A remark made by a NAAC assessing team member that the college must produce much more research, "whatever be the quality", has made me wonder. What is the reason that one must "do research" of dubious quality, in order to become a good teacher of undergrads?
I think this kind of "doing research" between the 3rd and the 6th period lectures, is no good for improving teaching skills or research skills. The people who do such research, rarely visit any library, do not have access to online journals.....so I always wonder how they go about their research.
Some people get research grants for this kind of work. I think the grant could have been given to a more serious researcher, or the money could have gone to build a lecture hall or library or some such resource.
3 comments:
Yeah, it is true. I hope someone at UGC and DST have some common sense and stop this nonsense. These collages mainly do undergraduate teaching and actually they do a good job. faculty should be proud of that, but people do get into the rat race and try to do research of dubious quality which has no value for anyone.
I agree with most of what you have said here. However, I think there is still some scope for research in a predominantly undergrad-teaching oriented college. For example a good research project would be to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of specific teaching techniques. Such results often help in gauging one's teaching skills, besides being publishable in many international journals on education. Doing research should not necessarily be viewed as a separate enterprise, but should be pursued out of one's interest to whatever level of adequacy one's circumstances permit.
That said, should such research be funded from Public tax money is anybody's guess.
@wilkerson: Now THAT kind of research, I think is very relevant and very useful. But what they do is some scientific study of some phenomenon which might have been done earlier (since lack of access to literature means one has no way of knowing)
@RS: yes, many of us do a good job of teaching undergrads...last week, an alumnus came to meet me and made my day-- he told me I had made a great difference in his life and so had my colleagues.
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