Critical Writing Pedagogies Symposium
The Undergraduate Writing Programme (UWP) hosted the second edition of their Critical Writing Pedagogies Symposium on the 18th and 19th of April, 2026. Through paper presentations, lesson demonstrations and an interactive exhibition on ‘play’ as a pedagogical method, it brought together educators and practitioners from diverse institutional and independent contexts, such as Azim Premji University, St Stephen’s College, O.P. Jindal Global University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Guru Gobind Singh University, among others.
The event was preceded by a workshop-style teaching demonstration by Professor Deepak Mehta (Sociology) in which a gathering of fifty faculty members, PhD students, Teaching Fellows and ICT Instructors witnessed Prof. Mehta’s pedagogy in action and considered their own imagination of teaching.
This spirit of inquiry carried into the symposium’s opening, where keynote speaker Akhil Katyal (poet, translator, and Head of the Writing Centre at BITS Law School), reminded the audience – principally teachers of writing – that they are often the first witnesses to a student’s discovery of ‘self’. And yet, he observed, this rarely happens by design. It is most often encountered in the many “detours” taken along the journey of growing with the student, through the unexpected tangent in the classroom, fragmented essay drafts or meandering conversations during office hours. It served as a fitting provocation for a symposium concerned with what structured pedagogy can and cannot hold.
The papers which followed were grouped under three themed clusters. The first, Machines in the Loop, took stock of the growing presence of AI tools in students’ lives, exploring how writing, authorship, and language acquisition might be rethought in multilingual classrooms. It also nudged us to think about the harms of prescriptive feedback offered by AI tools and how to formalise AI usage policies for assessments. The second cluster, Writing as Dwelling, conversely discussed the elements which cannot be automated, such as collective meaning-making, reflective writing, and creative methods (like drawing) as a means of participating with texts. The third cluster of papers, Students before University, widened the lens further and offered ideas about using picture books to introduce humanitarian and critical thinking in early childhood, and examined what the politics of handwriting assessments revealed about Indian pedagogical practices.
Alongside the papers, the symposium also attempted a new format to share pedagogical practices – lesson demonstrations that allowed the audience to see teachers in action. These took the group through exercises around intralingual translation, the cultivation of “voice”, and the use of close-reading and misreadings as a pedagogical tool. There were also demonstrations which asserted the importance of ‘mapping’ emotions both for qualitative research and as part of teaching reflections. These were followed by “working groups”: active reflection spaces in which the audience shared their practices and experiences. The groups discussed, among other things, the possibilities of multilingual classrooms, the need to de-centre the authority of texts, and ways of embedding ‘self-reflexivity’ in student writing.
The symposium also featured an interactive showcase titled Play, Practice, Pedagogy, with six displays stemming from the UWP’s own Introduction to Critical Thinking classrooms. Designed entirely by student volunteers, the exhibit explored video games, theatre, picture books, ‘culture diagrams’, translation and sound as pedagogical tools to teach critical thinking. Each exhibit invited the audience to interact with the student work that had emerged from these classrooms. This was followed by a panel discussion with ICT instructors Aditya Vikram Srivastava, Jonmani Das, and Hiba Ahmed in conversation with Aditi Sriram (Head of the Writing Centre at Shiv Nadar School of Law), which delved into how play enters our classrooms both as a disposition and a method, and the impact of that play on the student-teacher dynamic.
The symposium ended with a closing “chatter” with the Heads of three prominent writing centres: Madhura Lohokare (Director of the Centre at O.P. Jindal), Krittika Bhattacharjee (Head of UWP at Ashoka) and Akhil Katyal. Moderated by Arpita Das (Associate Professor, UWP), this focused on the place of the writing programme in the university, the challenges of institutional legibility, and the need to expand the understanding of the ‘work’ of the writing teacher. How can programmes continue to argue for the time, space and attention needed for “detours”, or play? The panel reaffirmed the need to create new referents and networks for the Indian context, and to continue to share values and practices as the field expands in India and new writing centres are founded. The Critical Writing Pedagogies Symposium is an optimistic step in this direction.
