The Familiar and the Self: Reflections from Teaching Sociology Online in India

Interrogating the familiar is seen as a benchmark of good sociological research. As teachers of Sociology, we have to teach courses that question and critique the familiar regularly. It is a mammoth task. The enormity of the job is further increased by the fact that the teacher is part of the same social institutions as the students. As such, how does a teacher deal with their own assumptions while teaching? How does one teach young students to question and challenge the familiar that all of us are a part of? How does one teach the self which is a part of the familiar? I try to address some of these questions in this piece drawing from my own teaching experience. It has been my experience that the challenges of teaching the familiar and the self are augmented by the online mode. With the boundaries between the home and the university getting blurred in the online mode, the difficulties in defamiliarizing are even stronger. This challenges the core itself of Sociology. Apart from limiting the interaction between students and the teacher, there is also less scope for peer-based learning in the online classroom. Thus, there is a need to re-think the nature of the online classroom and the teacher that can help Sociology in continuing to question the familiar.