School of Mass Communication, KIIT Deemed to be University organized the fourth day of Faculty Development Programme-2021 on 24th June 2021. There were three sessions with eminent resource persons – Prof. Mrinal Chatterjee, Regional Director, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal; Prof. Archana R. Singh, Professor, School of Communication Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh; and Dr. Jatin Srivastava, Associate Professor and Director, Institute for International Journalism, E W Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University, Athens, USA.
At the 10th session of this ongoing FDP, Prof. Chatterjee delivered his talk on the theme “Hit the pause button: Positioning Journalism in a post-pandemic world”. He started with the beginning of the pandemic, when everything came to standstill including the industries and academic institutions. He advised to negotiate with the traditional pattern of teaching-learning system. Today the perception of media consumers has changed. If there is a change in the society due to the pandemic then the practice of journalism should also change. In today’s time technological dependence is more and it is not only confined to collection of news but also in terms of dissemination of the same. He focused more on Project Based Learning Systems.
At the 11th session, Prof. Singh talked on “Teaching the digital natives: Jet lags of time travel”. Prof. Singh started the talk with an understanding of digital learners, the digital natives. He talked of digital immigrants, the teachers who need to do a lot of catching up to speak and teach in the language of the digital natives, the students. The new generation processes the information in a completely different way. Teachers look for narrations but today students look for keywords. Teachers are linear but students are not. Under this scenario, to know more than the students is a challenge and teachers have to accept this. Further, she added that the students never need to race with the teachers, teachers need to race with them because they are always a step ahead in this field. She talked about the growing field of digital humanities.
At the 12thsession, Dr. Srivastava spoke on ‘Using theory as a guide to explore the role of media in our society’. Dr. Srivastava talked about understanding theories in general, how theories work and how to develop a theoretical mindset. He talked about theories reflecting reality with pertinent examples. He said that a good theoretical mindset focuses on explaining things, and not just making them a jargon. He gave certain examples from natural sciences and then summarised it to apply in social sciences and media related studies. He mentioned the application of theory in understanding a topic works uniformly across all disciplines following which he went on to give many similar examples from media artefact. Dr. Srivastava said, falsifying theories can be misleading and often dangerous. He mentioned that understanding the individual elements in formulating a theory plays a significant role. Dr Srivastava pointed out how theory is formulated from observation of life and then how it is applied in the world.
There were over 32 participants from several universities across India, such as Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Central University of Jammu, The University of Burdwan, and Bihar Agricultural University, Sabour. Dr Bidu Bhusan Dash, course coordinator of the School welcomed the resource persons. Faculty members – Ms. Ruby Nanda, Dr. Anurag Sahu and Mr. Souptik Garai moderated the sessions and proposed vote of thanks after each session.