The nature of critical thinking in Indian Higher Education appears to operate within the limits of textuality, silos of disciplinary training, and in forms that are detached from self-reflexive enquiries about our knowledge systems and who we are in relation to them. While I speak from the vantage of one trained in and teaching Law and Humanities, my enquiries around Higher Education are pedagogical and transcend disciplinary boundaries. My decade-long engagement with ideas of critical thinking-writing-learning have led me to focus on two of the many critical pedagogical tools that inform the ways we think of the world - nurturing contradictions and complexity and dialogical self reflexivity. While there are many generative forms of critical thinking-writing-learning, I focus on these two as immanent, consistent and productive forms of self-erasure[1] and self-creation. Two interconnected modes of praxis that accompany us for the duration of our lives as knowledge-making and knowledge-understanding techniques. In this paper, I discuss each as operative categories of critical thinking-writing-learning and a few illustrative ways of doing them in classrooms, as transferable heuristics.

In the first part, I discuss what I understand by each of these modes of critical praxis, how they operate as ideas and in embodied forms. In other words, what might one do to nurture these and why are they useful modes to nurture, especially in relation to our existence and ever-evolving sense of selves. The significance of dialogical self-reflexivity lies in recognising how theories and structures are not static and evolve with us and our interpretative lenses. We make that which we study and, in turn, are made by it. Complexity and contradiction, then, become ways in which we can engage in such dialogues with each other and with meta-narratives. The impulse that informs each of these modes of praxis is to build forms of capacious scientism and kindness (as intelligence) as ways of learning and being. In the second part, I share some classroom and assessment techniques designed around these modes of critical praxis, how they’ve been engaged with and received, and the challenges around them. While this is in the context of the teaching of Law and Humanities (undergraduate and postgraduate courses), the frameworks are transposable and transferable to most forms of undergraduate teaching.

This paper reflects on my own experience in mentoring five undergraduate students to produce research essays for a small seminar that I was convening in late 2023. The seminar was partially supported by a trust that had been particularly set up to encourage ‘research culture in Mumbai’ and emphasized drawing in young students to participate and present papers. To foster student participation in my conference, I scooped up a bunch of avid learners from my classes and invited them to discuss the possibility of presenting at my conference. Although daunted at first, all of them readily agreed when I promised to ‘guide’ them in their research and writing journey. As undergraduate students in a state-level public university, none of them were required to write academic essays in their coursework to graduate and received no academic training in writing---there simply was no writing classroom!

I must add that this journey was occurring alongside my travails with honing my writing skills as I had only recently begun devouring the host of resources on websites hosted by writing centers of North American universities. Plagued by anxieties about not publishing enough and not in tier-one journals (almost wholly published from the Global North), I was scouring books, websites, and blogs seeking writing advice, editing advice, and bracing myself for the unending cycle of revisions and rejections to solidify my identity as a professional academic. Throughout my PhD from a well-known central university, I was never directed to a structured writing program or even asked to read ‘books on writing’, perhaps my felicity in English, the language of dominant academic practice, was seen as qualification enough, and I had thought of academic writing as something that one cultivated (organically!) by reading closely and thinking critically.

Although my closely held notions about writing held through several years of doctoral work had crumbled by the time I began working with my students with varying degrees of ‘writing capital’ (Savitha Babu, 2019), I struggled to find and develop resources and exercises to scaffold my students’ writings. In the absence of any institutional support for this initiative, I met students in the library-managed computer lab to demonstrate working with scholarly databases or the practice of academic citation. Building a writing cohort meant creating a WhatsApp group to share resources, plan meetings, or share bite-sized writing goals. Whilst students enthusiastically embraced reading widely and searching for books and articles on their chosen themes, almost all of them resisted writing. Most of them wrote their papers a few days ahead of the conference and a couple of them only managed to put together PowerPoint presentations (rather than full papers) as they were carving out time for this ‘additional activity’ outside of their routine learning schedules and assignments. I had hoped that as I read and gave feedback on their drafts, students would gradually appreciate that writing was a dynamic process that required collaboration with peers and mentors. But more importantly, I realized that one needs to rethink the meanings and relevance of undergraduate student research, especially when students have had little opportunity to work on their research and writing skills in school. Nurturing student writing is an arduous process and goes beyond sharing resources drawn from writing centers of American universities. Students need to be introduced as much to the politics and exclusions of academic writing as much as the purposes and audiences of academic writing.

This paper assesses the usefulness and shortfalls of ‘the pedagogy of discomfort’ (henceforth PoD) as a de facto social justice instruction strategy in a critical reading and writing classroom. Through an account of select classroom encounters, I discuss the risk of using tacit cultural and affective standards to evaluate student learning. When applied without reflection PoD can work against goals of collective transformation in three prominent ways. Firstly, in focusing the pedagogical gaze on students from dominant groups, who are understood to be the primary subjects of transformation-via-discomfort (Zembylas 2018); second, in not guaranteeing that we equally recognise significant discomfort that may pertain to cultural misalignments or language barriers (Gupta and Dasgupta, 2021); and finally in codifying a habit of discomfort in the classroom such that it ceases to trouble existing epistemological hierarchies. 

PoD is a framework used to talk about ways of teaching and expectations of classroom interaction that centre discomfort as a route to transformative learning. Drawing on critical pedagogy and feminist critical pedagogy, proponents of the pedagogy of discomfort describe a classroom process in which students from dominant or privileged communities come face to face with textual or experiential realities that decenter their knowledge by offering a contrasting and marginal standpoint. The stakes of this exercise are set by beginning with an admission, as writing instructors situated in the liberal arts do, that the classroom is an asymmetric and variegated space, representing a diverse range of attachments, experiences and inequities that are determined by class, caste, gender, and ability. We proceed from this to a widely held and well-documented proposition that the right pedagogies applied in such a setting can achieve some of the transformative goals of social justice. (hooks, 1994) 

While the skills and techniques constituting the “conventional technical aspect” (Lokohare 2019) of critical reading and writing tend to present a relatively standard, specific and instrumental syllabus, the ‘critical’ evokes a more wispy and undefined area of intent, one that may “thoughtfully explore the major issues of our time” (Miller and Spellmeyer, 2014) and/or to “engage and reshape concepts through questioning and writing” (Ashoka University, 2021).

These broad, open definitions afford space for instructors to deploy their own/collective conceptions of social justice and transformation. Here, I believe the PoD emerges in formal and informal teacher talk (Horn, 2010) as a de facto strategy for guiding the curation and arrangement of thematic texts in the course, and setting expectations in reading and writing work such that we mobilise the ‘critical’ in the curriculum. 

I demonstrate that classroom discomfort adopts more forms than the archetypal challenge to the conscience of a student from a dominant group, surfacing in instances such as a non-native English-speaker’s anxiety about language use, and draw attention to the need to be critical of our own biases as instructors, in recording affective responses in the classroom. The present analysis raises serious questions about whether a social justice pedagogy can itself create and normativize an asymmetric critical standard and what the possibility of it being reified, through repeated enactment and teacher talk, could represent. 

Bibliography

Critical thinking seminars. (2021). Ashoka University: Leading Liberal Arts and Sciences University. https://www.ashoka.edu.in/programme/critical-thinking-seminars/

Gupta, A., & Dasgupta, A. (2021). Something of Our Own to Say: Writing Pedagogy in India. Composition Studies, 49(3), 139-144.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. 

Horn, I. S., & Little, J. W. (2010). Attending to problems of practice: Routines and resources for professional learning in teachers’ workplace interactions. American educational research journal, 47(1), 181-217.

Lokohare, S.(2019). Enacting care in writing pedagogy: Notes from a collaborative exercise. Café Dissensus.

https://cafedissensus.com/2019/06/24/enacting-care-in-writing-pedagogy-notes-from-a-collabora tive-exercise/

Spelmeyer, G., & Miller, J. (2014). The New Humanities Reader (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Wagh, A. C. (2023). Interrogating Privilege: An Autoethnographic Pedagogical Exercise. Sociological Bulletin, 72(3), 294-312.

Zembylas, M. (2018). Reinventing critical pedagogy as decolonizing pedagogy: The education of empathy. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 40(5), 404-421.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyse, evaluate and interpret information effectively. Critical thinking is a crucial aspect of 21st century skills which if practised consistently will enable individuals to develop a perspective and express their ideologies based on the scenarios presented to individuals as a part of the larger society. In contemporary classrooms in the Indian context, it is imperative to imbibe critical thinking practices within any learning environment. Students in contemporary popular culture, especially students in high school, must be trained in critical thinking to prepare them to face the nuances of the larger society. The 21st century culture requires individuals to characterize the ability to generate innovative ideas, originality, flexibility and willingness to explore diverse perspectives and exhibit creative thinking skills. Constant and consistent practice of critical thinking encourages individuals to go beyond conventional problem-solving techniques and develop unique solutions and explore novel ideas to approach a situation, problem or even an ideology. Hence, it is crucial that the school culture prepares students by making it a practice within the boundaries of the classroom environment and within the limitations of the syllabi to inculcate critical thinking practices by Socrative principles, project-based assessments and many such tools in language classrooms.

In this paper, I will explore the perspective that even though there are limitations within high school syllabi, such as time, syllabus completion, varied kinds of learners, one can still inculcate critical thinking through conscious methods of writing practices, practise creative thinking through pedagogical practices to enhance the learner experience and equip the students for their future educational endeavours. 

A significant challenge in the practice of teaching critical writing today is the ubiquitous presence of AI tools that produce writing. Despite the fact that there are only 100 million active users of ChatGPT, the rapid growth of generative AI tools for writing appear as a looming presence in critical pedagogy, whether with a sense of measured hope or impending doom.

A less considered, but related, reality is the alacrity with which we produce writing involuntarily about ourselves simply by existing as a subject on the internet—app preferences, metadata, search results, etc. Such proliferation of writing in the form of data concerns a privatization—in the sense of producing private governable persons that can operate as such in the digitized marketplace, as consumers. The production of this ‘automatic’ writing alerts us to our status as consuming subjects, whereas the labor involved in producing the same is invisibilized. This includes the labor of our consented immersion in the marketplace as well as the invisible work that sustains these infrastructures.

This paper asks if critical writing, as a process distinct from such automation, urges the thought of production and helps us consider the private subject as one who accrues value in being capable of production. Can critical writing in universities, in the time of generative AI, result in the production of a writerly subject with a name to which copyright and consent can be affixed? How does the relationship between instructor and student change when the location of the writerly subject shifts? The paper considers labor theories of property and automation from materialist histories of technology, writing, and Critical AI studies to enquire about the status of the writer as dispositif in the wake of supposed algorithmic thinking.

We ask how AI impacts the labor processes that produce writing and the writer who exists within citational networks of research, governed by logics of originality, credit, and its obverse, plagiarism. To what extent is the authorial function diverted to an engineering of prompts and an extended editorial role? What is the efficacy and value of producing writing through the use of such stochastically determined tools? Is there any economic justification in teaching and producing critical writing at all? This paper argues that it is imperative to inquire after the status of the writerly subject in devising pedagogic principles and practices to teach critical thought.

The paper will largely draw on my past years’ engagement as a Senior Writing Fellow at the Centre for Writing and Communication (CWC), Ashoka University, in teaching the Academic Bridge Programme (ABP). The focus will be on specific pedagogical techniques and strategies which are geared towards facilitating the integration of teaching writing and developing critical thinking competence in this three-week course. In drawing on genre-based ESP – engaging with genres not merely as ‘text types’ but as ‘social action’ responding to specific social situations - the objective in these sessions has been to draw attention to how different texts operate and seek to deliver their intended objectives. In shifting the focus from ‘what does a text mean’ to ‘how does a text work’, these conversations have aimed to highlight specific rhetorical maneuvers to teach goal-oriented writing in academic or professional genres aimed at specific readerships and circulation networks. Short excerpts from readings (both academic and non-academic), and some audio-visual texts have comprised the reading list for these classes.

Analysing and participating in the processes whereby meanings are produced, reproduced, and contested is geared towards creating an awareness not only of how the same ‘object’ can change in different contexts depending on how it is approached but also allows for a reflection on the process of contextualising itself. The larger target of these class discussions around the assigned texts has been to simultaneously see how the classroom connects with the outside – with the historical, socio-political, and cultural. The excerpts selected for this purpose were mainly positioned around caste and gender politics. While the reading practice began with granting autonomy to the text, the structural analysis was followed by an examination which took into account the larger historical, social and ideological context in which the text is produced, where the aim was to see how the students relate (or not) to the social and the political as it plays out in the dialogue. 

Unlike a class situation where one begins with a dis/agreement with a certain position/opinion (deriving at times from the knowledge system one already has), and then proceeds to cite reasons for doing so, the class exercises here, in reversing this process, tried to interrogate how the arrival at a decision takes place. Here, the attention, in addition to the position that a certain text brought forward, was given to what features make for a persuasive argument. This, of course, is not to arrive at a trans-historical set of features which will ‘always necessarily persuade’, but to think about the kind of associations the students have with the idea/term ‘persuasion’ itself and work from there. Here, it became productive to spend some time thinking about how and why ‘persuasion’ operates in these specific contexts/texts. 

The paper will discuss certain sections from the syllabus and will attempt to unpack some of the teaching practices and in-session exercises, which include peer review, that were used to teach how to reverse-engineer one’s writing choices towards a certain aim along with trying to develop a critical outlook. The designed curriculum comprised a series of ‘learning by doing’ exercises, bookended with self-reflection and collaborative summation whereby the class could discover ways to develop a transferable reading and writing toolkit which can be re-deployed in other contexts.

In this paper, I will draw upon my experience as a writing instructor and a peer tutoring coordinator at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy, Krea University to reflect on the role of writing pedagogies in fostering critical thinking habits in students. Critical thinking as a skill is valued across disciplines in academia and building this skill in students entering university spaces is seen as one of the primary responsibilities of writing pedagogies across the world. While writing pedagogies have embraced and owned this responsibility in many ways, we are also simultaneously constantly engaged in coming up with innovative pedagogical strategies geared towards both demystifying what critical thinking is and teaching our students the skills of critical thinking, reading, and writing. In this paper, I will suggest that writing pedagogies need to focus on cultivating the disposition for critical thinking along with teaching the skills of critical thinking. I will further suggest that when it comes to critical thinking, skill and disposition are not only equally significant, but they might also be mutually constitutive. To explain why I lay emphasis on cultivating disposition for critical thinking as both a responsibility of writing pedagogies and as essential to building critical thinking skills amongst students, I will focus on the process and levels of feedback and how that contribute to the networks of support upon which the work of writing pedagogies is built. Through an examination of samples of student writing, student peer review, tutor feedback, and instructor feedback generated through years of my teaching at Krea-CWP, I will unpack how effective feedback is closely tied to both the skill and disposition of critical thinking and how access to empathetic networks of support—both peer-driven and instructor-driven—determine the success of writing pedagogies in producing critical thinkers.

Over the past five years, there has been a profound transformation in both the art of teaching and the science of learning. The transition from traditional blackboards to the luminescent glow of blue screens has sent powerful ripples throughout various communities, marking a seismic shift in educational methodologies. This paper delves into the role of multimedia pedagogy, enhanced by AI-driven tools, in developing the critical thinking and writing skills of students in higher education. By leveraging adaptive learning and natural language processing, this paper spans three distinct temporal phases—pre-pandemic, pandemic, and present times—through the lens of an educator. The first phase witnessed the co-existence of both classroom and multi-media resources, complementing each other. During the pandemic, there was a rapid shift to online platforms, and the recent times, we witnessed the emergence of generative AI tools that refine language. The theoretical underpinning of this study is based on the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework which is essential in understanding and integrating technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. In the literature review, we discuss the historical evolution of multimedia pedagogy and AI in education to gauge the evolving trends that have defined the higher education landscape. The research methodology section elucidates the research design, participant selection criteria, and the methods employed for data collection. Educators and other stakeholders in the educational process provide insights into the impact of multimedia pedagogy and AI tools on students' cognitive and writing skills through surveys and interviews. Furthermore, the findings section highlights key patterns and variations across the pre-pandemic, pandemic, and present-time phases. These findings have been interpreted within the context of the TPACK framework in the discussion section, offering insights for effective teaching strategies. The discussion encompasses the practical applications of the research, emphasizing the role of technology-enhanced pedagogy in cultivating writing skills. In conclusion, this paper throws light on the dynamic shift in fostering critical thinking and

writing skills through evolving techniques which have been studied by employing a temporal analysis and incorporating educators' perspectives. As we navigate the evolving landscape of education, it is necessary to explore the extent to which these tools and practices influence the learning process, especially one like writing.

One of the key learning outcomes of university education in general, and liberal arts programs in particular, is that students acquire proficiency in writing across genres and disciplines. Further, some universities, mainly private, have begun to take concerted steps towards training  students to read and write academic texts in the last decade. Based on my experience teaching  core courses in reading and writing and final-year undergraduate seminars, I highlight how  introducing writing as a process (as opposed to a product) to students can help them work with  their unique strengths and address specific weaknesses. Here, I focus on teaching writing as an  iterative process, where students make decisions (with support from the course teacher)  regarding elaborating, rewriting and discarding portions of their work to chart the possible  directions their writing could take, which I argue is crucial towards learning to find one’s voice. 

In this paper, I first elaborate on what I mean by writing as a process, which, among other  things, is characterised as being recursive, going through a series of iterations. In this part, I  enumerate the steps I undertake in my classroom, from pre-writing to peer review. Asking  students to start with Peter Elbow’s freewriting as a pre-writing activity, I work with them to  generate ideas from the freewrites to produce early drafts. Moreover, feedback on freewrites  and revised drafts to generate more ideas and to expand work by asking questions, sometimes  clarificatory, to the student helps them render more details and clarity to their work. Last but  most importantly, students are introduced to peer reviewing based on assessment grids.  

In the next part of the paper, I will elaborate on providing substantive feedback on students’  drafts and discuss their reflections on receiving and incorporating those comments. In  conclusion, I reflect on my challenges and constraints of putting these processes into effect, the  ethics imbricated within these practices that involve reading raw (and sometimes personal)  writing, and questions and conversations about academic integrity and ethics to conclude how  learning and teaching could be reimagined as a transformative experience for students and  teachers. 

Indian students often struggle with the transition from learning English as a subject in school to having to engage with all subjects in English at university. The shift to having to use English for academics forces them to employ a second language across many disparate domains and subjects for the first time at university. One instance of a domain is critical thinking and writing, closely connected to language and metalinguistic awareness. 

Metalinguistic awareness, or the ability to consciously reflect upon language to structure and shape both speech and communication, contributes to effective academic argumentation by structuring thought. One such form of metalinguistic awareness is the knowledge of the linguistic subfield of Formal Semantics which deals with the understanding of meaning in natural language using the tools of logic, mathematics, and philosophy. 

Fundamentally, academic argumentation is based upon reasoning, and semantics sheds light on the processes and the phenomena involved in reasoning: presupposition, implicature and entailment. Argumentation is using good reasoning to arrive at an inference as a necessary truth. This inference is based on an entailment of pre-agreed premises, and semantics is at the heart of the entire process. An understanding and awareness of how to combine words and how this combination gives rise to meaning that can consequently be used to make an argument is integral to critical thought. A thorough understanding of how to employ words as building blocks in specific ways to express logical ideas such as entailment, implicature, presupposition etc. goes a long way towards developing the skill to bring around the audience to agree with one’s argumentation.

In this paper I make a case for the inclusion of introductory Formal Semantics in Critical Thinking syllabi. This provides students with a robust framework for both analyzing and constructing arguments and is especially relevant for non-STEM disciplines. I conclude that including Formal Semantics in Critical Thinking pedagogy not only leads to success at university but also empowers students with the professional tools they need to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing world by providing them with a key skill employers look for. This research will also contribute to the ongoing discourse on effective writing pedagogies.

In 2020, I found myself coming to writing pedagogy with several identities: I was already an experienced neuroscientist and science journalist, and, now, also a novice writing teacher. From dissecting fruit fly brains in order to study neuronal development, I found myself unpacking the anatomy of academic essays. Looking through a microscope at animal brains soon became looking microscopically at how scholars write to persuade their readers. While learning to navigate the then-unfamiliar terrain of writing pedagogy, I was also motivated to think about what neuroscience and neuroscientific training could contribute to the teaching of reading and writing to young scholars-in-training. 

Writing pedagogues generally agree that writing pedagogy in undergraduate class rooms aims to inculcate in learners skills of critical reading, thinking, and writing that can traverse disciplinary boundaries. The converse of the above, i.e., how different disciplinary dispositions of writing pedagogues shape their vision of writing pedagogy, is relatively less discussed. In an attempt to bridge this gap, in this paper I draw upon my experience of teaching and training at the Centre for Writing Pedagogy, Krea University, to explicate how my disciplinary standpoint in neuroscience helps shape my perception of and disposition in writing pedagogy. In doing so, I re-frame some key aspects of writing pedagogy through neuroscientific theories of learning and memory. 

In particular, I pay close attention to one aspect of writing pedagogy – incremental scaffolding of the writing process – in order to elucidate how the neuroscience of learning and memory can illuminate how students learn complex tasks by systematically fragmenting the said task into modules of relatively simple ones, and then practicing these modules in an increasing order of complexity. Finally, in order to complicate notions of “simple” and “complex” tasks, I take the example of teaching analysis to first-year undergraduate students. Drawing upon the pedagogical material generated for my class, my exercise in teaching analysis also demonstrates the iterative and re cursive nature of the scaffolding project in writing pedagogy. 

In summary, my paper aims to not only provide tools for a systematic unpacking of fundamental concepts like analysis, but also to provoke writing pedagogues to reflect on how their disciplinary standpoints shape their pedagogical dispositions in the context of writing pedagogy in India.

How can a teacher rigorously learn, conceptualise, perform, and evaluate the act of providing feedback to student writing? In the absence of a rich discourse of feedbacking in Indian higher education settings, rigorous answers are difficult to find. The experiences and practices of feedbacking are hardly documented across institutional settings. As a result, teachers typically do not have access to comparative or nuanced approaches to how they can evaluate their own feedbacking styles. Further, standardised approaches to feedbacking, which may be available online or even institutionally shared in some cases, may not necessarily help the teacher tackle the complexity of the act. Feedbacking involves a complex intellectual, interpersonal, and emotional exchange—reducing it to a set of broad pointers or ‘best practices’ may not be particularly generative or take into account the contextual negotiations required to provide critical, meaningful feedback. 

In this paper, I wish to respond to this problem in two ways. First, I will argue that it is important to specifically account for the institutional, pedagogic, and social factors that shape the  culture of feedback in particular settings. By using the examples of two public university settings (where I have done my fieldwork and completed my research degree respectively) and a private university setting (where I work), I will demonstrate how factors ranging across teaching workload, labour precarity, socio-economic and professional hierarchies, curriculum design, assessment frameworks, disciplinary biases/agendas, and professional accountability mechanisms shape the quality of attention and value provided to feedbacking. To attempt effective interventions,  it is essential to understand the structural and contextual shifts/negotiations that may be required. 

Second, I will provide an introspective account of my own journey with feedbacking as a teacher in a ‘critical writing’ program. In the absence of any formal initiation or regular, transparent conversations on the experience of providing feedback, how did I arrive at my own understanding of what the feedbacking process entails and how it may shape ‘critical writing’? What are the evaluative criteria, dispositions, embodiments, and linguistic frames that I consider essential for feedbacking, and why? How do I position myself in relation to the student? How do I negotiate with the notion of the ‘critical’ in how I provide feedback and what I’m trying to achieve? How do I assess the impact of my feedback, and what do I learn from the experience? Through anecdotes, observations, and reflections, I will attempt to document and explore the significant factors that have shaped my feedbacking orientation and practice, and also offer a layered account of the many elements of feedbacking. Although any attempt at studying oneself is terribly partial at best, I hope that this can open up a conversation on how we can attempt thicker, (self-)critical, and pedagogically useful descriptions of the experience of feedbacking. 

In this paper, I will draw upon my experience as a writing instructor and a peer tutoring coordinator at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy, Krea University to reflect on the role of writing pedagogies in fostering critical thinking habits in students. Critical thinking as a skill is valued across disciplines in academia and building this skill in students entering university spaces is seen as one of the primary responsibilities of writing pedagogies across the world. While writing pedagogies have embraced and owned this responsibility in many ways, we are also simultaneously constantly engaged in coming up with innovative pedagogical strategies geared towards both demystifying what critical thinking is and teaching our students the skills of critical thinking, reading, and writing. In this paper, I will suggest that writing pedagogies need to focus on cultivating the disposition for critical thinking along with teaching the skills of critical thinking. I will further suggest that when it comes to critical thinking, skill and disposition are not only equally significant, but they might also be mutually constitutive. To explain why I lay emphasis on cultivating disposition for critical thinking as both a responsibility of writing pedagogies and as essential to building critical thinking skills amongst students, I will focus on the process and levels of feedback and how that contribute to the networks of support upon which the work of writing pedagogies is built. Through an examination of samples of student writing, student peer review, tutor feedback, and instructor feedback generated through years of my teaching at Krea-CWP, I will unpack how effective feedback is closely tied to both the skill and disposition of critical thinking and how access to empathetic networks of support—both peer-driven and instructor-driven—determine the success of writing pedagogies in producing critical thinkers.

In the panorama of Indian central technical universities, the prevalent challenge is linguistically heterogeneous classrooms. Diversity in learners’ native languages and their varying levels of English proficiency disrupts the smooth implementation of writing courses as it becomes difficult to establish a baseline in course curriculum, grading, and level of difficulty. Furthermore, students in technical universities are unfamiliar with the rigor of writing, believing that just their first draft warrants a good score. They need to become more accustomed to traversing the stages of writing and rewriting. Thus, as practitioners of writing pedagogy, we navigate these challenges by creating a class environment where students can become better critical thinkers and better writers. However, these challenges together make for a discomforting experience for an educator. Particularly, cultivating higher-order thinking skills in students requires addressing and questioning their “problematic” opinions on sensitive issues like politics and inequalities (gender, class, caste, and financial status). Our goal as educators, therefore, is to foster a class environment that is safe, unbiased, non-judgemental, and collaborative, without assuming an authoritative position over the students. It necessitates that we navigate the preconceived power dynamics between us and students within the classroom. In this context, the paper highlights educators’ various impediments, including the failure to create a conducive discussion platform, in implementing effective writing courses across undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

Keywords: Writing pedagogy, Inequalities, Power dynamics in classrooms, Writing in engineering/STEM courses, Discussion forum

My paper addresses the question of otherness and social hierarchies in a classroom by analyzing how language mediates and shapes power dynamics between students and teachers. Through an auto-ethnographic account of teaching in a middle school classroom in rural India, I reflect not only on the role of language in engendering hierarchies but also argue how these constraints can be negotiated. As a privileged, upper-caste, middle-class individual hailing from Delhi, my two-year immersion into the Teach for India fellowship in Vadgaon Budruk, Pune, Maharashtra, enabled me to observe and address the classroom dynamics of equity and power firsthand. In this light, my paper focuses on three core registers. 

First, using Bourdieu’s (1973) theory of cultural capital as an analytic, I lay out the form and content of socio-cultural asymmetries in a rural Indian classroom, how they play out in everyday teacher-student interactions and what they reveal about the larger structural context of education in the country today. I find Bourdieu's theory to be an important lens to understand the inequalities that arise in the everyday space of a classroom, wherein aspects such as language, clothing, and communication styles contribute to forming hierarchies. 

Second, through this paper, I argue that the experience of “otherness” in a multilingual context is a dialectical phenomenon that affects both teachers and students alike. While scholars like Mohanty, Panda & Pal (2010), and LaDousa (2018) focus on the dominance of English in classrooms as a tool of hierarchization, I reflect on the ways in which the English-vernacular divide contributes to experiences of “otherness” for both students and teachers alike. While the existing scholarship establishes how the English language divide reinforces social disparities, I argue how in a multilingual set-up, the experience of otherization is equally potent for teachers. Here, I focus on my experiences as a non-Marathi speaker, navigating the school administration and classroom experiences that were predominantly Marathi-dominated. 

Lastly, reflecting on these questions of language dominance and experiences of otherization, I argue that a powerful means of negotiating these asymmetries and experiences of otherization is through engendering “informal socialities” and a “multilingual pedagogy” within and outside the classroom. I reflect on what becomes possible when informal socialities that extend beyond the formal disciplinary boundaries of a classroom are consciously weaved into the pedagogy. Through this auto-ethnographic account, I argue that the synergy of English-vernacular languages in a classroom can in fact pave the way for embracing differences and meaningfully understanding others, instead of engendering social hierarchies. 

References 

Bourdieu, P. (1973). “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”. In R. Brown (Ed.), Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change. London: Tavistock Publications. 

Mohanty, A., Panda M., & Pal, R. (2010). “Language Policy in Education and Classroom Practices in India: Is the Teacher a Cog in the Policy Wheel?” In Menken K. & Garcia O. (Ed.), Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers. New Delhi: Routledge. LaDousa, C. (2021). Mind the (language-medium) gap. In Kumar, K (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Education in India Debates, Practices, and Policies. New Delhi: Routledge.

First-generation undergraduate students, and thus, first-generation learners of the English  language, are not only climbing a steep learning curve to comprehend and apply new concepts  in an academic space but do so while simultaneously learning and using a new language. In  tertiary academic spaces, the value of language far exceeds its referential and phatic functions.  Here, it becomes a tool by which students make arguments and communicate ideas. However,  when they enter an exclusively English-speaking environment for the first time, they are faced  with challenges that are not only linguistic in nature, but also those that beg sociolinguistic  exploration. For example, in the brand-new world they find themselves in, students face trials  which include language prejudices and syntactic hypercorrection. This not only impedes their  academic performance but also influences their social lives as a member of their cohort.  Further, these first-generation students compete with urban counterparts who are well-versed  with the ‘appropriate’ syntax of the English language, and who enjoy the linguistic capital that  the know-how offers them. 

Two broad issues in the experiences of first-generation learners in English as a Second  Language (ESL) classrooms warrant in-depth exploration. 

1. The direct link between a student’s English language competency with their self-image  and confidence. This exhibits the glaring social and psychological aspects of ESL – particularly, a language that has been used as a device by India’s upper-classes to  maintain their privilege and power since the British colonial period. 

2. The nature of the teacher-student relationship found in the classroom has direct impacts  on the overall academic confidence of the learner. 

I argue that for the ‘positive social transformation’ objectives of education to be achieved  in a pluralistic society, due acknowledgement and sustenance of linguistic, literate, and cultural  pluralism must be given. ‘Culturally sustaining pedagogies’(CSP), an approach that is actively  pursued in urban education research in the West, and particularly in the U.S., develops and  promotes teaching strategies that, “… positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good,  and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather  than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits” (Paris  and Alim, 2017). Additionally, I argue that a ‘caring’ relationship between the instructor and  learner will not only improve the learning outcomes in the classroom, but also empower first generation students in their negotiation with the dominant gaze of upper-caste and upper-class  Indian academia in their pursuit of quality tertiary education. 

This study will review the literature on the application of CSP in urban English language  classrooms and identify strategies that writing instructors have successfully used in their  classrooms to foster improved academic outcomes, encourage critical thought, and build  emotions of community and belonging within classrooms. These include strategies such as use  of non-traditional texts, valuing communication over performance of standard English, use of  physical objects or ‘artefacts’, encouraging ‘translingual practices’, etc. This exploration of the  literature will conclude by offering possibilities for English language pedagogy in the Indian  context, with a particular reference to teaching first-generation students at the undergraduate  level. 

References 

De Costa, P. I., Singh, J. G., Milu, E., Wang, X., Fraiberg, S., & Canagarajah, S. (2017).  Pedagogizing translingual practice: Prospects and possibilities. Research in the Teaching of  English, 464-472. 

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and  learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press. 

Woodard, R., Vaughan, A., & Machado, E. (2017). Exploring culturally sustaining writing  pedagogy in urban classrooms. Literacy research: Theory, method, and practice, 66(1), 215- 231. 

DeJaynes, T. (2018). What Makes Me Who I Am? The English Journal, 108(2), 48-54. 

Caraballo, L., & Soleimany, S. (2019). In the name of (pedagogical) love: A conceptual  framework for transformative teaching grounded in critical youth research. The Urban  Review, 51, 81-100. 

Carter Andrews, D. J., Richmond, G., & Marciano, J. E. (2021). The teacher support  imperative: Teacher education and the pedagogy of connection. Journal of teacher  education, 72(3), 267-270. 

Peña‐Pincheira, R. S., & De Costa, P. I. (2021). Language teacher agency for educational  justice–oriented work: An ecological model. TESOL Journal, 12(2), e561.

English has long been recognised as a gatekeeper to participation in higher education in India (Jaaware, 1994; Deshpande, 2022; Nag, 2023)  and recent scholarship in writing pedagogy attempts to address this linguistic inequality. However, the conversation seems limited to established centres of writing in private universities, leaving a gap of academic and pedagogical discourse within public universities. Parallelly, there is a recognition of how English language ‘remedial’ classes are inadequate in fulfilling academic writing requirements--of both students and institutions. These limitations provide the premise for my paper, where I draw upon New Literacy Studies and academic literacies (Lea and Street, 2006) to explore how students ‘pick up’ ways of being critical thinkers/writers in the university.  That academic literacies are plural predicates that sources to achieve the said literacies will also differ: in modes, sites and objectives. For example, students might rely on curricular/research materials that have vastly different currencies, like it has been noted in the case of lack of critical-scholarly material in Hindi guide books (Deshpande et al, 2010).  

In this paper, I aim to document some of the sites that enable development of academic literacies among students in public universities. I categorise these modes as institutional and non-institutional. The former will be a set of interviews with facilitators and select students from a English for Academic Purposes course at a public university in Delhi. I will attempt a critical investigation into the processes, experiences and challenges of participants within the program. The background question informing this is: how do we begin to talk about public universities beyond their resource constraints? Much like a deficit view of language learning is questioned, there is a need to question the deficit view of institutions, and instead foreground the existing practices and the mutually understood objectives of students and teachers, and how it relates to the institutional goal of critical thinking. 

Non-institutional modes are a more nebulous category —for the purposes of this study, I’ll limit them to a) semi-structured interviews with moderators/administrators of social media forums that aim to expand access to academic resources (Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access on Facebook and Academic Opportunities and Resources on WhatsApp), and b) a reflective and observational account of peer support networks while being a student in a public university. In this process, I also aim to reflect on my position as a student: what enables me to speak about students, as an inclusive-of-me category, versus a category separate from me? In other words, I will explore, to whatever extent possible in a participatory manner, the development of what Savitha Suresh Babu (2019) helpfully calls “writing capital”. The rationale behind looking at non-institutional modes is informed by the fact that reading and writing are social practices that consist of many micro-practices involving digital literacies, familiarity with genres, access to social networks. 

Finally, I argue for a framework of writing pedagogy that has academic literacies at its core. While writing pedagogies do include reading practices--the other component of how literacy is commonly understood--using the category of literacies allows for the project of writing to be more expansive and generative. This can prevent us from carrying forward an assimilation-based approach to teaching academic writing, where students from different backgrounds and cultural contexts are expected to fit into a preset mould.

References

Babu, Savitha S. (2019) "Regional, national, international: graded hierarchies of academic practice" Cafe Dissensus. 

Deshpande, S., Gupta, C., Singh, R. N., & Singh, U. K. (2010). Social Science Teaching in Hindi: An Inventory and Analysis of Current Curricular Materials at Six North Indian Universities. Delhi: Institute for Social and Economic Research and HEIRA, CSCS.

Deshpande, S. (2022). Higher Education and the Future of Social Inequality in India. In Inclusive Development in South Asia (pp. 185-214). Routledge.

Jaaware, A. (1997). “The silence of the subaltern student” in Tharu, S. (ed) Subject to Change. 107-24.

Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (2006). The “Academic Literacies” Model: Theory and Applications. Theory Into Practice, 45(4), 368–377. 

Nag, S. (2022). Linguistic Human Rights and Higher Education: Reflections from India. The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, 413-426.

At the outset, the Indian Education system demands and aims at providing just and equitable access to Education.  However, Indian higher education stands at the intersection of language diversity and class distinction posing an urgent demand to address the question of diversity in classrooms.

It is important to recognize the need to characterize the nature of language teaching pedagogies to go beyond not only language and communicative competencies but structuring it to inculcate cultural competence as well as the integration of critical thinking skills with a liberal approach towards using the second language.   Since English has become the cultural capital of this era and apparently it won't change in the coming years as well, it is pertinent as educators today to see English as not only a language of communication but its implications on the lives of the students who easily use it and the ones who are learning to speak, read and write in it to attain social mobility. 

Classrooms can become systems of tension units in a dynamic environment. 

In a classroom, multiple identities meet and interact. (Lewin, 1948, 1951; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). This leads to the formation of achievement gaps which are devised under standardized testing. 

The production and introduction of successful educational interventions can be aided by a subjective focus on the classroom setting, and their psychological environment, and by viewing the classroom as a dynamic social system of tensions in which multiple forces interact and counter each other. It can also be studied how successful the current teacher training initiatives are in terms of tackling diversity in classrooms and disparities in achievement gaps.  

In this paper, I will navigate a few writing pedagogies that can be used in terms of content and approach to build critical thinking skills for ESL learners. For instance, the kind of content that the students are exposed to. The teacher often sets an academic benchmark in terms of the level of teaching content, and delivery in the class holding a presumption about the language proficiency and competence of the students even in diverse classrooms. In most cases, it can also be a result of the adherence to the strict competent curriculum and syllabi which needs to be delivered in class on time.  A class of critical reading and writing would often involve citing references or instances from movies, documentaries, or books that might be inaccessible or completely unknown to many students in class. This clearly exerts the existence of a gap in a classroom environment thus provoking academic anxiety. 

Thus, the teacher needs to be culturally equipped with the media and agencies of knowledge for all the students in the class to prepare engaging material. Writing is a complex application skill that involves the ability to adapt diverse contexts and ideas cohesively. Engaging material relevant to the classrooms with a collaborative teaching approach would be functional in ESL classrooms of Critical reading and writing. 

I will further discern in my paper the approaches to teaching and materials in a structural manner. 

Dangerlok is a trim novella by Eunice de Souza about a middle-aged woman named Rina Ferreira who lives and teaches in Bombay. As I neared the close of my first year of teaching, I found myself going back to this book, usually intent on scavenging snippets of conversations the protagonist, Rina, has with her students and colleagues. With good reason, I think. 

The literary scholar Rita Felski, in her Promethean 2008 text Uses of Literature, homes in on a failing that starts in the classroom: “What is lost when a dialogue with literature gives way to a permanent diagnosis, when the remedial readings of texts loses all sight of why we are drawn to such texts in the first place?” The fix to this impediment, according to Felski, are new ways of reading and responding, new ways of talking about literature. 

Engagement in the classroom, where the new / young teacher is often tasked with resistant readers1, is nothing short of an uphill battle. At the central university where I did my master’s, academic excellence lay in wielding opaque ways of writing and hermeneutics of suspicion remained the undisputed norm. But these practices served me little when I started teaching. What then? 

bell hooks, in her book Teaching to Transgress, delineates and calls for academic spaces which function as “a context where we engage in open critical dialogue with one another, where we can debate and discuss without emotional collapse, where we can hear and know one another in the differences and complexities of our experience.” 

Both Felski and hooks planted in me the conviction that (academic) discipline can take the form of conversation. My paper seeks to explore this idea by way of a note on my first year of teaching. 

In de Souza’s thinly veiled chronicle of the personal, I spotted impressions of what I wanted my classrooms to look like, along with traces of a previously mentioned conviction— discipline in conversation. 

What can this form of conversation do for students otherwise sidelined in jargon heavy classroom discourse? What can it do for the text being studied? How do such engagements change the way we treat literature in academic spaces? These are some of the questions I will attempt to answer through the paper. 

1 Resistant both in that they often fall into conformist patterns of critical reading like Felski notes but also in that there is an unwillingness to read in the first place.

In many ways, de Souza’s unsung novella is a response to naysayers who reckon that “it is a waste of time teaching literature to the young.” My paper is a rejoinder in the same vein that will borrow from existing frameworks in the writings of Felski, hooks, as well as the fiction of de Souza, while underscoring what I gathered from teaching creative writing and academic writing to undergraduate students over the course of one year.

On March 12, 2019, the University Grants Committee announced a sweeping budget cut for departments of Gender Studies across India. This harrowing news was met with protest and distress across the country. Ever since, the teaching and learning community has been left with deep anxiety about Gender Studies in the country. In this context, the study of gender has often masqueraded as a course within English studies; it must tiptoe around the more employable courses. For these reasons, teaching gender in higher education institutions is inherently challenging, especially outside of the Humanities and Social Sciences departments. This paper documents the experiences of teaching gender studies to both Humanities and Non- Humanities students, across undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Using the autoethnography method, this paper attempts to archive the teaching experience, specific pedagogical tools, materials developed for teaching specific topics, and the classroom interactions of 36 students from middle/ upper-middle-class, urban, English-speaking backgrounds. The aim of this study is to narrativize the experiences of teaching gender studies as both a reflective and an archival exercise to understand the approach to teaching gender and criticality through gender pedagogy. The intended outcome is to focus on formulating a framework for teaching gender. What is the role of the instructor in a gender studies classroom? Are there specific writing strategies that can be used to develop an instructional manual for educators of gender studies? Through concrete examples of worksheets, writing exercises, anecdotal data, and thoughtful reflections on the teaching practice, this study proposes to contribute to the pressing discussions on gender pedagogy. The mode of research is placed between experience-based discussions and scholarly discourse. Vishak Vishwanbara’s case study from Kerala and Aparna Rayaprol’s “Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy” are useful references in establishing issues of gender pedagogy in the Indian context. The study argues that recording the instructor's teaching experiences, personal narratives, and lived experiences is imperative to further the research on gender pedagogy. 

The use of “theory” as a tool in reading and writing about literature has long been a point of contention within literary studies. As educators who actively work in practices of critical reading, thinking, and writing within a humanities or social sciences context, we frequently encounter certain uses (and abuses) of “theory” that give us pause. In this paper, I propose to reflect on a few such instances, from my work in literary and cultural studies. In doing so, I hope to generate meaningful conversations with my colleagues at this symposium regarding the place of “theory” within our pedagogies for the same.

So, as one might have noticed, I have consistently used the word “theory” within quotation marks. At the turn of the millennium, Jonathan Culler sagely remarked that we have increasingly started thinking about the theoretical as an abstract, as opposed to older more situated understandings of theory. The ensuing question for Culler was whether literary theory has indeed forgotten literature? This becomes the starting point for my present reflections and inquiries. I wish to expand such a question to reflect on the function of theoretical frames of understanding within our practices of reading, thinking, and writing about literary texts—particularly the use of “Western” or “Euro-American” frames of reference in reading otherwise located literary and lived experiences.

Over the years we have encountered—especially in fields such as Comparative Literature or English Studies, instances such as a Foucauldian reading of Marjorie Kemp or a Freudian analysis of Meerabai. While I do not completely disregard the value in the importation of such seemingly anachronistic hermeneutic frames, I have often paused to wonder what such imports add to readings of an otherwise located literary text. My primary focus here would be to contemplate whether “theory” potentially supplants the actual hard work of reading and thinking about literature. Furthermore, does the use “jargon” as it is often disparagingly called, become an obfuscating shorthand that points to growing apathies towards readerly labor in writing about literary texts?

A key component of writing pedagogy at the university involves empowering students with reading strategies. Reading strategies can be broadly of two types: those that are discipline-agnostic, and those that are discipline-specific. In the context of mathematics education, it has been reported that undergraduate students of mathematics are unable to effectively read their textbooks, and that the difficulties they face in reading and comprehending these textbooks result primarily from the inefficacy of the reading strategies they employ (Shepherd et al., 2009). In other words, the importance of reading and writing courses in undergraduate mathematics education is being increasingly recognised (ibid.). 

Prior research has indicated three reasons that make reading mathematics a challenging task: (a) highly specialized terminology, (b) use of words that resemble common parlance but have distinct meanings, & (c) presence of homophones and similar-sounding words (Adams, 2003). While work on reading strategies that can alleviate these challenges is scant, a 2014 study identified reading strategies employed by expert mathematicians and how they differ from those employed by “novice” mathematicians (i.e., undergraduate students). They found that expert mathematicians skim more often than undergraduate students, that they are able to vocalize the meaning of the mathematics they are reading instead of verbalizing the text and that they employ comprehension checks frequently (Shepherd & de Sande, 2014). Drawing from their results, the authors suggest that teachers of mathematics and writers of mathematics pay attention to the metacognitive processes employed by experienced mathematicians in order to aid students’ reading and comprehension of mathematical texts. 

In this paper, we draw upon our experience of designing and teaching a ‘writing and communication in mathematics’ course aimed at undergraduate students of mathematics to build upon and contribute to existing scholarship on reading and writing in mathematics. The aforementioned course was unique in two aspects. One, it focussed on writing and communication in mathematics from both mathematical and journalistic standpoints. Consequently, it was co-taught by a mathematician and a journalist. Two, instead of focusing on reading textbook material (as has been the case for most pre-existing commentary on reading mathematics at an undergraduate level), the course material engaged with research articles aimed at an undergraduate audience, slightly more advanced research articles, and journalistic essays. Thus, the course provides us an opportunity to evaluate reading and comprehension of mathematical concepts in an interdisciplinary undergraduate classroom in India. 

In our paper, we focus on three aspects of the course: (a) the use of research articles in teaching undergraduate students how to read mathematical text, (b) the application of foundational writing pedagogy principles into a mathematics context, and (c) the juxtaposition of technical and journalistic registers towards the teaching of reading and writing mathematics. Drawing upon our reflections, teaching material, and samples of student writing, we speak about how the above-mentioned three aspects come together to help design a framework for teaching students how to read mathematics at an undergraduate level.

For the last 7 years, in academic contexts, I have introduced myself with the line, I am trained as an anthropologist, transitioning to be a writing pedagogue. I find it intriguing that this introduction has not shifted till the present day (even as I headed a writing centre for almost four years), indexing to me an unexamined, insistent need of holding on to two disciplinary fields, as I perform my professional and teacherly identity. In this paper, I attempt to shift the analytical gaze from practices and challenges of writing pedagogy in India to the small but growing community of practitioners of writing pedagogy, and how they understand what they do and consequently, who they are, as academics. The nascent field of writing pedagogy in India presents a complex conundrum: several full-time teachers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds teach critical reading and writing, even as their “writing teacher” identities sit (probably tentatively) alongside their “core” disciplinary identities. Against a backdrop of the neoliberal university which measures academic worth increasingly in terms of disciplinary publications (as opposed to pedagogic excellence), what does it mean for our professional teacher identity to teach a subject with no established disciplinary status/ canon (at least in India) and teach a subject which tends to be institutionally marginalized as a “soft skill” as opposed to hardcore disciplinary subjects?  

Through unstructured ethnographic interviews with critical writing teachers and through a reflexive account of my academic trajectory, I hope to explore how this community constructs its professional identity as academics and teachers. How do we negotiate the question of academic and disciplinary belonging? Importantly, how do these negotiations inform our intellectual and affective investments in our pedagogic performance and teaching practices in the writing classroom? In other words, how might we understand the relationship between how we construct ourselves in the academic world and what our teaching practices are in the writing classroom? What are the implications of our academic identity for the development of writing pedagogy as a discipline in its own right, in India? Even though research elsewhere has engaged with how teachers construct their professional identity and the institutional and political underpinnings of this process (Yagelski 1999; Mockler 2011; Chandran 2020), there is precious little work on the specific context of teachers/ writing teachers in higher education in India. Through this paper I hope to present an alternate mode of understanding our writing classrooms by turning attention to the writing teachers and how they imagine their professional identity and its implications for their pedagogy.