Good day, Jithin Joseph. 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?

Yes.

Could you briefly outline your professional journey in academia?

Of course.

Good evening, uh.

Good evening, I'm Doctor Jitin Joseph, uh, Presently I'm working as Assistant Professor at the Department of English Krasujayanti deemed to be university. I completed my PhD in the year 2023 from Central University of Tamil Nadu. The topic of my thesis was concrete abstraction, space body and marginalization of Dalits in Kerala during the 19th and 20th century.

Good

English I do offer two kinds of courses. Umm, the first category or the first set of courses are offered to the dinneries of science and uh, uh, business. Business.

Or commerce, umm.

In these courses, I basically offer some of the important required courses like Business Communication, Technical Writing and Content Writing and Content Writing for Social media. We have a curated set of contents offered in the syllabuses keeping in mind the basic requirements of these sceneries.

We also have integrated advanced technologies in the process of teaching.

And classroom experiences The second set of courses ioffer cultural studies and.

Digital humanities for these students. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Department of English at Christy Jayanti University.

We have a very peculiar.

Structure of her teaching currently in the institution where I work.

I have if you're looking at my research.

Profile you will understand that my area of my trust areas of interest in research are spatial criticism.

Critical spatial theory uh, spatial justice and the history of colonial modernity in Kerala umm, If you are trying to locate my interest of research interests in the context of the emerging trends uh, in literature and cultural studies, I would say that my research interest is quite aligned with the modern trends in the in researches in humanities, For example, my recent works are.

Umm are are based on the.

Emerging trends in the modern metropolises like Bangalore and Chennai I also.

UH keenly observed the, uh, modern a new developments in the field of spatial studies, especially uh in cities like Bangalore and Chennai because we have a a lot of opportunities and potentials to understand the new emerging trends in spatial studies. These are some of the insights about my area of research coming to the responsibilities that I am taking up in my current university. I am currently the Secretary of Board of Studies for the Department of English.

We where we actively take part in the process of framing syllabus and implementing syllabus in align with the new education policy NAP 2021. We have already implemented the NAP in 20/21/2021 itself. We have current batches studying or studying under NEP. I am also taking I'm also actively taking part in the process of documentation in the Department of English I am part of the department Quality Assurance cell where we.

Carefully.

Collect and document department activities for the purpose of different kinds of accreditations and ranking like NIRF and NAC.

I am also actively taking part in the extracurricular activities of the university. For example, I am the coordinator of the UPA Urad Bharadabi which is an initiative by the Government of India where we take the students to the villages and we provide them first hand experience of village life and we also encourage them to do surveys and analytical studies to understand.

The challenges that we face in the villages, I am also part of the EOC equal opportunity sell of the university.

Apart from that, I have been actively taking part in other department activities like department productions.

Umm uh, if you look at the umm teaching profile of myself, you will understand that I have also offered umm training sessions for the management students. Uh, I have provided hands on sessions and experiential learning sessions for management students on academic writing, umm and business writing, business communication and content writing. This is briefly about me.

Thank you, Professor. You've provided a thorough overview of your teaching and research activities. Now, I will assess your skills against specific competencies required for the role of English Professor. Let’s begin. First, regarding "Digital Humanities," could you explain how you integrate advanced technologies into your teaching methodologies for Digital Humanities courses? How does it enhance learning outcomes?

I can talk at length about this teaching experiences or the teaching practices that I implement in my classes, first of all.

I deal with some of the papers which are considered to be central to the discussions on digital humanities like popular culture and papers on culturalities, Introduction to cultural studies where we are dealing with texts that are aligning with the trends of the digital humanities like graphic novels and visual narratives. So my approach towards teaching is basically a student centered approach where I will be assessing the nature of the class 1st and the nature of.

The, the response of the students towards the UH syllabus, umm, and based on that only, we will be umm, initiating teaching pedagogies and teaching strategies or teaching practices in the class. So I, I will always try to integrate Ict-based methods in teaching. For example, I will promote umm learning, I mean learning through learning management systems. We have a very well established learning management system here in the department or in the university. So we have.

Multiple plugins which can be used to facilitate the learning process for the students. For example, we have a H5P video we have, quizzes we have, forums we have.

Assignments which can be given through the interface of learning management system. That is one of the ways we can integrate technology into this. Second one is we have observed, we have widely observed that the students has students have a progressive have an increasing trend towards moving away from the traditional teaching methods. For example, they are attention span is very limited and their screen time is quite considerably quite. Increasing these days.

So we thought of introducing teaching pedagogies or teaching methods or teaching practices that involves more screen time in the classroom itself. And we are also thinking quite seriously about using different AI interfaces like ChatGPT or Notebook or Gemini or. Different kinds of teaching aids Ai-based teaching aids in the classroom for preliminary discussions, for example, if you are teaching on a particular topic, we can maybe use.

AI for the brainstorming sessions, or maybe we can use AI, we can instruct or we can allow students to use AI to collect the primary information before they proceed to a critical analysis of the content and we can also have a very.

Involving or maybe accommodating space in the classroom if we have a different interfaces working in the classroom experience.

I also look into the possibilities of using technology in the formative assessment, especially when we are teaching digital humanities. We cannot assess the students outputs based on the summative assessment methods alone. So digital humanities enables us to use different modes of assessments. For example, we can ask the students to create videos, we can ask the students to go around.

Center and study about the Gen. C culture, Gen. C language and such and present it in the form of a video or video lecture or maybe a documentary or a short film. So there are innumerable possibilities when we teach digital humanities in the classroom by integrating or using different advanced technologies that are emerging in the field of education. Thank you.

Thank you, Professor. That was a comprehensive discussion regarding your integration of advanced technologies into teaching Digital Humanities. I appreciate the detail provided about tools like learning management systems, AI applications, and innovative assessment methods. Let’s move to the next competency. Can you describe how you approach teaching Commonwealth Literature? Specifically, how do you ensure students understand its historical and geopolitical contexts while also critically engaging with its thematic depth?

Facing Commonwealth literature.

Areas of interest because Commonwealth literature can bring in a lot of dialogues into the classroom.

Is actually one of my.

Uh, by the name itself, we know that Commonwealth literature is literature from the, uh, the, the, the nations which were previously colony of the Britain or other, you know, European nations. So, umm, the current theatrical trends that we can maybe say that that started to emerge from 1960s onwards, uh, and went on to have a lot of ripples in and around the field of literature and art can be brought into discussion.

And we are discussing Commonwealth literature and apart from that, Commonwealth literature is something that is actually driving the current literary trends, as far as I understand, because the experience of the experience that we find in the Commonwealth literature, especially the writers who are writing in Commonwealth literature or who belongs to the Commonwealth literature.

They are representing the marginal sections of the society most of the time and their content and themes or maybe the subject that they are discussing in their works.

In their texts are quite novel and quite unfamiliar and quite new to the world. That is why it is always a challenge as well as a fascination for me to teach Commonwealth literature and when it comes to telling stories and.

Umm, reading poems or maybe different genres of literature that comes from the Commonwealth literature? I would say that we have the canonical texts which are already introduced to the students. Or maybe they might.

Have they might have been introduced to the the classical text from the from their schools itself. Commonwealth literature is something that is not being exposed to much to the younger generation. So I think somebody who follows literature seriously, somebody who wants to teach, wants to introduce literature or demanding literature literary pieces in the classrooms and bring into discussions or maybe draw reflective.

And critical perspectives on literature. It is quite interesting to take up literature, the Commonwealth literature in the class Thank you.

Thank you, Professor, for that insight into your approach to teaching Commonwealth Literature. Your focus on fostering critical perspectives and addressing underrepresented voices is indeed commendable. Let me move to another critical area. How do you design and conduct student evaluations? Specifically, how do you balance formative and summative assessments to effectively gauge student learning and engagement?

Already mentioned in the beginning, my teaching approach is basically a student centered approach and we also follow the directions given by the National Education Policy NEP 21. NEP provides a very flexible platform for the evaluation process. And as I have mentioned, we are trying to balance summative and formative assessments or maybe we are trying to or maybe in the future we will be prioritizing summit form.

Assessment always submitted your assessment understanding that or by realizing that it is formative assessment that really brings out the real potential of the students. Or we can only measure the output that is being created by the syllabus or maybe the content that we are offering the courses that we are offering from the formative assessment. Because the learning process is a continuing process and the evaluation also should be following that continuation. It should be conducted at different intervals in the process of learning. So when it comes to.

My approach towards evaluation, I always prefer formative assessment for the comprehensive and holistic understanding of the academic growth of a student. But that will be done within the framework of the within the prescribed or stipulated framework of the syllabus only. And within this framework we have flexibility. I mean we have been offered with. Great flexibility to choose our evaluation methods, for example.

If I talk about my evaluation strategy, I would say that I mostly use learning management system and the plugins that are available in the learning management system to assess the progress of the students. For instance, we have an option called a workshop in the learning management system which can be used to assess students continuous progress over a period of time. For example if you are assigning a topic to the students.

In that process and the planning management system is configured in such a way that they have to go through different levels. And in one of the levels, there is even a possibility for the students student to evaluate his his peers or friends submissions and make their comments or maybe provide their or make their comments or give their grading before I finally evaluate and finalize the scores. So this is a very diverse and in a very, very much.

And if you give a deadline, maybe after one month they'll have to work through different levels.

I was an inclusive process of evaluation. What I have found out from this process is that especially from this particular assessment is that.

Uh, we offer students a peculiar chance to take part in the process of evaluation without actually tampering the process or without compromising the integrity of the process of evaluation. By doing that, students will be able to understand what are the important credentials for evaluating a particular topic or a particular assignment or a particular project that is given to them. So this knowledge will give them a better understanding about how to go with these projects that are given to them.

So I think this formative assessment should be prioritized over these summative assessment and summative assessment can be one of the important components in the whole process of assessment. But I think we should be prioritizing for media assessment and for major assessment can be done in different process. We can do it through activities, you can do it through AI applications. You can also do it through landing management system as I was mentioning. And it it actually diversifies the process of evaluation by that.

But by doing that, we can also actually bring in more transparency and inclusivity in the process of evaluation. Thank you.

Thank you, Professor, for detailing your evaluation methodology. Your focus on formative assessments and leveraging tools like learning management systems shows a thoughtful, inclusive approach to gauging student progress while enhancing their engagement in the learning and evaluation process. Now, let us move to the next competency. Could you outline how you approach guiding student projects and research? Specifically, how do you mentor students to ensure both academic rigor and alignment with their areas of interest?

I have been assigned with the two students, UH2PG students, uh, ask my wards, uh, for the PG project. So my approach approach is very simple and very transparent. Uh, and it is also very much, uh, practical. Uh, from my experience, I've been practicing it for the last two years. I have found out that, or I have realized that, uh, a PG student who is coming up with a project is not as ambitious as a PhD student.

So this will be a preliminary, preliminary level of research that they are seeking for. So we need to cater to those demands or those requirements when we are guiding a PG student for a project.

Uh, so the first thing that I would be doing, or maybe the first strategy I would be.

Implementing or maybe practicing is that I will ask them to explore the topic as much as possible by finding out review literature and doing reviews and taking opinion from others and searching different websites and sources. So I will ask them to gather maximum information and.

Make them rich with.

Information in and around this particular topic that they have chosen. So after doing that particular process of a review of literature, there might have a background in for basic understanding about what they are doing, and that would be something which is quite inevitable to dismiss the first hand.

Ambition that they have, they're coming up with because they might be very ambitious and they might be quiet.

Umm, there might. There might be very ambitious about their project and they will have a lot of unrealistic ideas when they meet us for the first time. So this review of literature and through which finding the gap will actually sort out this problem. That will give them a real understanding of the topic and make them understand what is the feasibility of this particular topic. Based on that, we can maybe change the topic or we can maybe.

Go a little further, or we can maybe take a little. We can maybe take a. Take a diversion from this or a digression from this topic. So that is the first thing I would be doing. And the second thing will be the writing process. Because as far as the PG students project concerned, we will have to give a very clear idea about the writing process because there may not be familiar with, they're not familiar with they may not be familiar with the process of writing research papers or academic papers. So the methodology classes or the the discussions on methodology will definitely.

Tighten them on the process of writing, how to write review of literature, how you how to formulate ideas, how to find out the research gap, how to frame the thesis research argument or the thesis statement, how to divide the chapters, how to place the chapters and how to how to maybe kind of have a balance of ideas.

How can be very disciplined in in in the process of writing. So these concerns in the practice of writings are of great priority to me when it comes to the PG projects. And I will also be stressing on the on on the process of the integrity of writing. For example, the language which they are writing should not be.

And thoughts being equally distributed in in chapters.

The AI enhanced language or AI, they should never be using AI for. They can use the AI for writing, but they should never be completely depending upon AI for writing in academic papers or research papers. So these are some of the important concerns that I would be keeping in mind. I'll be pressing all throughout the process of research if it is.

Umm, with the PG students, umm, and uh, that is, that is it I think.

Thank you, Professor, for detailing your mentoring strategy. Your structured approach—from literature review and identifying research gaps to fostering disciplined writing processes—shows a strong commitment to guiding students with both academic rigor and practical relevance. Let me proceed further. Next, could you share how you approach developing curricula for courses? Specifically, how do you align syllabi with institutional objectives, student needs, and contemporary academic trends?

Framing syllabus, uh, or curriculum is one of the most important responsibilities that we, uh, as teachers, uh, do or take up. So for me, curriculum is, umm, is something that is foolproof, which has to be very well, uh, integrated with the current trends in the field of education and with the field of knowledge. So it should be a foolproof.

Umm, very composite form of form of knowledge that we are framing in the form of curriculum. So when it comes to curriculum, my priorities will be differing based on the, the, on the greeneries that we are offering this course to. For example, if I'm offering this course to the management Deanery, uh, the.

The content will be chosen or maybe selected based on the priorities of the management department. For example, we'll be integrating more content, or maybe you'll be integrating more teaching strategies or learning strategies that will enable students to facilitate their communication skills, business communication skills, their language, language skills, their technical writing skills, their content writing skills, their competency in expressing themselves or involving in.

Skills and options will be more prioritized if I'm off offering it to the management department. So the curriculum that we are framing will definitely be based on the course, uh, the students, uh, to whom it is being offered. That is the first thing we'll be looking into. I'll be looking into the second one. Institutional integrity or in the goals of the institution is, plays a very, very crucial role in framing the syllabus. We have to align, uh, the syllabus and the content that we are putting it putting, putting there with.

So these kind of language techniques and practical language.

Principles and values of the institution, it should be going, it should be going in hand, hand in hand with the institutions principles definitely. And I would also say that teachers should be always updated. So the curriculum should be the most updated, most inclusive and and flexible form of form of framework of knowledge that it can maybe.

Receive the current trends or emerging trends that is going to happen.

Once the that is going to come in even after the setting of the curriculum. So the I mean, I think it is a very meticulous process. Framing curriculum is a very meticulous and very dedicated process and very demanding process which has to be taken care of with much seriousness. And anybody definitely helps us to do this process. It lightens the task of framing the curriculum as far as I'm concerned, the the methods or maybe the practices or the strategies for framing a curriculum.

According to the new trends and the demands.

UMM have been well explained, uh, in the National Education Policies Framework. Thank you.

Thank you, Professor, for providing an intricate perspective on curriculum development. Your focus on aligning syllabi with institutional goals, student needs, and contemporary trends indicates a thoughtful and forward-thinking approach. Let us now move forward into the next competency. Could you elaborate on your approach to publishing research in reputed journals? Specifically, how do you ensure the relevance and quality of your research to meet high publication standards?

Publication is of great concern for me because it is something that that justifies our baby, that speaks for our academic integrity and our resourcefulness. So as a research scholar or maybe as a as a.

As a yeah, as an academic, our integrity or our credibility, our progress is always being defined by the publications that we are making because that is where we actually.

Give out. Or maybe that is where we actually exposes or expresses our expertise on these fields. So my approach towards publication is very simple. This is something that have been practicing for a while now.

I do research in two ways. The first one is collaborative research, second one is project based research. In the collaborative research we have a team of people who belong to different who are coming from different reputed universities across India.

And globally. So we work together on topics that aligns with our area of interest of area of research. For example, we have in our group people who are working on different dimensions of spatial theory or spatial studies or urban spatial criticism. So we work together. We we, we work together, we contribute.

To each other's academic endeavors and that is one way we.

Do research and we also published together based on our it's a continuous process, so we continuously contribute to each other's opinions and ideas and that would finally materialize in the form of research. I think this is one of the best way to reach out to the World Academy community by making collaborations and it also increases the frequency of our publications. So that is the first thing, first way of doing research or that is the first dimension of my research.

The second dimension is actually or the the second dimension is actually the research that I'd be focusing.

With the research projects, I've been frequently applying for the research projects offered by the different institutions, both governments and non government institutions. I'm also closely analyzing the.

The functioning of these bodies and how do they really promote research and what are the basic requirements for getting proposals accepted by these agencies like ICSSR and different ministries? So I've been investing a lot of time off late.

On kind of.

To bring into proposals and submitted for the funding. I'm also trying to or I'm also exploring funding opportunities from abroad. Recently I was working on a project for the Spencer Foundation. I mean, I was working on an abstract, I was working on a project proposal for the Spencer Foundation. So we are exploring different avenues of project as well. And project is one of the, I think one of the most.

Writing research projects and finding out niche areas of research.

Important.

Field of research where we can continuously engage with experiential or qualitative research processes I also intend to publish in different.

Forms of publications, like it's not just about just confined to the journalists alone. I do publish in edited books, I do publish in handbooks, I do publishing special editions. Because when we are diversifying our publication in trust, we will get more acceptance, we'll get more citation, and we'll also get more readers. So this is basically how I approach research and that's how I do research.

Currently.

Thank you, Professor, for sharing your detailed approach to research and publication. Your emphasis on collaborative and project-based research, as well as diversifying publication avenues, demonstrates a strategic and resourceful commitment to academic contribution. Let’s proceed to the final competency. Could you explain how your teaching methodologies promote effective communication and a structured approach for your students, particularly in courses like English Language Teaching?

Time is up! Ending the interview now.