On July 29, 2023, India celebrated the third anniversary of National Education Policy 2020. NEP 2020 plans to make students well-rounded individuals possessing key 21st-Century skills like critical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, adaptability, and people management skills. NEP 2020 intends to move education from ‘Rote to Right learning’ with emphasis on holistic, inquiry-based, discovery-based, discussion-based, and analysis-based learning leading to holistic development of students. Thanks to the digital revolution, and changing macro environmental factors, the working world of the future is undergoing a transformation. The working world of the future requires new competencies of knowing, doing and being. NEP 2020 aims at holistic development of students to groom new age professionals with management competencies for the future: KNOWING; DOING; and BEING.
Holistic development is the social, emotional, physical, mental, and intellectual growth of a person. A holistic approach to education focuses on all aspects of a student’s growth. Holistic development encompasses biological, cognitive, and social-emotional processes. The three processes influence and impact each other. The existing model of holistic education that seeks to engage the learner’s mind, body, and spirit was proposed by Rudolph Steiner, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori.
The Four-year multidisciplinary undergraduate programme with multiple entry and exit options intends to accomplish holistic development of students. The programme is designed to enable learners to be rational, compassionate, caring, and ethical while acquiring skills for gainful employment.
Salient features of the proposed programme structure of a 3- or 4-years undergraduate programme are as follows: • A student will study major and minor courses in the discipline of his/her interest, open electives from a different discipline, co-curricular courses such as health and wellness, yoga education, sports and fitness, cultural activities, applied arts, visual arts or performing arts. • Dedicated modules/courses for skill enhancement, ability enhancement, and Modern Indian languages. • Immersive and transformative modules like on job training, field project, rural project, and community engagement project corresponding to the major (core) subject. • Value education course such as understanding India, environment science, and digital and technological solutions.
Holistic learning and development are at the core of NEP 2020. The broad-based curriculum of NEP 2020 demands the adoption of a more experiential, integrated, and holistic pedagogy. NEP 2020 calls for a more interactive teaching & learning, with a higher focus on achieving learning outcomes by shifting classroom teaching towards competency-based education rather than completion of syllabus. Assessment tools also need to be aligned with the learning outcomes and capabilities to be achieved in each course.
Comments