Anindita Bhadra is a behavioural biologist at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata. She also leads the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 at the institution. In this email interview with IndiaBioscience, she throws light on the steps taken to implement the policy, the changes that this has brought, and the challenges ahead.

Are we living ‘beings’? Or are we living ‘becomings’—constantly changing due to life processes occurring across levels of time and space? In the second (and final) part of this article series, Vasudev Menon, an Assistant Professor of Biology and Performing Arts (Theatre) at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, explains the worldview held by a school of philosophers that is central to understand the diversity and dynamicity of our biosphere.

What is the living world made up of? In a series of two articles, Vasudev Menon, an Assistant Professor of Biology and Performing Arts (Theatre) at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune, contrasts the way two philosophical views answer this question. He opines that understanding these views would help students place what they study in the ‘life sciences’ in context. This article is the first part of the two-part series.

Teachers often rely on tests and exams to understand how well their students are learning the subject. However, the traditional approaches of assessment end with giving marks or grades to the students. What if teachers could do more than just give marks to students? In this article, an educator tries a different approach to assessing answer sheets and shares her experiences from it.

Low exposure to research, often due to the financial constraints of college laboratories, and extensive curriculum can make studying biology unexciting for students. This short article on ​‘frugal science’ describes how paper, a cheap and familiar material, has been developed into instruments to study nature and stimulate creativity and curiosity in students.