Design for History Learning: Engaging & Contexualised History Education


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Creator/Artist: Shayam V.S.

Category: Communication Design

Document: P3 Project

Batch: 2014-2016

Source: India,   IDC IIT Bombay

Period:  2009-2018

Medium: Presentation pdf

Supervisor: Prof. G. V. Sreekumar


Detailed Description

The National Curriculum Framework 2005 envisions an education, where children are given a space to reflect, ask questions, wonder, and probe sources of knowledge outside the textbook. A lot of people in India have been working towards making this dream a reality. But even now history still remains a student’s nightmare in schools. The vastness of the subject adds to the drab of trying to learn it. But most of the time, it is also hard to relate to the lives of some King or Queen, living somewhere with life and culture too different from what a child knows. As of now, the school syllabus is largely centralised and hence cannot include local perceptions to a large extend. By enabling communities to include their local history and culture to be a part of education, we empower them and help us connect better to the nation. In this project I have attempted to aid this process of transforming history learning into a more palpable experience by creating resources to document and exhibit a student’s enquiry into his or her own history and share it with the world. This project’s initial goal was to create a set of learning and teaching material, specific to a locality to help students’ of that locality make sense of their identity in relation to individual and to the world. The locality I have focussed on is Kozhikode which used to be a part of Malabar. So I have learned about the history of Kerala, Malabar to build a knowledge base. My outcome is a crowdsourced web platform which can nudge the schools in Calicut to participate in contributing to the history of Kozhikode.