NEP-2020 seeks to bring about radical transformation in Indian education and work towards making India a global knowledge power. The policy is rooted in Indian ethos and at the same time very responsive to the requirements of 21st century. The policy critically looks at the challenges that face the higher education sector. It identifies rigidity and siloed nature of the programmes as an important challenge. Student flexibility and choice in what they study and breaking down the rigid disciplinary boundaries is seen as a way forward. Liberal or multidisciplinary and holistic education is promoted as the overarching model of higher education with focus on learning outcomes and learner centeredness.
The policy rightly focuses on undergraduate education as most students enrolled in higher education are in the undergraduate courses. It also noteworthy that for most students first degree is the terminal degree. Around 80% students do not pursue any formal higher education after their first degree and they either take up a job or become an entrepreneur. Undergraduate education has largely been a single-discipline or single-stream education with boundary between disciplines and streams being very rigid and nearly impossible to cross. Multidisciplinary education is sought to be operationalized through imaginative and flexible curricular structures which will provide creative combinations of disciplines and subjects going beyond the conventional combinations of disciplines and streams of education.
We need to understand the role of disciplines to implement multidisciplinary and holistic education in its true spirit. Disciplines are a unique view of reality focusing on a particular phenomenon or certain aspect of reality (Life, Matter, society, Human thinking and feeling), using a distinctive methodology and criteria as to what constitutes knowledge. Disciplines are not mere collection of facts or data or formulae but a lens or framework through which they try to understand a phenomenon. Disciplinary thinking is a disposition to interpret the world in a distinctive way -an ‘epistemic form’. Learning a discipline is about understanding essential questions or categories of knowledge, its methods of inquiry and how knowledge is structured and communicated. Thus, when a student studies a discipline (or a stream) she is not only learning an idea or content but learns a certain way of looking at reality.
A disciplinary approach catered to the needs of growing knowledge of the industrial age. However, technology (computer, communication technology and automation), globalization emerging environmental and health crisis have changed the world and our relation to the world in an unprecedented way. The world is much more dynamic and problems we are grappling are more complex. Automation and artificial intelligence have changed the way we work, learn, and interact with each other. Many jobs that have existed and for which education has been preparing young people are either getting totally transformed or getting obsolete or totally automated. Jobs are that will survive automation in future will require creative & critical capacities. Narrow task-oriented training will not be sufficient.
These changes have called into question relevance of existing modes of preparing young people for their future. New age requires new skills- 21st century skills. Change in technology, organizations and need for people to shift jobs and careers is asking for ‘adaptable generalist’ who are more agile in their thinking. 21st century skills include critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, information literacy, media literacy, technological literacy, flexibility, leadership and social skills and these skills cut across disciplines.
Multidisciplinary education is an approach to learning which prepares learners to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. Being exposed to different disciplines and streams helps learners to acquire multiple perspectives and different cognitive orientations or ‘epistemic forms’. Thus more “cognitively agile” graduates will be able to respond better to the changing world. Multidisciplinarity helps in seeing the connection between different disciplinary orientations demanded by professional and personal life. It also facilitates much needed communication between disciplines and understanding the language of different disciplinary experts.
Faculty in higher education largely come from disciplinary scholarship background having invested large amounts of time, effort in acquiring scholarship in their chosen disciplines. Academic institutional structures, research funding and career progression are all strongly linked to disciplines. Hence Multidisciplinarity creates anxiety among faculty members coming from disciplinary scholarship. There is a need for faculty to look at disciplines more from the role the disciplines play in meeting the needs of the future roles’ students as professionals, entrepreneurs, and citizens. This assumes urgency as for majority of students first degree is the terminal degree. N.E.P. prescribes combining rigorous disciplinary understanding with multidisciplinary exposure. We need to strike a balance between ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ dimensions of higher education.
There is a need for faculty to take a broader perspective and move from being a purely disciplinary scholars to facilitators of learning for students in preparing students for their future roles in life- personal as well as professional. It’s not just about making our graduate ‘work ready’ but making them ‘world ready’.
