Constructive Pedagogy

Higher education is a very powerful sector for the growth and development of any nation. It plays a pivotal role
in shaping the social, scientific, moral, and economic growth of any nation. It is the higher education that provides
an extra edge to the Indian economy in the form of skilled research scholars, experienced technicians, and
knowledgeable learners. There has been a remarkable change in the higher education system in India after
Independence. However, our university education programme needs a re-visit to revise the existing teaching-
learning patterns and generate a re-oriented programme that lays emphasis on improving the thinking power and
learning capacities of the learners. These issues are important for our Indian nation as a university education
programme is a potent tool that helps to create a constructive, innovative, and creative knowledge-based
information society of the 21st century. It has been researched upon well that learning sciences – an
interdisciplinary approach have generated enough collaborations among various disciplines, which has resulted
in the construction of new ideas, new approaches, new strategies & new methods. Therefore, this newer approach
of learning sciences can help university educators to recreate the innovative ways of thinking among the learners
during the teaching-learning sessions. The first detailed overview of this interdisciplinary field was published in
2006: The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006b). Learning sciences seem to have
enough potential to redirect undergraduate education through theoretical analysis, enhanced research data, case
studies, and constructive models for effective teaching sessions, to facilitate the reconstruction of undergraduate
education. The existing research data and literature always focused on the improvement of K-12 education and
did not suggest any major improvement techniques and strategies for the teachers in the colleges and universities.
This research paper brings the professors, lecturers & administrators into the realm of constructivist perspective
which systematically links the philosophical, theoretical & educational theories to their implications for teaching
practice in the present learning scenario.

On 29 July 2017, an international colloquium entitled ‘Re-Imagining Curricula for a Just
University in a Vibrant Democracy – Carrying the Conversation Forward’ was held at the Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. A wide range of scholars from African and non-African countries provided variegated perspectives on how tertiary theological and religious education could contribute positively to the development of contemporary societies – African and non-African. This article focuses on the colloquium’s African contributors by means of the concept of ecodomy, envisaged as a constructive process. Whilst the attending academics came from Europe, the USA, South Africa and Ghana, this article takes into consideration only the contributions provided by African scholars. The purpose of this selection is to identify ecodomic or constructive ways to argue in favour of university education in the fields of theology and religion which share the potential to be applied across the whole African continent. Bearing in mind that Africa has been dealing with decolonisation awhile, these African contributions investigate issues such as contextualisation, science, practice, illumination and holism from the governing principle of decolonisation, which is also the overarching societal umbrella for academic development in Africa. This study concludes with an assessment and a proposal written from an exclusively South African vantage point which demonstrates the viability of tertiary theological and religious education for the ongoing ecodomic development of African societies.