Spotlight on Faculty Grant Recipient
Arts-based Pedagogy Training in India Each year, the Mittal Institute selects unique proposals from Harvard faculty members to fund projects and research related to South Asia. One of last year’s recipients, P rofessor Doris Sommer, launched her pioneering Pre-Texts Program in India–a program she has brought to schools around the globe.
P
re-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. While the number of readers has grown worldwide, reading comprehension stays alarmingly low, because students need to use texts in order to understand them. With Pre-Texts, students master texts by using them to create visual and performative arts. Pre-Texts also coincides with the Indian government’s recent mandate to integrate arts into all school curricula. While this mandate asks teachers to focus on the rich art traditions throughout India, it does not guide teachers and principals on how to implement the arts-integration directive. That is where Prof. Sommer believes the Pre-Texts program can have a transformative impact in the country. In early 2022, she visited the Indian city of Pune to work with FLAME University to start Pre-Texts in India. The teachers, principals, and students who participated in the demonstrations of Pre-Texts in Pune experienced the ad-
vantages of this approach and were eager for their schools to be chosen as the site for a forthcoming pilot intervention.
Creating Art from a Text Traditional teaching methods often fail due to the pyramidal design that they follow: teaching begins with a base of technical information, leading to an understanding and interpretation of the material, then concludes with a creative expression of what has been learned. Unfortunately, this method of teaching often leads to boredom and disaffection among students, who may become fearful or disengaged when trying to memorize new concepts, formulas, and words. Since art in this context represents an expression of what students already know, as opposed to a form of exploration, the act of learning in this way leads students to make a conceptual error about the discipline. With the Pre-Text format of learning, the pyramidal design is reversed and
The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University
