Picture: Carles Martinez
PBL South Asia employs an iterative teaching approach based on group work led by heterogeneous student teams, closely followed and supported by faculty who act as mentors to the student teams. The intercultural and inter-institutional implementation process serves as a testing and learning environment for the participating HEIs. Through feedback and reflections from students, mentors, course coordinators, HEI leads and external stakeholders engaged in the project, the localised PBL student case methodology is then broadly defined and adopted.
In practice, student groups build a team, define the problem, objectives and expectations, review the current scenario, map the initial systemic context before embarking on joint field work. During field work, they explore, research, test, validate and verify their approaches and plans together with relevant stakeholders. After the field work, they form feasible approaches and interventions and plan in detail how these would address the given problem now and in future. At the end they reflect on their learnings and communicate the interventions to relevant stakeholders, and participating faculty assess the process from a learning and teaching perspective.
Universities identify community challenges and set up student teams. The teams review the current scenario and define objectives, expectations, risks and relevant stakeholders.
The teams analyze the challenge from aspects such as socio-cultural,environmental, economic, institutional, political, or Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA). Teams formulate an initial ideal approach to address the challenge.
The teams visit the site of inquiry and conduct fieldwork for 2-3 weeks. The teams conduct data collection such as interviews, mapping, photography surveys, and engage with the local stakeholders through workshops to validate the ideal approach.
Based on feedback from relevant stakeholders, collected data, research and analysis , the teams revise the initial action plan and propose feasible approaches and interventions.
The teams stay in contact with relevant stakeholders and put forward concrete ideas for the process of change. They participate in community meetings and iterate the requirements and the assumptions of the action plan and the proposed interventions.
The teams present their findings and proposals to course coordinators and local stakeholders. They discuss and reflect their approaches. The long term development and the ownership of the interventions are also discussed as a part of the ways forward.
The PBL South Asia project has resulted in the adoption of applied PBL teaching methods at the participating HEIs in Nepal and Bhutan, and influenced the teaching approaches of project partners that already had PBL elements in their curricula. It has cast light on the significant differences of teaching environments and the need to adapt general educational principles to serve heterogeneous academic and societal communities.
In addition, there is an increased interest in the application of PBL pedagogy for global sustainability among the participating HEIs at large, local stakeholders such as innovation ecosystem actors, societal partners, and faculty and course coordinators at other higher education institutions. Interested parties have actively engaged in the PBL South Asia project through teacher trainings, methods workshops, multidisciplinary PBL curriculum planning, and adoption and execution of projects in the local contexts.
To further adopt and promote the PBL methodology and sustain the positive momentum and engagement of the partner universities and other HEIs in the region, the PBL South Asia Network for interested faculty and institutions is initiated and coordinated by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
PBL South Asia Network website will be released soon.
All 10 partnering HEIs have been active in coordinating, contributing and executing activities such as PBL based curriculum adoption and new course implementation, PBL student cases management, teacher trainings, methods workshops, dissemination etc., which can be seen from the links below.
