A SONG CALLED TEACHING:Ebbs and Flows of Experiential and Empathetic Pedagogies

Description

This is a book of beauty, elegance and wisdom. It brings together exceptional writings of many teachers who reflect on and illuminate pedagogies based on empathy, responsibility, respect, compassion and caring. – Harsh Mander, Social Activist and Writer

The present book gives us this hope in love and care, and in knowing and healing…A book of this kind is a refreshing departure from the routinized academic publications. It ought to be read by all those who have not yet lost their dream of meaningful education, and are engaged with teaching and the beauty of teacher-taught relationship. – Avijit Pathak, Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This book is an unique effort in which teachers of Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India, meditate on a vision of higher education, which is reflective, critical as well as empathetic, and in which, the subjective context of every student’s life matters. The spirit of the book lies in the openness and authenticity with which the writers have expressed their deeper strivings and dilemmas of being teachers and practising challenging modes of relating with students both within and outside of the classroom. In the twenty six essays that bedeck this volume, teachers of AUD, self-reflexively re-examine the purpose and ethics involved in their profession.

It is with love that the contributors to this volume weave in a beautiful pattern in the tapestry of higher education as they sing a song that includes the often missing notations of empathy in their reflections on higher education. A melody emerges as teaching is re-envisioned as an intellectual, humane and relational process; an intense and involved immersive experience, charged with desire, devotion and inspiration, impelling one to the freedom of spirit, to the acknowledgement of past emotional scars even as newer versions of self are born in the classroom (and disavowed ones reclaimed) through the mutual and dialogical exchange between the teacher and her students. Such a mode of teaching is also clearly radical and political in its intent. It challenges the competitive and consumerist ethos of our historical times wherein the classroom is endangered by the dictates of privatization and the demands of the market.

Honey Oberoi Vahali is a Professor of Psychology at the School oh Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). She is a psychoanalyst and a clinical psychologist. Before joining Ambedkar University Delhi in 2010, she was teaching at the Department of Psychology, University of Delhi. Valuing the classroom as a space of critical intellectual engagement, she considers teaching as a relational encounter, a process that can potentially transform the being of the teacher as well as of her students. A search for visions of engaged spirituality and nonviolent movements has held her abiding interest. As a psychotherapist she is involved in forging bridges between psychoanalysis, streams of compassion and visions of social justice. It has been her endeavour to conceptualize a model of depth oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy in the Indian context that responds to issues of social and emotional justice even as it engages with lived experiences of human suffering.