Happy Teachers’ Day. Please Upload the Evidence.
Every Teachers’ Day arrives with its familiar ceremonial grammar. Students bring flowers. Institutions produce posters. Social media teams locate an appropriate quotation about teachers shaping the future. By evening, the teacher has been thanked, tagged and converted into content.
The following morning, the same teacher returns to attendance spreadsheets, learning-management systems, accreditation evidence, workload calculations, student-retention meetings and a timetable that appears to have been designed by someone experimenting on human endurance. This is funny because it is recognisable. It is also political.
The teacher in contemporary higher education occupies a curious position. Institutions describe teaching as a noble calling while organising it increasingly as a service transaction. The teacher must remain intellectually generous, emotionally available and administratively exact, while also meeting targets that belong more comfortably to customer management. Students arrive carrying the language of aspiration, anxiety and return on investment. Parents ask about placements. Management asks about retention. Accreditation asks for documentation. Marketing asks for photographs. Somewhere inside this crowded room, the teacher attempts to teach.
From knowledge worker to service provider
The neoliberal university rarely announces itself with ideological clarity. It enters through ordinary words: efficiency, scalability, deliverables, satisfaction, visibility, outcomes.
Each word carries some practical value. Educational institutions require accountability. Students deserve clarity, care and competent teaching. Public systems need standards. The difficulty begins when these managerial categories become the dominant way through which education can be recognised.
Knowledge develops through hesitation, failed attempts, disagreement, repetition and periods in which very little appears to happen. A learner may spend three days making drawings that lead nowhere, then understand proportion through the fourth. A studio discussion may appear disorderly while quietly dismantling a student’s assumptions about caste, gender, consumption or visual taste. A material experiment may fail as an object and succeed as thought. These processes resist the clean temporality of the service economy. They cannot always be promised in advance, delivered on schedule and verified through a feedback score.
Yet the privatised institution increasingly needs education to appear predictable. Fees create expectations. Competition produces claims. Prospectuses promise transformation before the learner has entered the classroom. The institution therefore packages learning as a sequence of assured experiences, each with outcomes, rubrics and photographic evidence.
The teacher becomes responsible for reconciling the promise with the reality. This requires a peculiar professional performance: part scholar, part facilitator, part administrator, part counsellor, part event manager and, during inspection season, part archaeologist searching old WhatsApp groups for proof that a workshop occurred.
Design education enters the lecture hall
The pressure becomes sharper in design education because the studio carries a different structure of learning.
Design is learned through making, critique, observation, iteration, conversation and contact with materials, communities, histories and systems. A studio has rhythms that a lecture timetable finds difficult to understand. Students work at different speeds. Questions emerge from what they make. The brief changes as its assumptions become visible. The educator moves between demonstration, provocation, technical correction, historical framing and individual mentoring.
A studio with forty students is therefore more than a room containing forty chairs. It contains forty partially formed practices, forty uneven relationships with language and material, and usually at least six people who have misunderstood the brief in unexpectedly productive ways.
As design education expands in India, this model faces a structural problem. The growing demand for design education is worth welcoming. Design should circulate beyond a small metropolitan and class-based enclave. Greater access can produce new visual languages, different questions and forms of practice rooted in places that the older design establishment often treated as peripheral.
Scale, however, is never merely a matter of admitting more students. It reorganises labour.
When studio education is inserted into systems built around lectures, periods, classrooms and examinations, its most demanding qualities become administrative inconveniences. Mentoring is counted as contact time. Critique becomes a scheduled activity. Process is converted into submissions. Collaboration is divided into individually assessable components. A workshop becomes a room with movable furniture, assuming the furniture is available and somebody has approved the purchase.
The studio then begins to resemble the lecture system around it while continuing to advertise itself as experiential education.
This is the central contradiction. Design education expands numerically while its pedagogical infrastructure often contracts. More students enter; each receives less sustained contact. More modules appear; less time remains for ideas to mature. More outcomes are specified; fewer unexpected outcomes survive.
The accreditation-shaped classroom
UGC and NAAC frameworks address real concerns: academic standards, equity, institutional responsibility, student support and the quality of teaching and research. The UGC describes its statutory role through the coordination and maintenance of standards in university education, while the NAAC framework evaluates institutions through criteria, key indicators and documented evidence.
The problem lies less in the existence of standards than in what happens when institutions treat the measurable as the educationally real. A criterion becomes a metric. The metric becomes a form. The form becomes a portal. The portal becomes a deadline. The deadline reaches the teacher with a message marked ‘urgent’.
Documentation then begins to precede pedagogy. A faculty member may conduct an intellectually rigorous studio and still be asked whether the activity was mapped to the course outcome, whether the outcome was mapped to the programme outcome, and whether photographs were taken with a date visible. The learning remains provisional; the evidence must be conclusive.
This creates an accreditation-shaped classroom. Teaching slowly adjusts itself to what can be reported. Activities become legible through counts: number of workshops, number of experts, number of field visits, number of publications, number of students placed. The meaning of those encounters receives far less attention because meaning occupies an inconvenient column width.
Even language begins to change. Students become stakeholders. Conversations become interactions. Thinking becomes ideation. A visiting practitioner becomes an industry interface. Tea with a craftsperson may require a memorandum of understanding before anyone is allowed to learn from it. Such systems produce a strange surplus. Institutions accumulate evidence of learning while teachers struggle to protect the time in which learning might occur.
The heroic design educator
Inside this arrangement, design educators are often pushed towards heroism.
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One version of the heroic teacher keeps the studio alive through personal labour. They stay late, mentor beyond assigned hours, arrange external experts through friendships, source materials informally and absorb the emotional consequences of an overextended system. They translate institutional language for students and pedagogical language for management. They fight for another week, another faculty member, another room, another line in the budget.
The institution benefits greatly from this figure. Heroism is cheaper than infrastructure. The educator’s commitment fills structural gaps, and the gap gradually disappears from official view. A module succeeds because somebody worked through two weekends. An exhibition happens because students and faculty paid for materials themselves. An interdisciplinary collaboration emerges through personal trust because the formal process would have taken longer than the semester.
The heroic teacher receives appreciation, perhaps even a Teachers’ Day card, while the conditions that demanded heroism remain intact.
Another educator responds by switching off. This response is often read as indifference, though it may be closer to self-preservation. Complete the forms. Deliver the prescribed content. Upload the marks. Avoid the meeting where every pedagogical question will be answered with a template.
Between burnout and withdrawal lies a difficult third position: remaining critically engaged without allowing the institution to consume one’s entire intellectual and emotional life. This position lacks glamour. It involves negotiation, collective organisation and a willingness to distinguish between a battle that changes the structure and a battle that merely produces another exhausting email thread. It also requires teachers to stop treating private overwork as proof of professional virtue.
Students are caught inside the same transaction
The shift from education to service also changes the student. A student who pays substantial fees has every reason to ask what an institution provides. Laboratories, competent faculty, accessible resources, transparent assessment and ethical administration are legitimate expectations. Consumer language becomes seductive because it offers a vocabulary through which students can demand accountability.
Yet consumerhood narrows the learner’s role. A customer receives. A learner participates, risks, argues, practises and occasionally produces work that is quite terrible before it becomes interesting. Design education depends on this period of uncertainty. Students must encounter briefs whose answers remain unsettled. They need critique that exceeds reassurance. They need to understand that process is more than a polished double-diamond diagram placed in a jury presentation five minutes before submission.
The marketised institution often fears this uncertainty because student satisfaction has become both an ethical concern and a reputational measure. Satisfaction matters, but learning and satisfaction follow different timelines. A demanding critique may feel uncomfortable today and become intellectually decisive two years later. A popular module may offer an enjoyable week with very little that survives it.
The teacher consequently manages another contradiction: caring for students while resisting the idea that care means removing every difficulty from learning.
Teaching design after the age of certainty
The present moment also changes what a design teacher can credibly claim to know. Software shifts rapidly. AI systems generate images, interfaces and research summaries within seconds. Professional roles mutate before curricula complete an approval cycle. Students sometimes encounter new tools earlier than their faculty.
This need not diminish the teacher. It can release the teacher from the performance of omniscience. A design educator’s work increasingly lies in constructing conditions for judgement. Which problem deserves attention? Whose knowledge enters the brief? Who supplies the data? Which labour remains hidden behind an automated output? What material is extracted, and from where? Who bears the cost when a seamless interface meets an unequal society?
These questions require more than technical currency. They require history, ethics, political attention and the courage to let a studio remain open long enough for disagreement to develop.
The teacher here becomes a co-investigator with institutional responsibility. They bring experience without claiming final authority. They recognise student knowledge while retaining the duty to challenge weak reasoning. They make space for uncertainty while setting standards for rigour. This is a more demanding role than content delivery. It is also far more useful.
Scaling relationships, rather than merely enrolments
The future of design education depends on how we understand scale. If scale means larger cohorts placed into existing timetables, the studio will become increasingly theatrical. It will retain pin-up boards, sticky notes and jury vocabulary while operating as mass instruction.
If scale means expanding the capacity for situated learning, different questions appear. How many students can one faculty member seriously critique in a day? What kinds of peer learning can carry intellectual weight? How should studio hours be counted? Which activities require smaller groups? Where can communities of practice replace individual heroics? How can regional knowledge and local material cultures shape curricula, rather than appearing as decorative case studies?
Technology can help with access, documentation and routine feedback. It can free some time. It cannot manufacture attention.
Attention remains the scarce material of education. A teacher looking carefully at a student’s work, asking why an image has been made in this way, noticing what the student has avoided, and returning the work with a better question: this exchange refuses easy scalability. Its apparent inefficiency is precisely where education happens.
A Modest Teachers’ Day proposal
Teachers deserve gratitude. They also deserve contracts, time, studios, institutional trust, manageable cohorts and the right to participate in shaping the systems through which their work is judged. Flowers can remain. Cake can remain too; late capitalism has already taken enough from us.
But perhaps Teachers’ Day can also become an annual institutional audit of a different kind. How much time did teachers spend teaching? How much disappeared into avoidable administration? Which experiments were supported? Which failed without punishment? How many faculty members carried an unsustainable workload because commitment was treated as an endlessly renewable resource? How often were teachers consulted before academic decisions entered the timetable?
These questions produce forms of evidence that may resist a dashboard. They still matter.
The teacher today is neither the sacred guru of nostalgic imagination nor the smiling service provider of the educational marketplace. The teacher is a worker within an institution, an intellectual within a bureaucracy, and a participant in a contested public culture. In design education, they are also the person trying to explain why a studio cannot be run like a lecture course while standing in a lecture hall filled with sixty students. That figure deserves more than celebration. They deserve allies.
Happy Teachers’ Day. The evidence of teaching may take a little longer to upload. The teaching is still in progress.
