The Hindu Business Line : Matching excellence

Winning the annual teacher's award at the National University of Singapore is no mean feat. Professors need to be competent and up-to-date. Chitra Sankaran from Chennai qualified on both counts.

The National University of Singapore (NUS) settles for nothing less than the best of teaching talent to groom the "top one per cent" of its students in the University Scholars Programme. Lecturers must prove their `pedagogic' mettle in every field before they are given a carte blanche. Peer reviews, student feedback and the like are all part of the grinding evaluating process to match excellence with excellence. But, of course, the absolute seal of approval is the coveted annual teaching award, presented to the lecturer who shines on all counts.

Last year, that honour went to Chitra Sankaran, Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, where she teaches Post-Colonial Literature and Feminist Theory. "I certainly felt happy and privileged. It was the high point of my career but it was also important because it ensures that certain standards are maintained," says the Chennai resident who was recently in the city on a domestic do.

The University Scholars Programme is where the crème de la crème of the college's student talent goes and it is the lecturers of this programme who compete with one another for the annual award. "The important thing about the whole process is that it ensures (though there's no sure-fire way of arriving at a best teacher) a level of objectivity and the recognition it brings encourages you to do well," says Chitra.

With over 12 years in the teaching field, beginning as a lecturer at the Mother Teresa Women's University, Chennai, and going on to the Open University Degree Programme, Singapore, before finally landing a job at the NUS, Chitra's career spans a vast and varied field of experience.

"In a lot of ways it's been an interesting career for me," she smiles. "Working especially for the Open University Degree Programme gave me an insight into adult education in a conventional university set up." She has found, however, that colleges in India face a crying need for standardisation and institutional support. "Though in some colleges the professors are intellectually engaged and up-to-date on their research, not the same can be said of all colleges," she says.

A major reason for this is the lack of emphasis on research and adequate referral material in colleges. "For lecturers to remain current in their field of study, they have to publish articles on a regular basis in any of the standard internationally refereed journals.Very often, the research books that come out from India are not very current, and most of the articles published don't even show an awareness of recent work in the field," she says.

True, online bookshops are now a dime a dozen, "but how much can one individual researcher buy in order to flourish in her research?" she asks.

Not much, especially in the face of an equally deficient incentive system. Whereasmost universities abroad encourage their professors in the field of research by giving them research scholarships or grants, "here in India it is restricted only to the top colleges."

But, where institutional support is lacking, the Internet, she says, can be of immense help. There are calls online for book chapters and recently the SUNY (The State University of New York) press put out a call for a paper on Feminism in critical pedagogy, which Chitra and a colleague responded to.

If Indian colleges are going to maintain standards of excellence and currency in research, then they will also have to break out of the bureaucratic nine-to-five grind. "In India, the profession of a lecturer is still not seen as one that involves intellectual activity, where you should be allowed to work at your own pace. There's too much of unnecessary stress on punctuality. But as long as you deliver the goods and your teaching is up to the standard, I don't think one should care too much about punctuality," she says.

While Indian universities might come up short in many areas, Indian students, on the other hand, fare exceedingly well when they go abroad. Chitra has found them to be "very articulate and very interested in engaging with ideas. I don't think that there is a qualitative difference between students here and those abroad, if anything I think that Indian students are capable of doing incredibly well given the kind of talents they have." On how Singapore fares as a prime education destination, she says, "We have reached state university standards, so that places us comfortably in the first quarter. But, apart from that, Singapore can be a destination of choice for the simple reason that it's a safe country. Indian parents, especially, will not find it culturally alien. And I think that it will do Indian students a lot of good to become increasingly aware of these options closer to home."

Picture by Shaju John

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