may be sports, movies, farming, fashion, gadgets or animals. It needn't be deep. Hence we thought of pushing our faculty to be readers, readers of anything. ' Ente Vayana - Teachers Reading Experiences', My Reading, thus came to being. Ms. Febin, Asst Professor of Malayalam at the College, has coordinated the event right from the launch and has consistently shown interest in making the programme grow further. 

The Implementation 

Faculty members will read a book and will present a review of the same in a gathering of all faculty members. The presentation will be followed by a discussion. Each month there will be a day assigned for the programme and those who are ready with a read can be part of it. In that sense it was purely voluntary. From 2021 onwards we have been running the show with varied levels of readerly contribution from the faculty members. Some obviously contributed more as they are in to the habit of reading while others contributed less since they are not into reading. This unevenness is reflected heavily in favour of some. While Ente Vayana' (My Reading) for faculty members was implemented, it was followed up with a students version of 'Ente Vayana' (My Reading) too. The programme had reasonably good response from the student community. We have so far done more than fifty faculty book reviews and fifty plus student book reviews. 

The Challenges

Among the many initiatives we introduced, I would rather rate this among the toughest. There are a couple of reasons why I state so. Firstly I don't want this to sound like a self-promo campaign in which everything we attempted yielded perfect outcome. Not at all. Certain things worked like a song. But certain projects struggled. The decline of reading among faculty members is nothing secret and it is not easy to effect a quick turn around. I would state that this is a reflection of the times we live in too. Anyway, we are happy that we did make some progress and I hope that the effort will be carried on in the years to come too. There are those who started reading because of the programme and that gives us lot of satisfaction. 

As the institution grew and the number of faculty members increased, there had to be an increase in the number of sessions. This is an where we struggled. Initially it was possible to have at least one review in one academic year by one faculty. But as the numbers multiplied, this was not easy. In the last academic year (2023-24), for instance, it was not possible to accommodate at least one review by all the teachers of the college. The percentage of faculty members who participated was around 70. There were many reasons for this including the occasional difficulty of making time for the gathering as our event schedule was quite crowded. The teachers who were juggling diverse responsibilities at times couldn't do the kind of reading they wanted to. This, but, is one situation we need to change by making the faculty members push their reading to the top of their agenda. 

The Takeaways 

The benefits of reading are well known and well documented. Irrespective of which profession one belongs to, reading will be of support in different ways: supplementing, supporting, leading, assisting and offering anecdotes and examples which will be handy in their interactions with the students. Good reading will also enhance our self confidence levels. This was true among our faculty members too. They also started looking for good books to read and sharing their thoughts on what they would like to read and recommending books to be purchased by the library. 

There were times when we clubbed together both the students and faculty programmes and that made an interesting audience too. It was an opportunity to bring the avid readers among faculty and the students together. There often is an impression, though wrong, that reading exists basically among the Arts and Humanities people. It was a pleasure for the students and teachers to come across book lovers across disciplines among both the groups through 'Ente Vayana' (My Reading). 

As we progressed, the sharing of the reading experiences of the faculty members began to generate more discussions and productive interactions. The quality of the discussions generally increased too . More over the discussions in the Journal Forums and My Reading sessions began to reflect in the contents by our faculty in 'FaBlo!', our faculty blog. Interestingly many of our colleagues from non-humanities background who had left their early reading habits behind could rediscover it since we launched the programme. 

The Wayforward 

Well, there is only one way forward and that is to keep encouraging the faculty to read, making efforts to put the outcomes of the exercise to further use in many forms. What is key here is to locate the core readers and invest trust in them to carry on with the mission. Obviously the network can expand and grow beyond the borders of the institution too. 

Babu. P. K., Ph D.