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My Family: Classroom Exercises on Unlearning and Learning About Families

B. Devi Prasad (School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India)

Shivangi Deshwal (School of Social Work, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA)

Indian Families: Contemporary Family Structures and Dynamics

ISBN: 978-1-83797-596-9, eISBN: 978-1-83797-595-2

Publication date: 21 June 2024

Abstract

Teaching about families in a classroom may seem rather simple and uncomplicated because families are thought to be familiar settings – a part of our day-to-day life experience. Most often the task is not that simple. For this purpose, personal and familial biographies of students were used as part of family pedagogy for understanding the family structure and value orientations. Such an approach requires respect for students’ lived experiences as valid knowledge to use as a subjective and experiential journey to teach about families. There is a dearth of such pedagogical approaches to teach about the complexity and diversity of families in India. This chapter documents such an attempt to teach students, using three exercises, the concepts of family through experiential learning. The concepts include the myth of a normative family, nature of family change, and multigenerational extended kin relationships. The first author developed the teaching exercises and used them in the classroom. The data were collected across three consecutive MSW (Children and Families Concentration) batches of 2012–2016 from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. A focus group interview method was used, and qualitative analysis was undertaken. The analysis of the data deconstructed the myth of the so-called normative family, helped to understand family change, and showed the presence of a range of multigenerational extended relations in families in the Indian context. The results of our study will be useful for researchers, practitioners, and teachers to employ experiential learning techniques in teaching about families in India through classroom interaction.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the students of 2012–2014, 2014–2016, and 2016–2018 batches of Centre for Equity and Justice for Children and Families for their active participation and the information provided by them which formed the basis for the study. Our thanks are also due to Dr Madhura Nagchoudhuri, School of Social Work, TISS, for her valuable inputs on the previous versions of this chapter.

Citation

Prasad, B.D. and Deshwal, S. (2024), "My Family: Classroom Exercises on Unlearning and Learning About Families", Chandra, V. and Blair, S.L. (Ed.) Indian Families: Contemporary Family Structures and Dynamics (Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, Vol. 26), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 179-200. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1530-353520240000026009

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited