Management of college curriculum through soft skills: an integrated approach

Change has always been the only constant. As Tennyson said a long while ago, that the old order changes to yield place to new, otherwise one good custom corrupts the world. The hitherto sacrosanct higher education system calls for a rethinking, redesigning and change, with the challenges being thrown up especially by the employment-generators. If we want our Management, Commerce or even our Engineering and Humanities graduates to be employable and to be well-adjusted in the fast-changing socio/emotional/economic/real-virtual globalised world, then the college teaching-learning process calls for a change across all disciplines. This becomes especially true for a country like India, which wishes to reap its demographic dividend, to gain international ascendancy.

The paper begins by defining and outlining the new-age socio-emotional competencies or soft skills or global employment competencies, as these core skills are being called. The paper then dwells on the problems of student disaffection from and boredom with the existing college classroom system. There is also the need of social inclusion of the ‘disadvantaged’ students. All of the above factors suggest the pressing need for classroom re-orientation.

With these factors in mind, the writer explores the responsible role that the teaching community needs to play. While working within the framework of university curricula, teachers need to become creative, driven and passionate within classroom. The active-learning approach can be adopted and adapted by teachers as per their subject requirements. This is a game-like approach which is student-centric and gives a sense of agency to students. The paper goes on to suggest some activities within the paradigm of the active learning approach. It also gives evidence of an English class.

The paper winds up by suggesting the need for a mixed format for student assessment, once this approach is practised and adopted in the classrooms. Assessment criteria for this kind of teaching-learning process is still at a nascent stage and calls for a lot of scientific testing by practitioners.