Registrations are invited for One Day Workshop for High School Teachers on Why Social Science Concepts Matter at Azim Premji University, Bhopal. The workshop will be held on November 30, 2024.
Azim Premji University is a private university, located in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It was founded in 2010 and is named after Azim Premji, an Indian businessman and philanthropist who was chairman of Wipro Limited.
A second Azim Premji University campus opened in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh in July 2023.
Social science education is effective only when both teachers and students can critically engage with its ideas and texts not merely in the classroom but also through a sustained engagement with our social lives. Foundational to the social sciences are concepts. At the school level, the syllabus introduces and explores a range of concepts such as society, community, family, social change, etc. These are also ideas that have meanings in everyday life. Social science concepts provide a lens to view reality and help students participate in their social worlds.
However, the concepts are complex entities! This workshop aims to unravel two interrelated questions: how are concepts created in the social sciences; and how these concepts relate to empirical reality?
In this workshop, they want to engage with pedagogical practices through which we can deal with social science concepts in classrooms, not as stable or static, but as dynamic entities. A concept is always directed towards the purpose of understanding empirical reality.
Say, for example, let us consider the concept of ‘family’. The concept of ‘family’ can be defined and constructed in very different ways depending on the purpose of our investigation. ‘Family’ can be defined universally with primacy given to biological descent. Or can it also be explored in terms of relationships we build beyond fixed gender roles? Each position leads to a different set of questions and possibilities for social scientists.
For a concept to be effective it must abstract and represent the diversity of phenomena and variations found in the world. But it must also not be so abstract as to have no relation to empirical reality. So, how do social scientists maintain a balance between these two competing demands?
High school teachers of social science, teaching grades 9 to 12.
November 30, 2024.
10:00 AM – 4:30 PM.
Azim Premji University, Bhopal.
Interested participants can register themselves online via this link.
Email: outreach[at]apu[dot]edu[dot]in
