Lately, the debates on teaching-practices in the online mode have given grounds to ask a fundamental question, does pedagogy really matter? For educationists, it surely does. But, what idea of pedagogy prevails upon the pedagogues, the teachers, techno-managerial professors, particularly in the higher education? This article rummages through the contemporary milieu that solicits debate on the idea of pedagogy, by and large marginal in the teaching practices in higher education. The structural academic Brahmanism of the ‘old normal’ has been melodramatically palpable in the time of ‘new normal’ too. In the academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenology of teaching practices occasions a polemical realization about limits and possibilities of pedagogy.
Following Alwin Gouldner (1971), it is pertinent to perpetually ask a seemingly all-time relevant question. And the question is, what do sociologists do? In the manner of doing sociology of sociology, and by a polemical resurrection of fragments from the dominant practices of sociologists, this essay brings forth general understanding about the idea of research-writing in contemporary India. It underlines the anomalies in the practice of research-writing, connected with the teaching and training programmes, in a self-referential perspective. The essay substantiates the polemics with analytical reasoning, in order to reveal as to what could be reasons behind this state of sociological research-writings.
The pursuit of success is a leitmotif in the domain of education in India like anywhere else. It is, however, fraught with manifold anomalies. The latter consistently manifest in the news reports, advertisements of the institutes of education, popular cinematic tales, excerpted mythological instance and institutional manoeuvrings of the schools. The anomaly, in short, is expressed in the spectacles of success, a kind of fetish, sustained by the dominant rationality of our times. This article attempts to raise a critical debate on the dominant rationality of spectacular success presiding over the popular conscience and institutions of education in India. The dominant rationality, arguably, ennobles the idea of spectacular success to the level of a fetish. The objective in this paper is to interpretatively explore the critical issues pertaining to the regime of success, and thereof notion of calculability, impinging on the idea of education.
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