FROM CHIEF EDITOR "I shall be telling this with a sigh  Somewhere ages and ages hence Two roads diverged in a wood, and  I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."                                                               Robert Frost

From the Chief Editor: Ms.Sharada Nayak - We begin the year 2002....

Guest Column: Contextualising Beyond the margins - Prof Suma Chitnis

Comparative Perspectives: Diversity Opens Doors to All Prof.EdgarF.Beckham

Curricular Interventions: A few suggestions for Syllabus Design Shobha Shinde

Student Corner: The Camp that widened Our Horizons - Rathisha Fernandes

CDI-A Memorable Learning for Life - Divya Singhal

Lasting Impressions: Prof.Rob Linrothe

Campus News Events organised at Savitri Girls College, Ajmer

Evaluation: Evaluating Campus Diversity Initiative - Vasudev Rao

Report: Workshop for Phase III of CDI

Profile: Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow

From The Press:Education News - Counselling initiative

Visits & Events Organised

We begin the year 2002 with this issue of Beyond the Margins and send our sincere greetings to our extended family in India and abroad. We were happy to hear from many of you who have sent us your appreciation of the newsletter and your suggestions for future issues. We have heard from college faculty an students sending us contributions and all these communications have impressed upon us the need to keep this dialogue through print and internet. We launched our web page (www.erctrust.org) just after midnight in the new year and to those who have not received our email-ed announcement, we forward the message that Beyond the Margins will be available on-line starting from the first issue of October, 2001.

Every New Year marks a point in time where, like Janus, we look back at the past and ahead into the future. The past twelve months have been turbulent worldwide. However, we take heart from the continued interaction we have ha from colleges around the country and reaching out, through our work to students beyond the margins. The end of the second phase of the Campus Diversity Initiative finds out participants on different paths. The road less travelled is the disadvantaged students from the hinterland, or the sections of urban youth who are first generation learners their parents eager to see their children seek new avenues of employment. We had to leave the metropolitan cities to talk to college principals and learn about their concerns on how to enrich the education they were proving to the socially and economically disadvantaged students students entering college from poorly equipped schools. How could they motivate students who did not have the learning skills or the grounding in academic discipline, they asked. The disparities in our society continue to widen. The inclusion of these neglected and discriminated against, was most effective through the out-reach of the CDI project. However, their diffidence had to be overcome, their talents demonstrated, and their self-esteemed reinforced.

The faculty from several colleges came back from a self-evaluation and discussed their shortcomings and their lack of counselling skills, especially for helping the socially disadvantaged. Through feedback, evaluation, discussion, and identification of our needs we come to the crossroads and choose the road less travelled. In the year ahead, we hope to discover new strengths and hone our teaching skills so that education, equality, and diversity come to mean more than dictionary definitions and through the fog of jargon emerges the human face of development. We will then have made all the difference.


JANUARY 2002                                                        SHARADA NAYAK