How the Zebra Got Its Stripes (And Other Darwinian Just So Stories) Leo Grasset (trans. Barbara Mellor) 2016 Hachette, Profile Books pp. 154 I picked up this book as part of Hachette India’s bookstagram challenge during the COVID lockdown, currently in progress. This lockdown has had many effects including giving me even lesser time for…
This blogpost is inspired by my experiences of observing teaching processes in secondary school classrooms. Over a period of years I have observed the general tendency for teacher educators to repeatedly emphasise not relying on the textbook in the classroom. In sharp contrast lies the somewhat archaic method of teaching by reading and underlining text…
Venkatesh, K. 2017. Negotiating the ‘Social’ in Elementary School Social Sciences. Economic and Political Weekly, LII (24): 169-172. The paper begins by raising the fundamental question of what constitutes Social Science at the school level. The argument of Mills (1959) is used to resolve the debate of including the older discipline of History into the…
Education and Society: Themes, Perspectives and Practices 2015 Ed. Meenakshi Thapan New Delhi OUP ISBN: 9780199451319 Chapter 12: Texts and Values Krishna Kumar pp. 345-357 In this chapter, Kumar raises fundamental questions on the ‘patterns of response’ that are evoked by texts. Acknowledging that response is person-specific, the author goes on to highlight that texts…
