Guided Reading

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 2

Course Coordinator and Team: ShivaniNag (C), all faculty supervising PhD students

Email of course coordinator: shivani@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: Pre-Doctoral

Aims/Outline:

• To encourage PhD candidates to critically engage with academic literature on a particular theme for the purpose of a comparative review and in the process appreciate the debates and dialogues that take place through written academic discourse.
• To encourage students to pursue self-directed inquiries in academic domains and articulate a critical understanding of the literature.

Course Outcomes:

• Demonstrate ability to critically read and analyse text.
• Demonstrate ability to synthesise, integrate and build an argument drawing from the reading of the literature.
• To identify an academic area of interest and formulate a topic for academic engagement.
• To engage in a self-directed study on a particular area of interest.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Module I:Reading together of texts on a theme

The faculty coordinator in consultation with faculty mentors and the PhD candidates will identify 4-5 texts addressing a theme in keeping with the academic interests of the cohort. The group will pick one text per week, read it and then come together to discuss the key assumptions and arguments of the text. As the community of scholars deliberate on the texts, the research scholars will be encouraged to synthesise the different arguments made by the texts and work towards a literature review based on their emerging understandings of the text. The process is aimed at contributing towards the development of the research proposal of the PhD candidate.

Module II: Self-Directed Study

Each PhD candidate will be allotted a mentor based on their research interests. The candidate in consultation with the faculty mentor will finalise a topic of inquiry and propose a plan for the guided reading which will have to be presented before a school level committee for approval by the 10th week of the semester. The student will then explore and engage with literature based on the topic and in accordance with the approved plan and work towards an annotated bibliography to be submitted by the end of the semester.

Assessment Details with weights: