The CADIndia team will be a part of Chapter III of The Idea of the Indian Constitution presented by St Kabir Public School and History for Peace. The team will present the following sessions:
Session I: Teaching the Indian Constitution ( Vineeth Krishna, Senior Associate, Centre for Law and Policy Research)
For India to remain a constitutional democracy, India’s youth must have a sharp awareness of the place of the Constitution in our everyday lives and critically engage with and commit to its radical transformative goals. For this, we need to seriously reimagine how we teach the Constitution to students. This session will advance, advocate and elaborate upon the following pedagogical strategies:
- Constitution as a Living document
To introduce the Constitution to students as a historically contingent text that allows them to engage with the Constitution as a living social contract that requires constant re-interpretation, rather than a ‘scriptural mode’ of teaching which introduces students to the Constitution as a static text.
- Primary Materials
To pay emphasis on engaging with the origins and practice of the Constitution by reading two types of primary materials: historical and contemporary.
- History of ideas
To allow students to quickly pair key constitutional ideas with key constitutional drafters and interpreters, and their contingent social, political and economic backgrounds.
- Pedagogy of discovery
To increase the chances of students critically engaging with primary materials, they should be allowed to discover them on their own
Session II: Indian Constitutional History Workshop (Kruthika R, Associate and Vineeth Krishna, Senior Associate, Centre for Law and Policy Research)
CLPR has developed a website – ConstitutionofIndia.net - which curates, tags and presents Indian constitutional history materials in an interactive and engaging digital format. Additionally, the site archives materials used at our workshops and also our continued efforts to develop curricular constitutional education content.
You can find more details here.