This page is being updated
Educating The Imagination: Teacher development for enhancing creativity and criticality
Most current national curriculums stress the importance of creativity and criticality as key life skills that must be fostered in children in formal education systems. While Pakistan’s education policy recognises the importance of encouraging creativity and critical thinking in the school system, actual teaching promotes rote-learning and knowledge acquisition rather than critical engagement and creativity, limiting students’ ability to question, generate novel ideas and solutions and think out-of-the-box. The project aims to enhance students’ creativity and critical thinking by developing teachers’ capacity to create a classroom environment conducive to fostering imagination. Reports on the First Workshop and the Second Workshop
Most current national curriculums stress the importance of creativity and criticality as key life skills that must be fostered in children in formal education systems. While Pakistan’s education policy recognises the importance of encouraging creativity and critical thinking in the school system, actual teaching promotes rote-learning and knowledge acquisition rather than critical engagement and creativity, limiting students’ ability to question, generate novel ideas and solutions and think out-of-the-box. The project aims to enhance students’ creativity and critical thinking by developing teachers’ capacity to create a classroom environment conducive to fostering imagination. Reports on the First Workshop and the Second Workshop
Education in Mother Tongue and the case study of Punjabi Language
Pakistan’s education has many shortfalls and problems from funding to teaching quality and drop out rates. These issues are relatively well known and recognised. What is less well publicised and known is the major reason for this is the lack of Mother Tongue Education. This is most glaring in the largest and most economically advanced province of Pakistan; the Punjab. For reasons going back to colonial policies. The absence of Punjabi as a medium of instruction significantly affects actual learning of children, retention rate, the reading ability and the invisible cultural disconnect. The project aims to highlight academic research on education in mother tongue, development of Punjabi dictionary, computational Punjabi and the script. Read More
Pakistan’s education has many shortfalls and problems from funding to teaching quality and drop out rates. These issues are relatively well known and recognised. What is less well publicised and known is the major reason for this is the lack of Mother Tongue Education. This is most glaring in the largest and most economically advanced province of Pakistan; the Punjab. For reasons going back to colonial policies. The absence of Punjabi as a medium of instruction significantly affects actual learning of children, retention rate, the reading ability and the invisible cultural disconnect. The project aims to highlight academic research on education in mother tongue, development of Punjabi dictionary, computational Punjabi and the script. Read More
Democracy and Political Literacy
We share a broad commitment to progressive ideas and democracy which we see as a “mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience”[1]. A conjoint communicated experience cannot be realised without a shared – not necessarily agreed upon – discourse which allows people to participate in public discourse in an informed and critical manner. The creation, criticism and sustenance of this shared vocabulary is the task of political literacy – a task that becomes urgent when ideas such as democracy, human rights and egalitarian policies are not seen by many as native to the land, rather these are seen to be in tension with the received notions of culture and religion in particular. Read more…
We share a broad commitment to progressive ideas and democracy which we see as a “mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience”[1]. A conjoint communicated experience cannot be realised without a shared – not necessarily agreed upon – discourse which allows people to participate in public discourse in an informed and critical manner. The creation, criticism and sustenance of this shared vocabulary is the task of political literacy – a task that becomes urgent when ideas such as democracy, human rights and egalitarian policies are not seen by many as native to the land, rather these are seen to be in tension with the received notions of culture and religion in particular. Read more…