Introducing B.A. students to Hindi literary tradition through problem based learning (PBL)

PBL is known among its practitioners as a didactic method that greatly boosts students’ efficiency in learning to learn. It allows for a shift of the center of gravity from knowledge content to skills. Despite its long university career, it is not as widely widespread in human studies as, e.g. in social sciences or in medical studies for which it had been created. The present paper provides an outline of PBL for the purpose of its wider implementation in teaching literary studies. The paper presents a case study of a course in Hindi literary tradition along with a proposition of an introductory class for B.A. students to illustrate a new way of implementing the PBL method with due attention paid to a literary text as a problem case. Eventually, the paper seeks to demonstrate that even a short problem case enables the acquisition of a considerable amount of knowledge content.