Dr Anamika
Dr Anamika will be at the GEI as Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow from May to October 2025.
Critical pedagogy drives Anamika’s teaching praxis, which is laid on the essential foundation of critical consciousness. She started her journey of Critical Pedagogy with her doctoral work on “Pedagogy of Human Rights Education in the Elementary Schools of Taipei and New Delhi: Probing the Role of Social Science Teachers” conducted at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, enabled by a Taiwan Government PhD Scholarship (2006–2009). Her PhD thesis laid the foundation for her long-term commitment to human rights education. Currently, she teaches at the Indus Training and Research Institute, Bangalore, India, where she strives to nurture committed, empathetic, and imaginative pre-service and in-service teachers imbued with critical consciousness. Her academic focus remains on human rights education, and she has extensively published in this area. Her most-cited work, “Pedagogy of Human Rights Education and Secondary School Pre-Service Teachers in India: Philosophy and Praxis,” was featured in PROSPECTS: UNESCO’s Quarterly Review of Comparative Education (2017) and is now part of the UNESCO Digital Library. She has published in the area of comparative education, history textbooks, human rights and Gandhian Philosophy, digitalisation and higher education, and internationalisation of higher education. She is also a member of the International Editorial Board of the Human Rights Education Review Journal. In this capacity, she reviews scholarly articles, contributing to the journal’s commitment to high-quality publications and staying abreast of the latest research in her field. Additionally, she engages with wider audiences through op-ed contributions to The Indian Express, a national newspaper where she addresses major educational and policy issues, bridging academia and public discourse.
Anamika realises that peace is everybody’s concern, and as a human rights scholar, she should work on it. While working on the proposal on educational media and sustainable peace for the Georg Arnhold Programme, she felt an emergent need to work directly with young learners and researchers. She started The Muses Project in July 2024 to promote positive peace through storytelling, deep reading, literacy endeavours, and research. She runs a YouTube channel for young learners where she weekly narrates stories on friendship to promote peace and harmony. She conducts weekly sessions on deep reading with young learners who can read and write well to promote critical thinking. She meets young learners who cannot read or write fluently thrice a week to build on their literacy competencies. She also has weekly sessions with young researchers who discuss their research ideas in a group and promote research-mindedness informed by critical consciousness. Her engagement with The Muses Project, research and teacher training provides her life purpose and meaning.
GEORG ARNHOLD SENIOR FELLOWSHIP 2025
Dr Anamika is dedicating her fellowship at the GEI to a study that explores the role of education in sustaining peace through the vision articulated in the national curriculum frameworks and educational media in the countries ranking high and low on the global peace index. An education system imbued with the idea of sustainable peace is instrumental in creating harmony, tolerance, equitable access to resources, and freedom in laying down the democratic processes in society. Consequently, education takes the onus of designing learning experiences permeated with the founding principles of peace, such as non-violence, resilience, respect for all, equality, fairness, religious harmony, and socio-economic justice. Shaping future generations through this education will ensure sustainable peace. The objectives of her project “Global Peace Through Educational Media” are: to identify visions from selected national curriculums promoting sustainable peace; to identify the content, themes, ideas, images, issues and situations that are critical for sustainable peace within secondary social science textbooks and curricula; and to propose implications for education policymakers, social science textbook content developers, teachers, and parents in India and elsewhere to address the absence or diminished presence of sustainable peace.
