Pedagogy in Higher Education: An Exploration of Universities in India

Abstract

Pedagogy is an essential component of any educational institution, ranging from pre-school to higher education. People often use pedagogy interchangeably with other terms like teaching strategies and methods, but it's a comprehensive and complex concept in its entirety. In India, teachers in higher education, with the exception of teacher education, do not receive any formal education or training in pedagogical practices. Instead, their focus is primarily on content delivery, which fails to address the unique needs of their students in relation to their personal and social diversity. This creates an enormous amount of room for reflection in this context. The University of Delhi's Institute of Eminence funded a project that led to the present work. The present research is organized in two phases. In the first phase, we explore existing scenarios and teachers' perspectives on pedagogy in higher education through interviews. We analysed the collected data thematically, aiming to identify the concerns, challenges, issues, and possibilities related to pedagogical practices in higher education. During the second phase of the project, a framework is developed for pedagogy in higher education based on the experiences shared by university teachers, the possibilities identified through data analysis, and the existing discourse on pedagogy. The research encompassed data from five government universities in North India. The developed framework was validated by the experts in the field and shared with the participants for the member check process.