Good day, Dr. Caleb Theodar. M. I'm Arjun. I've had a look through your background and your professional record. I'm interested in hearing more about your work and how you see yourself fitting in here with our faculty. Ready to start?

Please start by introducing your professional journey in academia.

So myself, I'm Doctor Caleb Theodore. I'm an Assistant professor of English with postgraduate and doctor qualification in English Specialization in Film Adaptation studies, Narratology and digital Humanities. My academic work involves literary analysis with methodologies analyzing the narrative techniques in the films as well as the text. And now my area of interest is emerging into digital humanities, in which I'm currently applying.

Aliens for teaching community English and Literature to student for the past four years and mind Research integrates traditional humanities with computational tools. I aim to contribute to teaching interdisciplinary research and digital innovation in humanities education.

Thank you for sharing that, Professor. Could you elaborate on how your past four years of teaching English and Literature have influenced your approach to teaching? Specifically, how do you blend traditional humanities with computational tools in your classroom?

Yes. So recently I started working on a project which is like hashtags, buyers and equality a driven insights into India's online gender discourse which applies digital humanities method to analyze large-scale social media data. So from this, this project's prime understanding is to analyze and create a thematic clustering on how the gendering inequality, buyers and representation are actually constructed in this. So with this understanding. I can actually contribute to the students community and to find and teach them how values is more important in the teaching. Likewise, from the four years of my education, teaching English has significantly improved the student community towards the developmental of language skills for their professional life because I integrate more about the professional requirement in the classroom teaching rather than the traditional language teaching methods which involve. A job interviews, mocking interviews. Project presentation and innovative ideas, creative thinking. I, I even create a scenario where the students actually deal with real time situations and I give them real time tasks to solve the problem, which is like a kind of hacked on, but it's an English hackathon in which the students actually create, uh, solutions to the problems I give, which is more about real time based. So this actually innovates students to get more involved into my classroom experience that I created.

For them and then from this, the students engagement actually is, uh, increasing every time. So I can see a drastic change within the student community in this kind of teaching method.

So in terms of their evaluation method, I basically record the classroom interactions and which I convert those classroom interactions into written activities. So for an example, I used to give them creative writing activities in which they are asked to create a new product that never existed. So it is like a part there they start thinking of a product which work like a Shark Tank or a think tank. I give them this project. In which they have to come up with the product that never existed and they come up with the product and they go for presentation and they will be creating a product demonstration for me. And then once I go through with that, I give them some suggestions to improve that. And based on that they will come with a well refined product. And then they come to the classroom presentation after a review meeting with me. And then when they come up for the classroom presentation, they come up with a product prototype that is actually in visual format. It is connected to the smart TV and using the smart TV, they usually show that and then based on that, I will evaluate their marks based on the presentation skill and how well they articulate their ideas and then how well they are influenced towards the invention. So that actually creates curiosity to everyone and creating curiosity improves more classroom engagement and this is one such activity I actually do for. This icebreaker sessions for my.

Understood, Professor. Your approach to blending interdisciplinary research with practical and innovative teaching methods is well-thought-out. How do you specifically measure the effectiveness of your teaching strategies in terms of student engagement and outcomes in both their academic and professional growth?

Classes and then the other based evaluation methods are involved in LSRW. So primarily I focus on.

Writing and listening. So first they have to be good listeners so that they can start implementing understanding the idea that I give them. So I I I usually give instruction only once during the class and I make sure they listen to it. If they don't listen, their instruction will not be repeated so as to improve the classroom concentration. I usually do this so the students know that when I start about a particular activity, they will listen clean to it so that they can do with the further activity.

And when they come up with doubts, I give hints, I do not give the complete answer to them. I give the hints as answers. So that increases curiosity to the to the students and that engages them more into the activities very involving.

Your methods clearly emphasize critical thinking, creativity, and active engagement, Professor. How do you ensure inclusivity in your classroom, particularly for students who may struggle with some of the advanced or unique methods you apply, such as product creation or intensive listening tasks?

So in the improved listening task, I actually concentrate also on the slow learners. I actually provide additional guidelines for them through simplified explanations, individual feedback and structured practice. I encourage peer support so a person has a good learner, he can understand what I actually teach them and they have to help the slow learner. And I also go in person to get the individual feedback from the slow learner so that I can create.

Practice to them and through this peer support and my own support towards them on the individual level it can it can give a great output towards it. So my aim is to help the slow learners build confidence 1st and then gradually ensuring while they meet the learning outcomes through continuous assessment rather than one time evaluation. So I continually monitor them and I give activities based on their.

Uh, updates in each, uh, the assessments I have given. So I slowly start with, uh, speaking skills. I make them speak, I make them more listen to it. Because in my research, I actually did a research on subconscious learning, which I applied on movies. So through movies, student can actually learn sentence formation and construction through subconscious learning with.

They developed from the subtitle and the actual, uh, character narration from the novel, from the movie so that they can get OK. This is how a sentence should be narrated and that subconsciously create a sentence construction into them and that helps them to be a better pronouncer. Even they develop their pronunciation skills better from movies. So these are some supports I give to my slow learner so that they can build confidence when they come in front of the class and talk.

Thank you, Professor. Your focus on peer learning, individual feedback, and subconscious learning strategies like using movies is both innovative and thoughtful. I see that you incorporate many creative and research-driven methods to support various learner levels. Let me ask—how do you balance your dual focus on teaching innovation and your research in projects like digital humanities?

Everything is about time management. I work precisely with my time management. So every time I work in my campus, I go prepared for my classes. So every time I go before the class, I prepare at least 30 minutes for how to creatively make the students involved into my class. So actually, I work with the most current trending activities that can engage and make students more driven into my things. Likewise, the technology integration for Xmly if I go and teach. To the biotechnology students, I tell them about the GMOs and what are the cloning problems that the currently the world is facing and how the genetically modified organisms beat the plans, How are they evolving and how it is actually helping us feed the population and how would this helping us to give more yield than the traditional seeds. So I I talked both the pros and cons and then I make them to be a person to speak from their perspective about the pros and cons. So that actually engages the students towards my classroom and from this kind of teaching method and more about the speaking, I make them write about it. So right, in a way it is like they write it as a report. I asked them to take one particular kind of scene and its evolution throughout like 30 years and then they have to give a feasibility report. How feasible is that to be done in a particular land which is not as fertile? So they will be talking about seeds that can be.

So I think that.

Cultivate in unforeseen lands and which can be improved in the basic fertility can be improved with word and these are the things they they have to write it as a feasibility report and this helps them for their further academic and internship activities. So this is how my focus is towards teaching and apart from that research I manage my time at two hours per day to read and then to study articles, to develop and to understand what are the current researchers in digital humanities.

Currently, I'm evolving more digital humanities because I'm more fascinated about it, because the moment I started my PhD, I know dealing humanities is an emerging area and I had very more passionate passionate about the film and activations. So I did my PhD thesis on film adaptations or Dan Brown's novel and how the textual narration converted into visual narration. And I'm also simultaneously doing work filament adaptations of Agatha Christie's and and.

Uh, Stephen King and also I'm exploring into digital humanities because I can incorporate film studies and digital humanities as A1 component. Through this, I can explore the computational tools and its components towards my research. So then I can, I currently learning Python And I'm more about the prompt engineer. I've been certified in three courses by Adobe and Google and I've been saying recently. Certified by Board Infinity on Prompt Engineering, which is an advanced level certificate.

And likewise, I'm also recently doing a Python learning process for so as to improve my, uh, clustering knowledge towards programming so that I can use more computational tools for my research on data analysis and data constructions on the projects I'm working. And I'm also improving myself towards upgrading in even areas of the post colonial studies in order to understand the history to make better tomorrow. So these are my research interests and this is how I manage my time.

For research and also this is how I do my academic work.

Yup.

Please go ahead, Professor. I’d like to hear how your work in film studies and digital humanities has directly impacted your students' learning experience.

Though I teach digital parities by first grounding the students in core humanities concepts such as narrative, disc roles and interpretation, I introduce them to the digital tools gradually for textual analysis, sentiment mapping, and digital data visualization, and without overwhelming dynamics technology. Because students work on small scale projects, they need to analyze the text first, so they need to understand about the literary components of analyzing. Or a film or a social media discourse to understand how a bias is formed or how a character's description is narrated throughout the novel or how to profile a character in the novel. So with this basic idea, they can analyze the text and from this they can go for the sentiment mapping, which is a computational part that that is actually done with where dark or tool. I primarily work on where dark tool for my sentiment analysis. And from that I get the.

Data for the visualization which I give the four polarized components of my sentiment outputs and from which this approach helps the students to understand the extension of critical thinking rather than the replacement of traditional literary study. As digital manages more evolving, it is about the conversion of the in traditional researchers into more data based and the data interpreted and more about how we provide. Data-driven output which also.

Gives a more solid surety towards the result that we are doing because with data we can be more sure that the research is promising. So that is how the digital in manages will benefit the students and this is how it them from the ground level of understanding the basic narrative functions and in the interpretation and then gradually helping them to understand the digital tools and how it works. So that requires a a primary understanding of the computer science. Programming things and that can be taught in the class and as now we have.

The extensive support of AI and we can actually teach them how to use AI for programming, how to use AI for problem solving, how to use AI for digital humanity aspects, which can reduce our workload to a greater extent.

Thank you, Professor. Your approach of grounding students in core humanities concepts before introducing computational tools and AI demonstrates a measured and thoughtful integration of technology. Teaching students to combine traditional literary analysis with sentiment mapping and visualization not only enhances their critical thinking but also equips them with modern research skills. How do you envision these interdisciplinary skills preparing your students for future academic or career opportunities in the humanities field?

Yeah, because the future of humanity is actually based on how we develop the critical inquiry. As far as digital humanities is concerned, the a driven analysis to study literature and the social discourse is the future in humanity. So I see this as opportunity to introduce it to the students to improve their literary studies because as we see the students literary level of understanding the novels can be upskilled in a larger extent with the. At incorporation of digital humanities, so which give the data-driven analysis for them for their future is achievable because as we know, the ground researchers are basically more data-driven and digital humanities helps us to more into meaningful, meaningful academic environment where we provide data for the research act we do from the traditional things. So that is how I feel it a more interesting thing for the academic career because taking up research or being a.

In the project, they need to know the, uh, the programming skills. Likewise, Python is a more, uh, competent, uh, tool that needs to be known to all the students. So I would prefer as a digital humanities researcher, I think that AI and the basic coding knowledge can get them into a, uh, grid area of exploration towards, uh, in the, in the, in the, in the side of the humanities aspect because. Being being a person from this I can know that the future is more dependent on.

Humanities, as we see and its emergence starts with digital humanities and for the student to be involved in this can impact a great extent of knowledge.

For them.

Understood, Professor. Your vision of equipping students with a combination of critical inquiry and programming skills to engage with emerging fields like digital humanities is insightful. By integrating data-driven methodologies with traditional humanities, you're enabling students to navigate both academic research and practical applications in an interdisciplinary landscape. Let’s now shift to discussing your experience in guiding student projects and research. How have you approached mentoring students in their academic or research projects, particularly in interdisciplinary fields like the ones you've mentioned?

So the intertwinary field I'm currently working is the Seri project which is an institutional project and the project title is #bias Inequality A driven insights into India's gender discourse. And this applies digital universities method of analyzing the large social media data.

And in this the thematic clustering is actually done by two students from CSE and in those two students, one student is working under the natural languaging process and the other student is working under the sentiment analysis. Actually I'm trained the students to understand how gender equality works and theoretical and the research based data I'm feeding to them, they actually develop the. Tool based on that. They develop the tool based on that, so a final framework comes.

So when this framework comes, we use this data to analyze it, uh, analyze the comments and the tweets or the Reddit, uh, Reddit conversations or the Reddit posts that are posted or the Instagram comments, Instagram post, Instagram hashtags. Our framework is to develop how is the source determined? So the source of, uh, bias is our determination. We need to find where it starts and if we use the computational analysis, we can. Is the condom contemporary issue through the cultural and the ethical understanding because it differs with all culture as India is very wide with cultures and we need to understand all the cultural traits to create a framework. So this framework needs LLB and not only. We need to understand the sentiment of every particular tradition and so that we can come up with the actual meaning of each sentence so that we can develop a framework to understand what is the underlying situation or the underlying meaning. Of a person to put up put up a particular statement. And mostly I can see the gender bias is towards the women community in the society that is actually targeting them towards their substantial growth, their work they get to places they reach greater heights. But The thing is like the society is not really acknowledging they would rather than it's diminishing their achievements by. Directly posting negative comments and this study I'm I've currently undertaken is in the verge of completion. I'll be completing that.

Sorry

Within the first quarter of this year and the final framework might be a greater understanding for the future researchers to work on this to get a clear understanding of how and what is the underlying influencing factor that creates online negativity.

Yeah.

Please continue, Professor. I’d like to hear more about your strategies for mentoring students or anything additional you'd like to share about your approach.

I want to tell how I want to contribute the research to create because I plan to contribute through interdisciplinary digital humanities research. Through quality publication and collaborative collaborative projects, I aim to align my work with institutional research policies, external funded projects, and involve students in data-driven humanities research. I also intend to contribute to the curriculum development by integrating digital humanities modules into literature and ELD.

And uh, if I'm asked to make like how suitable is this specialization, I would say the combination of strong humanity's training, practical yield experience and applied deal with Mathis research. I do not treat digital humanities as purely technical field, but as a critical interpretative space where technology enhances humanistic inquiry. This balanced perspective allows me to contribute meaningfully to teaching, research and institutional growth. So. That is my primary understanding of my contribution towards VAT.

If I get an opportunity to serve to the institution.

Thank you, Professor. Your vision for integrating interdisciplinary digital humanities research into both curriculum development and institutional growth is well-articulated. Emphasizing a balance between technical tools and critical humanistic inquiry positions you as an advocate of meaningful academic innovation. You've shared a comprehensive view of your intentions and approaches. Is there anything specific you would like to add or clarify further regarding your academic goals or contributions?

Yeah, I would say that uh, my academic intentions with uh, uh, vit is like I want to be an established faculty member contributing to the field of my research and to be an innovative faculty in teaching to do more inter interdisciplinary collaboration. And I want to mentor students in research project and participate actively in academic initiatives that strengthens the.

This is my core understanding and core goal for the institution and to maintain and enhance the academic reputation of PIT.

Institutions Profile.

So I wonder if thing that I will talk a lot about my research, but I want to tell you my strength as a teacher. My strength as a teacher lies in my ability to connect with students and make English accessible and relevant. I combine academic vigor to practical application, ensuring students not only to understand concepts but also use English effectively in real time situation, real life situation.

Thank you, Professor. Your dedication to mentoring students, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and contributing to institutional reputation aligns well with the academic ethos of a forward-thinking institution. It's clear that you're committed to both the growth of your students and the academic community as a whole. Would you like to share any closing thoughts or perhaps emphasize a key point about your teaching methodology or research focus before we conclude?

Thank you for sharing that, Professor. Your strength in fostering meaningful connections with students while blending academic rigor with practical applications is a powerful asset. By making English both accessible and relevant, you ensure a transformative learning experience for your students. It’s been a pleasure discussing your teaching philosophy, research approach, and institutional vision. If there’s nothing more you’d like to add, would you like us to conclude the conversation here?

Yes.