Teaching beyond the book: The next challenge for humanities

This is not an attack on print medium, or the written word. Print remains one of the great technologies through which humans store thought and feeling. But in many humanities classrooms, print has hardened from a medium into a mindset.

We teach as though serious interpretation begins and ends with the bound text, ignoring the reality that students inhabit a world where language is composed of images, sounds, interfaces, archives and code.

Marketing designers have spent years navigating the merger of word and visual. Today, an ad is read through text, colour, sound and timing; a political message lands as a clip, meme or viral video. Public culture is no longer organised by the printed page alone. Yet, humanities education often behaves as if print were its sole legitimate vessel of complexity.


What is lost when we treat digital or visual as an elective, rather than a core object of study? A student capable of dissecting a 19th-c. novel but blind to the politics of a campaign graphic or an interactive archive is not being well-served by his or her education.

This is compounded by deep-seated curriculum inertia. Which is ironic, because the humanities have never been static. Print itself was once a disruptive technology, a way of standardising communication that eventually became default for academic life. For centuries before that, orality and, subsequently, print weren't silos, but existed in overlapping modes of existence.

The task is not to abandon books but to end 'print anxiety', fear that admitting newer forms into the classroom will dilute rigour. Students need more rigour, not less, precisely because communication has become harder to parse. In a world of captioned images and text-overlay videos, interpretation demands a keener eye.

What happens when, say, Begum Rokeya's 1905 proto-feminist science fiction classic, Sultana's Dream, steps out from the printed page and reappears as Afrah Shafiq's Sultana's Reality, an interactive digital work of text, sound, animation and archival collages? It is met with shock and awe.

It also quietly exposes a crisis in the humanities in India. Our universities train students to read books, but they leave them ill-prepared to interpret the forms through which culture actually reaches them today. The humanities should lead this adaptation. Political science classrooms could dissect how ideology travels through campaign visuals. Sociology could treat online self-fashioning and platform behaviour as central to social life, not as a side issue for a media-studies elective. English Literature could pair teaching Chaucer with The Canterbury Tales Project, which focuses on digitally transcribing, collating and editing the surviving 15th-c. manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales.

A 3-step approach can be considered:

Departments build modules that treat print and digital forms as equal sites of interpretation, rather than just 'assigned text' plus 'fun activity'.

Universities create foundational courses in digital humanities and electronic literature, taught from within the department, rather than outsourcing 'the digital' to computer science.

Experiments must inform curriculum and policy, ensuring digital literacy is treated as a fundamental humanistic competence.

Performance and media studies already offer a blueprint. They have long grappled with embodiment, spectatorship and technology. Not imitating them wholesale, other disciplines could adopt their attitude to treat non-print forms with analytical seriousness.

The goal is to make the humanities adequate to the world they claim to interpret. If we want to revitalise the study of language and literature, we shouldn't reduce it to skills training, or freeze it in a print-only past.

We should ask a simpler question: are we teaching young people to think with the world as they actually perceive it? When images, words and videos collide daily, an education that treats only one of these as 'serious' isn't conservative but incomplete. A structural integration of multimodal literacies requires dedicated hiring, design and updating of curricula. It's essential to reclaim the fields as sites of rigorous contemporary inquiry to ensure our tools of critical thought match the complexity of the current information landscape.

{The writer is assistant professor, Department of English, GITAM (Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management), Hyderabad.}