Development of educational models suited to Bharatiya Knowledge and today’s youth.
The educational skillset and resources of contemporary mainstream students is different from that expected for traditional study of shaastras. Modern education has de-emphasized memory skills and focused more on analytical skills and conceptual study. To train students and the younger generation in shaastric insights rapidly, shaastras need to be paraphrased for conceptual study .
For traditional scholars to present shaastric insights in a form that is intelligible and useful to the mainstream academic community, they need to be trained in model-based reasoning which is the hallmark of western science and to present shaastra as a universal model beyond its textual context. To do so, they need to develop skills to probe the author’s thought process behind a shaastra statement and articulate it in modern contemporary contexts. This helps glean, universal insights from shaastra exposition.
To be able to develop shaastric models for contemporary disciplines, one must learn to study a modern discipline with an eye for its practical utility, to identify shaastric equivalents of modern concepts and to express the latter in shaastric terms.
The larger canvas of Indian Knowledge Systems and its systematization from a pedagogy perspective can benefit from fundamental research in pedagogy , models of teaching , models of evaluation and the processes of learning.
Center for Shaastra pedagogy
The focus of this center is to design and build processes around the shaastra map-based education paradigm and to enable research into shaastra texts , using this framework.
Scholars and students of shaastra , will be experimenting and using this new paradigm in creative ways as part of current pedagogical processes. Active feedback will help us develop and fine tune the shaastra-map technology platform , so that teaching and learning workflows can be curated , customized and enabled via software tooling.
The use of shaastra-maps for contemporary shaastric research , in terms of discovery and exploration of knowledge areas are also important focus areas. Enabling novel workflows and tooling to enable semantic exploration and linkages amongst the various bharatiya gyaan paramapara bodies of knowledge is one of the goals of research at this center.
Center for IKS Education Management
The teaching and learning of Indian Knowledge systems in modern settings needs to be rethought. The traditional path of the shaastra scholar has a focused usage and delivery and does not scale beyond the traditional use. For mainstream impact and for civilizational resurgence and also for global adoption , IKS and its “utility” needs to be made available to mainstream experts , entrepreneurs and to the general public consumer. The curriculum design, evaluation models, IKS institutional leadership, IKS orientation in education : all of it needs to rethought and restructured. The focus of research at this center is to help in these efforts of contemporarising the pedagogy of Indian Knowledge systems.