Background:
Community engagement and social responsibility in higher education are emerging as new fields of professional competence internationally. Experiential Learning is one of the most important ways of learning any curriculum. Engaging with the community offers an opportunity to understand the real life issues and also to be able to resolve those issues with the subject expertise of that Higher Education Institution (HEI).
UGC believes that this approach will also contribute to improvements in quality of both teaching and research in HEIs in India. This will also extend an opportunity to understand the potential strengths and weakness of every part of India; to know our country in real sense. However for students to be trained in the community study, teachers need to convincingly motivate the students to do so. This in turn requires teachers themselves to be sensitive, motivated and be aware of techniques to identify real issues of the community. UGC’s ambitious quality mandate launched in 2018 focused on improving societal linkages of HEIs and enabling students to become socially productive. The Ministry of Education’s, Government of India’s Unnat Bharat Ahiyaan (UBA) 2.0 aims to bring a transformative change in rural development by the active participation of higher education institutes with rural communities and reorientation of communities through research and development. The UGC set up a Subject Expert Group (SEG) on Curricular Reforms and Educational Social Responsibility for achieving the objectives of UBA 2.0 in June 2018.“The Subject Expert Group (SEG) on Curricular Reforms and Educational Institutions Social Responsibility will basically work on the reforms in the curriculum at the level of UG and PG to instil the concept of Rural Community Engagement and Social Responsibility. UGC SEG developed the National Curricular Framework and Guidelines for “Fostering Social Responsibility and Community Engagement” of HEIs in India, which is premised on promoting mutually respectful community engagement in teaching, research and outreach. The key principles of curriculum framework for community engagement are stated to be mutual learning and respect, the philosophy of engagement to be the basis of curricula in all disciplines, credit-based curricula with respect to community linkages, providing credit to teachers for their engagement with the community, involvement of local institutions for sustainable linkages with the community.
The National Education Policy 2020 has presented a transformative framework for higher education in the country. It has reinforced many of the recommendations already included in the UGC/UBA scheme “Fostering Social Responsibility & Community Engagement in HEIs”.
Read UGC guideline here – https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/0703887_UBA-Notice.pdf
Training of Master Trainers in Community-based Participatory Research in
- Nagpur University, Maharashtra from 20th – 22nd April 2022
- Madurai University, Tamil Nadu from 27th April to 29th April, 2022
- Central University of Odisha, Koraput from 7th – 9th June 2022
- Bhopal University, Madhya Pradesh from 16th – 18th June 2022
- Agra University, Uttar Pradesh from 15th – 17th July 2022
- Kurukshetra University, Haryana from 19th- 21st July 2022
- Tezpur University, Assam from 26th-28th July 2022