Evaluate the impact of the Draft National Education Policy 2019 on its adoption by the Government of India on your discipline

Unboxing the B's and D's of NEP : Impact of National Educational Policy on the discipline of English Literature

Education is a nation's strength. A developed nation is inevitably an educated nation. Indian higher education system is the third largest in the world, next to the United States and China. Since independence, India as a developing nation is contentiously progressing in the education field. Although there have been lot of challenges to higher education system of India but equally have lot of opportunities to overcome these challenges and to make higher education system much better. The latest policy released by the UGC aims to fill in a lot of these trenches.

To construct a socially conscious, knowledgable, and skilled nation that can uplift its people, and construct and implement robust solutions to its own problems, the National Education policy has to live up to certain attributes and fundamentally challenging yet totally viable and inclusive provisions as discussed in its latest issue. The benefits (B Side) and drawbacks (D Side) of a few selected policies on the Literature discipline have been mentioned as follows:

P9.1. Moving towards a higher educational system consisting of large, multidisciplinary universities and colleges 

This policy aims to provide students with broad- based multidisciplinary education and 21st century skills, while developing specialised knowledge with true disciplinary rigour. This would also engage faculty and students with local communities and with real world problems, and function in collaborative, inclusive, and cross-disciplinary ways.

B- Side 

Instead of confining their minds to one particular area of expertise, literature students will now be able to build their perspectives within a wider frame where they have access to multiple approaches of a study and learning experiences. A researcher working on literature can now aim for a topic in Philosophy. Optimal development is also encouraged as students will now be engaging themselves in creative as well as analytic approaches as well. Boundaries between two disciplines, within a University or a college will be broken.

D- Side

A system that provides a broadened availability of choice of disciplines amongst students also demands the caregiver or the teacher to be equipped for the same provisions. To develop such kind of a system, training teachers for such kind of a multidisciplinary handling can be challenging at one go. Changes and adjustments in evaluation patterns of the students can also prove to be a disturbance. 

P10.4.  Liberal education and programmes/departments/schools of higher education   institutions: 

The policy quite literally aims at the liberalisation of current education patterns. Courses across all subjects will be available for all students across all majors. All HEIs, including all universities (Type 1 and 2), shall be required to offer liberal education undergraduate programmes. (National Education Policy. 215)

 All universities shall also offer the four-year teacher education programmes, to enable the preparation of outstanding school teachers; many colleges will also aim to establish the same. 

B- Side 

Literature could be understood with the perspective of science or any other analytic courses and vice versa. Students and teachers can together practice a sort of autonomy in creating creative and comfortable classroom spaces with no restrictions from the authoritarians. The notion of selecting one particular stream to decide your career in life will come to an end with the opportunities of choosing fields of their respective interest. 

High quality liberal education is, by its very definition and nature, multidisciplinary. 

One of the major advantages of such kind of an education is an exposure to the concept of peer learning. One of the major problems that gets often sidelined while considering the students studying under the meticulous and stringent pressure of the state government curriculum are the very common difficulties the students face in the various communication processes, be it amongst the peers or the family and the difficulty of the people on the receiving end to understand the true intentions of their students. However, it has been noticed that some students evidently initiate certain peer interactions and intend to maintain it during their developing processes. Some students often form deeper bonds and connections from their interaction with their peers (Howes, 1994). 

D- Side

Autonomy in creating syllabus and curriculums may create arguments because of the difference in expectations of the authorities, the law makers and the teachers.  

11.1. Liberal education to energise undergraduate programmes | Practical engage  ment with the work and professional competence with liberal education

This policy is aiming at all programmes to be combined with conceptual knowledge along with  practical engagement which has relevant real world connections (e.g. through practical laboratory work, eld work, workshops, internships, involvement in teaching or tutoring, student research projects, and student portfolios). 

B- Side 

Shakespeare and Barthes have to be taken beyond text books and research papers. A practical approach to a literature research may answer thousands of unanswered and unnoticed questions in the present world. If the literature is not speaking to the community a a whole, what good is it going to do in a book? Critical theories will be applied to your everyday lives and could be used to get a better understanding of how things work. Parents will not urge students to take up Arts or English because there isn't enough scope for their kids to get into other disciplines but because of a genuine interest in the subject.

D- Side

Constructing pedagogies and curriculums with such a diverse expectation of education can be quite time consuming and challenging.

Even though the policy aims to disbar all bridges between interdisciplinary conflicts and all discomforts in the growth of higher education, one cannot overlook a few discomforts that multidisciplinary teaching itself brings onto the table. One of the disadvantages is the time constraint. For a multidisciplinary team, they need to not only finish their own work, but also spend time communicating and responding to the modifications given by their counterparts and work on extra modifications from the caregivers team as well. The other disadvantage can be caused by the differences in the backgrounds of the collaborators. Difference can be in the level of each student's career (Tang & Hsiao, 7). The working schedule of a designer, being a master's student, will be very different to the working schedule of an engineer, being a full-time programmer at a company. 

References 

Tang, Hsein- Hui & Hsiao, Emily. "The advantages and disadvantages of multidisciplinary collaboration in Design Education". National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. 

National Education Policy. Ministry of Human Resource Development. 2019