Treading on the Path of Teaching
Pranav Prakash

My personal interest in teaching and mentoring was aroused for the first time in a Hindu monastery in eastern India. A Bengali monk unexpectedly asked me if I would volunteer to teach some impoverished children in the nearby slums. He had undertaken an independent initiative to educate socially outcast and economically disadvantaged children of our society. It was a spiritual pursuit for him. He believed that one could liberate the soul from the cycle of life and rebirth by selflessly serving the poor and the dispossessed. I, on the other hand, was an immature adolescent who had yet to grasp the basic import of spirituality, liberation and education. Nor had I contemplated on the necessity of sharing my knowledge and skills with others. For my first lesson, the monk asked me to discuss the significance of Indian Railways to a group of children who had never seen a moving train in their lives. In deference to the revered monk, I consented to teach his students and showed up at his makeshift classroom on time. On being surrounded by a group of curious minds, who aspired to do something good in their lives, I suddenly became aware of the crucial role teachers plays in their students’ quest for better lives. The children’s enthusiasm for learning motivated me to engage closely with their thought processes and worldviews. It encouraged me to develop innovative ways to help them imagine things they had never seen in their lives and to grapple with ideas that were inaccessible to most of their acquaintances. From drawing sketches of trains and cars to organizing field-trips to neighboring bus-stations and libraries, I adopted an ecletic set of strategies to interest them in my lessons. Whenever I was able to lead my students to newer avenues of learning and perception, I experienced a profound sense of inner satisfaction and self-fulfilment. My monk was pleased with my commitment to teach and my monastery awarded me with a certificate of appreciation. For the first time in my life, I realized that I was capable of making a difference in the lives of others, and that the true worth of one’s learning is manifest only when it is generously shared.

On witnessing my interest in teaching and mentoring, another monk loaned his copy of E. R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel, To Sir, With Love (1959) for my summer reading. Braithwaite was born in 1912 in Guyana, then a British colony, to an Oxford-educated black parents, and studied at elite institutions like the Queen’s College in Guyana, the City College of New York in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. In spite of his exceptional résumé, he was repeatedly denied a job in the engineering sector and ended up becoming a teacher in a secondary school in east London. Braithwaite narrates a moving account of his struggles against racism and his efforts to educate children who were misbehaved, impoverished and ignorant of their inner potential and future prospects. The racism in Braithwaite’s world and the casteist exclusion and religious segregation of my slum-dwelling students foreshadowed my personal experiences as an undergraduate student in some of the most elite schools of India. It was soon apparent to me that the gravest pedagogical challenge in the contemporary world concerns the issues of inclusion and diversity which in turn are rooted in the ethics of equal opportunity for all. Therefore, I always strive to develop courses and teaching methods which will enable my students to appreciate the values of cultural diversity, religious pluralism, conscientious dialogue, mutual understanding and ethical living.

To Sir, With Love (1st edition, 1959)

I have taught a wide variety of courses to students of diverse backgrounds in different parts of the world. My teaching interests and pedagogy ally intimately with my research interests. For instance, I have offered workshops and seminars on the study of Persian and Indic manuscripts at the Central Scientific Library in Dushanbe and the Bobojon Gafurov University in Khujand, Tajikistan, on the basis of my prior research into the material history of the book in Iran and South Asia. Likewise, I have taught Sanskrit in the Persian medium to postgraduate students of the University of Tehran. My course helped students master the fundamentals of Sanskrit language and simultaneously appreciate its philological proximity to Avestan and Pahlavi languages. This course in effect complemented my research interest in exploring the history of intercultural interactions among people of diverse literary and religious backgrounds. On resuming my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa (UI), I served as a primary instructor and teaching assistant in the departments of Religious Studies and Classics. My courses have covered a broad range of topics and themes – from the lived experiences of eastern religions to the religious history of Buddhism; and from the conceptualizations of the sacred and the secular in Judaic traditions to the evolution of Classical mythology in Euro-American societies. Furthermore, I have delivered guest lectures on diverse aspects of Persian manuscriptology and South Asian book cultures for graduate students of South Asian Studies and Digital Humanities programs at Iowa. While I genuinely enjoy teaching several classical and modern languages and literatures of South Asia, particularly Persian, Tajiki, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Avadhi, Hindi and Maithili, I am always eager to offer both survey and seminar courses on the history of diverse religious traditions and book cultures in India, Iran and Central Asia. My courses not only contribute to the general education of my students and prepare them to become informed citizens of the world, they also guide my students to appreciate how intercultural interactions and global networks among people of diverse backgrounds have caused the advancement of our scientific knowledge and ethical values throughout history.

Witness | Ink Painting by Pranav Prakash | © 2017 Pranav Prakash

Each class of students brings with them a unique set of shared concerns, assumptions and biases about their world. If our syllabi and teaching methods are not sensitive to their thought processes and worldviews, then our students may not be able to attain the learning objectives of our courses. Consequently, I always maintain a certain degree of flexibility in my syllabi so that I can replace some readings and discussion topics based on the response of my students. A flexible syllabus is intended to facilitate the learning process and self reflection of my students; it does not alter the learning objectives of my course. This strategy is successful only when my students actively participate in classroom discussions and activities.

To enhance the classroom participation of my students, I engage them in a variety of activities and games: role playing, moot-court, group discussions, parliamentary debates, brainstorming storylines, acted charades and trivia quizzes. For explaining the biography of Buddha and the historiographical challenges of reconstructing his life story from extant sources, I once collected pictorial illustrations from several south and east Asian cartoons, shuffled this pack of illustrations and distributed them among smaller groups of students in my class. Each group had to create a plausible life-story of Buddha on the basis of the few cards they received from the pack. Apart from appreciating how multiple narrative traditions emerge in oral cultures and what issues are relevant to historiography, my students enjoyed talking to their classmates while working together to examine the details of Buddhist illustrations. This kind of classroom activity not only contributes to the active learning of my students but also inculcates the value of shared learning and collaboration among them. While choosing a classroom activity, I pay close attention to the learning objective of my syllabus and the general behavior of my students. Each activity serves a specific purpose and it activates unique aspects of cognition and learning. When I was a teaching assistant for an introductory course on Classical Mythology, my students preferred trivia quizzes for reviewing some of the key concepts relating to Greek culture and philosophy. For drilling new vocabulary in language courses, many students liked the game of acted charades and role playing, whereas others found pop quizzes more useful. In a seminar course on Buddhist traditions, some of my students felt that their comprehension of several Buddhist ideas and concepts were enhanced during the staging of moot-courts and parliamentary debates.

To ensure that my students are benefitting from my teaching methods and strategies, I like to receive their feedback as often as I can. I usually begin my classroom sessions by asking my students what they liked and/or disliked in the previous session. I memorize the names of every student in my class and I regularly call on them to participate in the classroom discussion. Whenever I notice a student is inactive and/or underperforming in my course, I reach out to them either during the class or via emails. As a teacher and mentor, I try to remain readily accessible to my students. I encourage my students to make use of my office hours, emails and social-media accounts. If needed, I set up additional appointments with them.

Underground | Ink Painting by Pranav Prakash | © 2017 Pranav Prakash

My pedagogy aspires to benefit from some of the most recent advances made in the fields of digital humanities and research-informed pedagogy. I intend to incorporate the use of social media, weblogs, networking platforms, mapping, video editing, computational text analysis, textual encoding initiatives, chatbots and similar tools in my pedagogy. I am currently developing a webpage on the life and works of Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī (1253-c.1337), the primary subject of my doctoral dissertation. I intend to develop online resources on Persian and South Asian literature for pedagogical purposes. I have attended several workshops, seminars and colloquiums on the use of digital media and technologies at the UI’s Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, H-Net and LinkedIn. I have received an associate level certification from the UI’s Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). This certification program promotes the use of evidence-based learning in classrooms. It recognizes that academic excellence and diversity are necessarily intertwined phenomena. Hence, this program expects our classrooms to nurture learning communities by bringing together people of diverse cultural backgrounds for the purposes of shared learning experiences and for generating newer forms of knowledge. Being trained under CIRTL programs and equipped with various tools of digital humanities, I continually strive to develop an advanced and effective pedagogy for my classrooms. The UI’s Department of Religious Studies awarded me with the Alice Lampe Heidel & John B. Heidel Award in recognition of my commitment to teaching and exceptional service to undergraduate students.

Notice | Ink Painting by Pranav Prakash | © 2017 Pranav Prakash

Each day of teaching is a fresh opportunity for me to reexamine the contours of my thought and subsequently improve my understanding of the self and the world. The everyday needs and challenges of teaching and learning are not always met by past experiences and preconceived insights. Contrary to the naïve expectations I held at the beginning of my academic career, I now concede that some intellectual capabilities and ideational worldviews are acquired gradually over a longer period of time, and some habits of thought are stubbornly resistant to change and evolution. My most inspiring mentors were, therefore, endowed with much patience and compassion. I always strive to follow in their footsteps.