The National Council of Educational Research and Taraining as the apex organisation for imparting quality education all over the country is involved in developing pedagogic tools for effective teaching and learning. As part of this responsibility, it develops curriculum frameworks, syllabi, textbooks, supplementary readers and other teaching-learning materials. In this endeavour of enhancing the teaching-learning of History, the Council has developed a Dictionary of History for Schools-Trilingual (English-Hindi-Urdu).
History as a component of the social sciences till the secondary stage and as an elective subject at higher secondary stage requires appropriate pedagogical support for effective teaching learning. The terms and concepts used in the discipline can be appropriately assimilated, understood and learnt by students through a dictionary that will be appropriate to their level, need and learning expectations. Therefore, it was considered, extremely worthwhile to conceive, design and develop a dictionary of important terms and concepts in History for school-going children and teachers.
It is not to say that dictionaries of this sort are not available in History but by virtue of their being too exhaustive and specific, these are not meant for school going children. There are some dictionaries which have been developed either based on events or on different periods of Indian history. Some of the available dictionaries have entries only on important personalities, whereas some other have a mixture of entries on personalities, important writings, events, places, archaeological sites so on and so forth. These dictionaries are essentially meant for students at higher levels of specialised education. These dictionaries have very few entries on terms and concepts occurring in the study of History. For school students these dictionaries turn out to be inappropriate, thus creating a gap in this area.
The History textbooks brought out by the NCERT have no doubt provided explanations of some terms and concepts to cater to the requirement of transacting specific themes in classrooms but still there are many such terms and concepts which require explanations. This necessitated the development of a dictionary in History which will not only do justice to the themes that have been delineated in the textbooks but will also go beyond those to apprise students about diverse facets of India's historical development from the earliest times to the present. It is therefore, expected that a dictionary can go a long way in meeting the curriculum and pedagogic requirements of both students and teachers of history at all levels. This dictionary covers all periods of history of India and world (i.e. ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary) and therefore, should be viewed within this broad context of supplementary reference works.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) brings out diverse teaching-learning materials for the qualitative improvement in school education. The trilingual Dictionary of History (English-Hindi-Urdu) for school children developed by the Department of Education in Social Sciences (DESS) reflects efforts of the NCERT in this direction. The dictionary includes historical terms and concepts, most commonly used in History textbooks of the NCERT along with other relevant and popularly used terms in History.
History, as a component of the general Social Sciences, is a compulsory subject in Classes VI to X and is offered as an elective subject in Classes XI and XII. The students often face difficulties in understanding certain historical terms and concepts. Sometimes, they are familiar with a term in English/Hindi/Urdu, but are not able to explain or elaborate the same in the language used for medium of instruction, which may be different. Thus, efforts have been made to facilitate learning in history with the help of this dictionary. Each term and its explanation has been given in all the three languages together, so that students can refer to any version whichever they feel comfortable with. It is hoped that this work of the department to provide explanation for terms and concepts in the subject area in three languages together would be useful to all students following different mediums of instruction.
It is, indeed, a great pleasure for me to appreciate the efforts of the members of the development committee for preparing this trilingual subject dictionary of this kind for the first time. Development of curricular materials is an on-going process in NCERT and since the road to improvement is never ending, we look forward to your suggestions and comments.
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