Dr. Rekha Srinivasan, the James Stephen Swinehart PhD Professorial Teaching Fellow in Chemistry and senior instructor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award. The grant is for teaching and research in India and her field of study is Education. Her host institution is the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Her project is titled: Active Learning Pedagogy in India’s STEMM Classrooms: Empowering Students, Instructors, and Institutions.

Undergraduate education in India has undergone rapid expansion with the education sector valued at US $91 billion in 2018. This explosion in the education sector is projected to continue on the upward trend with India’s increasing youth population. Dr. Srinivasan will study current teaching practices and map out barriers for implementation of novel methods by observing STEMM classrooms, conducting attitude surveys of students, faculty and administrators of higher education. She will also conduct workshops in teaching methods, guide faculty in redesigning their courses, and implement a plan-do-check-act (PDCA cycle) philosophy to test effectiveness of redesigned courses.

Figure 1. A modified, four-module PDCA cycle process based approach is proposed for the Active Learning Classroom (ALC) project encompassing research and teaching programs at participating STEMM institutions India

To learn more about the Fullbright Scholar Program, click here!