The Zone of Productive Discomfort

When we face uncomfortable situations or experiences, our impulse is to escape or overcome the discomfort. Whenever we can, we do not deliberately choose discomfort.

Yes, there are powerful theories and beliefs that uncomfortable experiences are useful. Teachers, preachers, motivational speakers, and parents—or people who don’t have to show what they mean by example—are the biggest advocates of such theories. “Get out of your comfort zone,” many dads will say, “In the end it is good for you”!

However, regardless of the theories (and lectures), the same fact remains: we rarely “experience” discomfort as a good or pleasant thing in the process itself.

Now, is it practically possible to embrace discomfort as a positive experience? Are there ways to use discomfort as a teaching or learning tool that is not only “eventually” beneficial but also likable (if not pleasant) in the process itself?

My answer is yes. Let me share some thoughts and experiences.

Drawing on Lev Vygotsky’s notion of “zone of proximal development”—or the “difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help” (Wikipedia)—I have used in my classroom a concept that I call the “zone of productive discomfort.”* Primarily, I use this phrase in order to warn and prepare my students that we are about to enter an intellectually, culturally, or emotionally difficult territory. I have found that when both my students and I start by first of all recognizing the complexity of an issue, when are conscious and ready to address the complexity honestly, and  when we have an explicit and deliberate purpose for facing a discomfort-inducing idea, that discomfort seems to become much more acceptable and meaningful–if not desirable.

Let me step back for a moment and insert a little background here. When I first started teaching in the US, I didn’t want to bring in ideas and perspectives from different cultures into class discussions; in fact, I selected readings that I thought were about mainstream issues, I tried to “blend in” and learn from students about those issues, and I kind of tried to suppress anything “foreign” from getting into the mix. After about two years, in a Business Communication class, after watching a video that showed a breakdown of communication between two businessmen, one from New York and the other from Tokyo, I happened to somehow un-prohibit myself from bringing in “foreign stuff” into the discussion and tell the class a few stories of communicative breakdowns that I have encountered or heard about in real life. I had been thinking about this concept for a while, so I started by prefacing my stories with describing my concept and highlighting what we can gain by consciously entering uncomfortable discursive spaces. One of my stories was about saying something stupid in relation to a friend’s racial identity and then realizing that I was now in a society that has a difficult history (I grew up in societies that have other, hugely problematic social histories, but they were race-blind; thus, this anecdote involved my learning process that most teachers would not use as an example of cross-cultural communicative failure with students).

That day, I noticed something very intriguing in the class. First, while listening to my anecdotes, my students seemed totally mesmerized. Then, when I asked them to share any experience of communicative failures that they may have experienced, they opened up like anything and shared so many stories that I had to ask them to save the rest for the following class; some of the experiences that they shared would have been very embarrassing if I had not first created the right environment by establishing the value of discomfort as a learning tool, especially by making myself vulnerable. That day, the level of comfort with discomfort significantly changed for the rest of the semester!

From the above experience, I learned a few important things:

1. Even students who might be assumed to not know much about the larger world and other cultures outside the US generally know a lot about those issues;
2. Students are more willing to learn more and engage in or about cross-cultural dialog than it is assumed;
3. Students appreciate the teacher’s contribution to their process of or desire for thinking outside the box; and
4. If the teacher happens to be from outside, they not only accept but also highly appreciate the teacher challenging them to think outside the box, to explore and learn more about cultures and perspectives beyond what they currently inhabit or know about.

So, when I taught this course the next time, I increased the amount of reading, discussion, and writing about cultural awareness in business communication. When I had a relevant personal/social experience, I also shared it with more confidence, prompting students to also do the same.

In a course that I taught some time after, an Advanced Writing course for undergraduate honors, I took my students’ appreciation and desire for learning more about other cultures and different perspectives one clear step forward. I started this course by assigning reading, blogging, and class discussion activities on topics of cultural diversity in the US; but parallel to these initial readings, I introduced the idea of what I call the “discussion argument,” disallowing students to adopt the conventional approach of stating one position, finding evidence to support it, and trying to persuade the audience about the superiority of one unified argument or one point of view. In the “discussion argument” assignment, students had to study, discuss, and present at least three points of view.

At one point while students were writing the “discussion argument” papers, I asked them to NOT include their own favored point of view into the draft—but withhold it for including later on. That was when some real discomfort first surfaced. One student said something along the line of this: “This doesn’t make sense. If I’m not supposed to support ‘my’ argument, how is this an argument essay?” Another student said, “I’m a salesman and if I adopt this kind of approach, I’m gonna lose my job right away.” I said, “[Josh], This approach would be a real bad fit for marketing, so I don’t recommend it for rhetorical purposes like that; what we’re doing here is to use this strategy for learning things.”

Then I realized that I should have started by better explaining and justifying the strategy, and I did the rest of the semester. So the rest of the semester, I regularly reminded students that by rejecting the conventional model that essentially says “here is my point and here are the different reasons why my argument/perspective is right” I was asking them to enter the “zone of productive discomfort.” And I asked them to enter that zone with full awareness and purpose. And they did. This assignment went well.

After a few weeks, I shifted the focus of reading, writing, and discussion to issues of cultural, political and intellectual debates at the international level: the clash of civilizations, changing dynamic of geopolitical power, the pros and cons of globalization, environment and global poverty, and the complexity of culture and identity. Again, there was disinterest, confusion, resistance, and in one case criticism of the topics. One student initially called the readings “foreign,” implying that they were irrelevant, and another student found more than one readings on a given topic “repetitive” because he was not seeing that the readings actually adopted polemically different perspectives on the topic.

It was harder to get the point across this time, but eventually students were motivated to “go beyond” what one student humorously described as “more of the same [s*], instead of new ideas and perspectives.” That was the same student who found the readings “repetitive” at first. The assignment this time asked students to deliberately and purposefully engage in intellectually uncomfortable topics, perspectives, and/or cultural value systems. Not all groups found the most shocking subjects to work on, but they appreciated the idea of the “productive discomfort zone” and they went well beyond received perspectives on the topics of their choice.

For example, one group of students did a multimodal project on how beauty was defined and enacted in different cultures around the world. When they presented their project in class at the end of the semester, the images of “beautiful women” from around the world shocked other members of the class, who were not ready to go as far as women with huge metal plates pushing their lower lips out, with metal rings stretching their necks to scary extents, extraordinarily thin or fat, and so on. The presentations prompted great class discussions about how taking one set of cultural and social/political values, intellectual perspectives, and material realities for granted makes us limited in understanding, sensitivity, and even in the willingness to learn more. Looking at the pictures of some of the “beautiful women”—the class agreed—was not only uncomfortable but almost painful. But the use/purpose of the discomfort was clear: to understand different perspectives and learn better.

To put it somewhat theoretically, there are practical benefits of deliberately adopting discomfort as a means or environment for learning. Yes, we need to ask: What kind of and how much discomfort is productive in learning what and in what context? How can we make discomfort more productive? When and what amount is not worth it? But if we can convince ourselves or our students about the practical value of deliberately entering the zone of discomfort, then that can be very productive.

When was the last time you deliberately entered the “zone of productive discomfort”?

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* A lot has been said and written about the benefits of “getting out of your comfort zone”; in fact, the phrase “productive discomfort” has been used in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy, physical therapy, spirituality, business, and even education. There is an interesting book by Daniel Pink, titled Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, in which he discusses the issue of “productive discomfort” in one of his chapters: “If you’re too comfortable, you’re not productive. And if you’re too uncomfortable, you’re not productive” (…). And what Pink says in that straightforward sentence is the essence of the plethora of things that scholars and researchers have found out and said about the value of discomfort.

“Annoying” variations from standard English: Cute examples from Nepal

This is a response to Richa Bhattarai’s post about “annoying” language variations in Nepali English on her blog.

Richa, the examples of Nepalese English variations in your post are typical and funny. What really resonated with me is your framing of the write up in the introduction, because I feel the same way about the often silly language variations we hear/read from our fellow Nepali users of English. My position on the subject is that the standard of any language must be maintained, even enforced, where shared norms of spelling, words, and meaning have value and purpose (for example, you can’t land an airplane in an emergency if the manual is written with these kinds of language variations); however, I also think that language is used in millions of different contexts many of which don’t demand the same standard. So, let me share a more boring but perhaps necessary other perspective: there are sociopolitical, cultural,  and other important issues about the “annoying” variations which are also worth thinking about.

I find words like “proudy” irritable as well, but it is one thing for me to say that I personally can’t stand when people make up such variations and quite another to only say that I am not interested in sociolinguistic theorizing in order to get away with, for instance, generalizing those who use such variations as stupid or lazy. If “proudy” is an emerging word among millions of speakers in South Asia, then the fact that this is the product of mistake, mis-teaching, poor choice… or whatever… will NOT justify that this word is simply “wrong” for all contexts and purposes. If millions of people use it and use it consistently, then there is no reason why words from particular regions of the world, sociocultural groups, etc shouldn’t be given legitimacy; hundreds of other words and variations enter the English lexicon every year, including many from the domains of popular culture, politics, etc all around the world. In fact, English is historically characterized by borrowing, coinage, extension, invention… you name it–or watch the video below! So, to say that error, hypercorrection, translation, semantic and phonetic/graphemic approximation are illegitimate sources for coinage of new words would be a failure to appreciate the funny but fundamental nature of how languages evolve…….

Okay, I could go deep down that rather theoretical path, but you got the point: language variations can be funny, and they can be annoying at one level, but while we can share a laugh about them, we cannot stop there. So, let me share a different perspective and highlight that the examples you give are great evidences of the beautiful/fascinating way in which a language develops, how it gets adapted and appropriated by local users around the world… the examples you give also constitute teaching and learning moments as well as potential topics for discussing how it is through language that we respect sociopolitical, cultural, and other kinds of differences and try to understand what lies behind those language variations. Of course, many errors will be primarily just that–errors, which the user is yet to fix, and of course errors are undesirable and can impede communication as well annoy others. But all language variations have a lot more to say other than/besides indicating the lack of effort, seriousness, etc on the part of their users.

1. Proudy: This is a misapplication of a standard rule, as you indicate in this and other entries. Words do evolve from such misapplication, whether it is done for convenience or out of ignorance. If millions of people continue to use the new word/variant in that sense, it will soon become a new word (or it has become one). Don’t be surprised if “proudy” proudily walks down the red carpet of Oxford dictionary before we die (and proudy lives happily ever after). While that happens, I’m already willing to say that “proudy” does sound more accurate for a person who is “proud”—besides allowing me to call myself “proud” in the positive sense, as with “I’m proud of you, honey!”
2. Talent: Cause-wise, this could be due to translation. Because colloquial/jharra Nepali terms like “batho” or “sipalu” are not constructed in verb-like forms (the more Sanskrit relatives like “pratibhashali” are), people could be confusing the word “talent” as an adjective. So what? You can cross it out with a red pen if you are hired as a grammar teacher at a school, but if you are at a tea shop in Bagbazar and your friend uses it, don’t burn yourself and people around by jumping off. Language variation is a matter of context variation, so while you are right to be annoyed in the former context, maybe not so much in the latter.
3.   Fooding: This one looks like an extension of “lodging” as it normally appears on sign boards that say “lodging and fooding available here,” so it’s a very rational construction if you think about it; and it’s been used so extensively that even a once-upon-a-time grammar nazi like me have learned to accept it as normal. I saw it all over in Nepal, India, and even Myanmar as I grew up. In fact, this word reminds me of the irrationality of English grammar instead. Take, for instance, the sentence “He is a boy.” What the hell–you got singular, masculine, human semantic ingredients in “he” then you repeat the singular in “is” then you repeat the singular in “a” and then you repeat the singular, masculine, and human in the “boy” again! Every grammar nazi who touts the rationality or systematic nature of his grammar must first start saying “eee boi.” Then we’ll discuss other “wrong” constructions.
4. Anyways: This is totally standard English in the US. Relax. Yes, it’s a colloquial variation, but I am in no mood of sounding like a grumpy old man yet, not yet. In informal contexts, I’m not going to tell anyone to say “It’s I” instead of “It’s me.” Oh, really, which one is the correct one? Younger people tell me
5. Heighthy: Same as “proudy.” Actually, even better. If someone is tall, I’m impressed. If someone is “heighty,” I would also consider them as maintaining good health and putting on a smile wherever they go, you know. Like if I describe such a character in a novel that I’ve always planned to write with the word “heighty,” the word could take on a life of its own, who knows.
6. Movement: Yes, it’s annoying to imagine what someone’s “worst movement in my life” was (it conjures up the image of a nightmare that low-pressure patients tend to have, or the sight of your ex- boyfriend dancing), but that’s a spelling error, and thus a great opportunity for teaching—that is, if you are paid to do so and you are not in the wrong place like at a party where your ex- boyfriend is still dancing!
7.  Touchy: I am wondering if this is a psycholinguistic response to the awkwardness of a “moving movie”—but I will say that it’s fine with me. I got the point. If people keep using it, then “touchy” will have one extra meaning, like many words keep adding meanings to them all the time. For instance, the word “word” used to not have the denotation of a “word processor” until Bill Gates created the application with that name. Now you look up the dictionary and it’s in there. Yes, if I am correcting a student paper, I do point it out.
8. Antique: Antiques are usually unique. Such metaphorical replacements actually add a connotation that the literal counterpart can’t convey—as with “proudy” above and many others here.
9. –ness: Extension galore! Love it. When I was in college (back in the twentieth century), we used to make up words like “khatarnakification” and “chwakism” and you know nothing in the world can give you that kind of pleasure in the world. It is subversive, it is creative, and it is generative of new meanings in powerful ways. And it is one of the beautiful ways in which languages develop.
10. Chilly: There seem to be more than one reason why “chilli” becomes “chilly” in Nepal. One, there are not many words that end in “i” and there are many that end with “y”—so these people think that we are the ones who are wrong! Two, Nepalese people don’t have to use “chilly” that much because it is only “cold” in Nepal (if you want to know where it’s really chilly, ask someone in Chicago or Siberia). Finally, there’s no pleasure in saying “chilli” because it doesn’t give you the full experience of the two l’s which is one of the ways which Nepali phonetics enriches the dullness of single consonants in English. Like we say “balla maja ayo” with two l’s partaking in two separate and sexy syllables. You ask a native English speaker to say that, and you get something like a dead fish swimming: they’ll say “bala maaja ayo.” Take the double-ness of the consonants from the way Nepali English is spoken and you get far less pleasure.

Want to see the silliest words that dictionaries have recently added? Here are some. Look at them and think about it: why the heck can’t Nepalese speakers of English help add some cool ones. I bet all the above will enrich “the” English language. So, even though feeling-wise, I tend to be on the same page with you about careless spellings and lazy misuse of words—because, rhetorically, coinage of new terms works much better when people know what they are doing—I no longer think that I can judge people’s usage of language by saying that I am not interested in linguistic intricacies. Simply, variations created while adapting sounds, structures or meaning to different cultures or contexts (which may at first look like outright errors made by lazy thinkers/ writers) cannot be considered as jokes. They are also food for thought and learning–particularly to scholars who one way or another deal with language but also generally–for anyone who needs to be open and sensitive to linguistic and cultural differences in a deeply connected world.

International Students: Surprising Numbers

It’s not surprising that the US is a leading competitor in international student enrollment, but if you start looking into the figures, some things are quite surprising. Here are some.

In 2010/11, the number of international students in the U.S. reached a record high of 723,277, with a 32% increase since 2000/01. (IIE, Open Doors Report, 2011). In 1955, this number was about 48,000! Currently, the tiny nation of Nepal, which is No. 11 on the world list for international students to the U.S.—plus, okay, my home country—sends about a fourth of that number of students every year; China alone sends almost three times as many students today.

While the total percentage of international students in the country is not surprising (it’s roughly 3%), a whopping 10% or so of total graduate students and a stunning 35% of doctoral students in the U.S. are international. I cannot imagine how American higher education is being impacted by this tectonic shift in its demographics. And that’s the general context of my dissertation!

What is more, graduate enrollment has been increasing more than undergraduate in the past decade on average. Surprisingly, Ohio is the top host for international students (10.5%) and New York #7—and unsurprisingly, U of Southern Cal is #1 among institutions. Engineering is not the top field—it’s Business and Management (21 versus 18 percent)—and my field of English Studies could be in very small decimal points within the 2.2 percent in Humanities as a whole! Almost two out of three students pay by self or family, and I belong to the 23% who work and study in the university.

And, finally, to add a dimension that is not talked about very often, almost 3,00,000 American students study abroad. Guess how many of them study foreign languages? Around 6%. Want to know why so few do so? Haha, because they learn the languages outside the classroom!

Features of American Academic Culture: Some Guidelines for New International Students

If you are an international student, you may find this post worth reading.

Let me start with an anecdote.

My first class in an American university was not fun. It was on Thursday evenings, 7-10pm. Week after week, I failed to understand why the teacher wouldn’t teach! She could come to class, sit on the table, then ask, “so, what do you think?” And an older man in the back would start speaking. As someone who had not only studied but also taught a similar course back home, I had a significant amount of knowledge on the subject. This made it worse. The gentleman would continue to share his thoughts and responses and opinions and ideas but without much reference and (honestly) understanding of the text; there were two women who took occasional turns, but they didn’t contribute any depth either. But the teacher would just shake her head, and add more questions. One hour, two hours, almost three hours, and she would not start teaching. Three hours, the class is over, without her teaching anything. The other two courses I was taking were not so bad, but this one, I was totally lost.

After a few weeks, a light went off in my head. This approach to teaching was far better than what I knew before: lecturing forever. Theoretically, I definitely knew about the “student-centered” approach to teaching. But I had never thought that you could really put it into practice to the point of almost “not teaching” at all!

So now I started participating in the discussion myself. I liked it. I came more prepared to class, and I hope that I added depth and complexity to the discussion–though I am not sure if I did, because I could have just felt better when I got to share my own thoughts and responses. But the point is that now I was learning in a different way–no matter how grand my ideas were, even how perfect my understand of the readings was. It was important that the students did the talking, the learning–and not the teacher. By the end of the semester, this turned out to be one of the best courses that I have taken!

That was a manifestation of one particular feature of the American academic culture. Let me now share a few other thoughts and ideas that may be useful to international students in the US.

But first a caveat. In a deeply interconnected world like ours, cultural differences are only relative. Generalizations about cultures are only convenient learning/teaching tools; they are almost always unreliable, which is more true in this context. Cross-cultural comparisons are bound to end in overlaps and criss-crossing relations. If you can bear that in mind and won’t be mad at me for using bullet points in trying to summarize complex “cultural differences” behind academic practices in the “West” in relation to the “rest,” here are some of differences that characterize American higher education:

• Compared to other cultures, learners are expected to be more self-directed, self-motivated, and critically thinking in U.S. higher education.
• Learning is essentially an individual process; group work, when used, is expected to enhance the individual’s learning. Knowledge is ultimately “owned” by individuals who strive to create “new ideas” through the learning process.
• Classroom activities often involve seminars or discussions among students, with the teacher as facilitator; lectures are much less common in the U.S. academic culture than in most other societies. It is common for students come to class after having read the reading materials, and sometimes having done assignments as a preparation for class discussion and activities.
• In the US, teachers often ask what are called “Socratic questions”—questions with the pose of ignorance, not sounding like testing the students’ knowledge—rather than tell students what they think about an issue. This could be shocking to students from other cultures. The idea here is to give the learners the opportunity to present their ideas before the teacher shuts down the learning process with a definitive answer/solution to a question/problem.
• Expressing personal opinion, criticizing or analyzing texts written by experts, and disagreeing with colleagues or teachers is one potential difficulty with many international students.
• Students are encouraged to be conscious about how they learn—called metacognitive awareness—and do things in ways that they tend to do best. Assignments are sometimes open, leaving some students confused what the teacher wants.
• Research doesn’t mean merely finding out what the experts have said/found and then reporting the findings: it means asking a specific question, exploring the existing body of knowledge on the issue, and using the findings to make a new point/contribution to the discourse/discipline.
• A student is seen not just as a learner; he or she is also considered a maker of new knowledge. A student doesn’t need to wait until he or she becomes the expert, a certain age or position, before his or her ideas and opinions begin to be considered “knowledge.”
• There is no real hierarchy of power between students and teacher, especially in graduate school. Many professors ask graduate students to use their first names. Some professors invite their class for a party-like meeting at their home, especially at the end of the semester. Drinking and smoking in front of professors, in a responsible way, is not considered inappropriate. But remember that the social “distance” between students and teachers also depends quite considerably on the personality and preference of the individual teacher, whatever the general acceptability in the culture.
• You might also need to press the refresh button on the way you understand body language, as far as it becomes visible in the university. For example, it took me a few classes to not think it was awkward for one of my professor who sat on the teacher’s desk. I also learned to maintain more distance with men and less distance with women in this culture—and, this is funny, not to hold hands of a male friend while walking!
• In many other cultures, writing maybe considered mainly a means for students to express what they’ve learned. In the west, writing is often considered both a tool of expression and a process of learning.
• Independent study is not as common in other cultures as it is in the US. Teachers may want to intervene less than you want them to when you are doing an independent study course.
• Plagiarism: You must use other people’s ideas only by telling your readers who they belong to. It is plagiarism whether or not you do it deliberately—so learn to document sources as you do research. In western cultures, knowledge and its products have long been considered as possible to be owned or protected by individuals or organizations who have either created or somehow maintained ownership rights over them. Simply, people have been saying “that’s my idea” for a much longer time in the west than in other places. But in the academy, there has been a tradition of allowing people to “use” other people’s ideas for creating new knowledge. So, we are supposed to use other people’s ideas “fairly,” especially by telling our readers who the idea belongs to. When you knowingly or unknowingly fail to acknowledge that ownership of someone else’s idea, you are said to commit the intellectual crime of plagiarism—which is also a financial issue because we all operate in a world where knowledge has financial value.
• Writing is not the core part of many disciplines, but because writing can really deter your success in some courses even in the less writing intensive disciplines, you should be prepared to take that challenge and find out ways to meet expectations in this area as well. (RCN’s case) In writing, you need to understand most of all the discourse convention of your discipline as well as the general rhetorical styles that the American academy favors. For example, American writing generally favors the statement of an issue before elaborating it—topic sentence, transition, and explicit connection of every supporting point to the main point—but specific disciplines may emphasize that style in different degrees.
• Sometimes you may find yourself unfamiliar with the knowledge of the discipline that the teacher assumes that you already have—that you have already read some popular book. When you find yourself stuck in the gap between what you are expected to already know and what you are trying to learn, always meet with your instructor.
• Research on the issue of academic acculturation of international graduate students in the American academy shows that their
• If you are an international student whose long term goal is not acculturation into the American academy and if you are here to learn more about your discipline rather than change your learning style, you might want to become biliterate in the academic cultures of two places.
• Finally, some teachers might consider you (your different academic background and your different skills and points of view) as resource from which they and the class can benefit. Whether or not that happens, however, you should not forget that a different background need not be a hindrance. Looking at any subject matter from multiple perspectives is an important part of the critical thinking, research, and writing process in the American university. You should find out how to take advantage of your previous knowledge, experience, skills, and perspectives.

• One of the important issues that came up during the meeting was that of underlying cultural difference even when academic practices themselves may seem very similar around the world. Nurcan shared with us about some universities in Turkey, for instance, that could be better than American universities in terms of academics, and therefore academic transition of students from universities like those wouldn’t involve much challenge. But although some international students who have no problem adjusting and succeeding in some ways will find other things more challenging–like relationship with teachers, students’ role in the classroom, issues of race or gender, etc. Students in some cultures will consider their peers visiting the professor’s office as brown-nosing, whereas that is a good practice here in the US. Cultural concepts and issues underlying academic practices need to be explicated so that international students know what is right here.

• There are also many issues that are not exactly academic but will affect the overall university experience and perhaps studies. These might include time management (including using a scheduler and emailing to make appointment) and stress managing (including taking advantage of extra-curricular services available in the university). The workshop should also bring up such issues. As Amber pointed out in a previous meeting, we should talk about the “whole student” in the context of academic transition, because life adjustment can significantly influence academic performance of international students.
• Differences in academic practices among the disciplines here in the US are sometimes very wide. This increases the need/relevance of presenters from different disciplines. At the same time, different presenters will also highlight general issues of academic cultures best. This will make it necessary for us to chime in during presentations, and elicit audience response a few times.

Please add anything else that I missed.

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* These notes were originally compiled for the “International Students Academic Transition Workshop” at the University of Louisville, a workshop that I started in 2009 and have presented three times, along with other graduate colleagues and faculty members.

Into the American Academy: Avoiding the U-Curve of Academic Transition

“Most international graduate students accepted into U.S. universities,” says author Virginia Gonzalez, “are the cream of the crop from their home countries. Nevertheless, their adaptation to the new academic culture in the U.S. can be an arduous task.”

Indeed, the very fact that international students get selected by US universities is most often a proof that they are the best of the crop in their home countries. But consider the following situation that exemplifies how even these best and brightest can get lost with an example. A few years ago, a friend of mine, an East-West Scholars at the University of Hawaii, went to see his professor when he thought the class he was taking was taking a toll on his time and energy. “Professor X, why is that there is extraordinary amount of work in your class compared to other courses?” said my friend. Confused, the professor asked him to explain. “Like I am writing journal articles every week, for which I have to read so much and I’ve been writing 10-12 page articles. This is taking up all my time.” The professor had an omg moment. My friend had understood the phrase “reading journals”—which, as most of us know, are normally very brief personal responses to what we read for class—as “journal articles”! Not understanding one simple term about academic practices in a different system almost wreaked havoc on my friend’s first semester.

Therefore, getting the opportunity to learn the terms and concepts and becoming familiar with the explicit and also implicit rules of the new academic system can make a huge difference for new international students. It can help them avoid falling into the U-curve before they get back on their feet and be the brilliant scholars that they proved to be before they left their homes.

In the fall of 2009, my former teacher and new dean of the graduate school in my university invited me to serve as her research assistant to find out what can be done to provide support to new and current international students (she had heard complaints from international students about the lack of support mechanisms). So, when I took that position, the first thing that I did is to develop a special workshop for incoming international graduate students that was designed to help them understand some of the fundamental principles that shape higher education in the U.S; the workshop also covered specific academic practices including variations across the disciplines, common classroom practices and necessary skills, ideas about research, the use of emerging technologies, and essentials about teaching for those who teach. This interactive event also helped students to reflect on the academic culture in their home country as a starting point to drive home my basic tenet that international students should NOT consider themselves empty buckets even when they are overwhelmed by how much they don’t know. Within three hours, the participants of the workshop (which we organized about one month after classes started) were able to identify and talk about often unfamiliar ideas and perspectives underlying American higher education—what originality means, why critical thinking is valued, how research is defined, whether to call a professor by her first name, and many more—and, even more importantly, they left the half day workshop with a confidence that they also have a lot of skills, experiences, and useful perspectives that they bring from their academic and sociocultural backgrounds, all of which can be useful if they know how to draw or build on them.

Here are some of the features of this workshop that I intend to build on as part of my long term project (a web 2.0 based participatory action research which I refer to as “Tackling the U-Turn Together”). First, international students need to learn the basics—terms and concepts, skills for reading and writing, the more or less distinctive epistemological worldviews underlying academic practices—of American higher education. This, I call “transition” or filling the empty half of the bucket. For many international graduate students, language barrier can be a big challenge. But a bigger challenge for them is to learn about the discourse/language of their discipline, depending on how much previous exposure/experience they have had. One of the solutions to that challenge is to inform and encourage new students to use available educational resources—the library, the internet, books and articles, and the services in the university. Another solution is to encourage them to seek help with their professors when they sense a gap between the teacher’s expectation and their own understanding of the subject or skills required to perform well at school. Learning the language of the discourse can make a great difference in the pace and effectiveness of learning. In a study of library use conducted by Randall Parker, 38% of people who didn’t use English as their primary language reported satisfaction with searching for materials in a digital database, whereas 68% of native English language speakers were satisfied with the tool. Many students do not know about the support system that the university has in place and many others don’t become comfortable with seeking help for a variety of reasons. Programs for academic transition must both educate and encourage students to make use of university resources. Besides learning new skills and the discourse of the discipline, international students also need to know about general concepts that characterize university education in the US. Every society and culture defines knowledge, learning, and education in different and unique ways. In order to make a quick and successful transition into the American academy, international students must understand some of the characteristic concepts that underlie the idea of education, research, new knowledge, the role of student, relationship with the teacher, and so on. In some cultures, education means “getting the facts right,” whereas in others it means participating in the process of creating new knowledge. Randall Parker conducted a study of this issue among his students and found that many of his international students “were so concerned with getting the ‘right’ answer that it was sometimes difficult to expand the depth of understanding of concepts or skills” (6). In many non-western cultures, individualism and competition do not shape the educational process as they do in the west. Students from many cultures are unable to adjust to the level of informality which affects their participation in class and communication with teachers. Students from some cultures are reluctant to ask questions or to receive feedback from colleagues or even teachers. Depending on how learning is defined in the society where they previously studied, students find it hard to go beyond summarizing and synthesizing what they read into analyzing and critiquing it.

Second, international students should start with and retain confidence in what they are already capable of. I call the process of utilizing or building upon past knowledge and skills “transfer.” One of the participants of the “Academic Transition Workshop for International Graduate Students” from 2009 writes the following in his reflection that he shared for the PLAN website:

When I had completed my first year excellently, I realized the reality of the theme of the workshop that “International Students are not empty vessels.”  I remember the facilitators tell us about the basics of the US education system such as the practice of making appointments and meeting with with faculty members when support is necessary, participating in classroom conversation, the importance of writing, the availability of research support in the library and so on, which were really helpful for me. Thanks to my fellow graduate students who presented this useful workshop, I was able to start utilizing my past knowledge and skills very early while also identifying and learning what is new about the academic culture/practice in this country, my discipline, and this university.

Many universities have academic transition programs but they pay little or no attention to encouraging transfer at the same time; they attempt to teach new students new skills without paying much attention to how that imbalance can undermine the students’ confidence. As Abu’s writing clearly tells us, it is absolutely necessary to recognize and encourage the many useful skills that students bring into the new game. Many international students, even graduate students, have inadequate language proficiency but that doesn’t mean they are stupid; those students may be brilliant in the area of research skills, use of new technology, professional skills from the workplace, and knowledge of subject content.

Generally, universities also have a support system for international students in the form of the International Center which oversees all the official/legal and administrative issues for international students. But unfortunately, international students typically make the most important transition—academic transition—on their own! There seem to be few programs in U.S. universities that help new students with developing new academic skills, understanding cultural/epistemological concepts underlying academic practices, familiarizing themselves with discipline-specific discourses, learning new technology, and so on. Similarly, universities also have programs in ESL but these service units are designed to assess international students’ language proficiency and sometimes to help them learn English better. They cannot help students with academic transition either. Some universities do offer orientations for incoming international students to help them better understand the academic practices in the American university. However, such orientations are too often based on potentially counterproductive “deficit” models about international students as people needing to replace their old set of ideas, skills, and perspectives about higher education with new ones. Students are not only lectured about the American education system as if they don’t know anything about it but are also never helped in translating their past intellectual resources into a richer repertoire of intellectual assets for themselves. So it is unfortunate that even when programs for academic orientation do exist, they are based on the ideas of cultural differences that are absolute and taken for granted. “International” students are considered one big category of “others” who are defined by a lack of what is needed to succeed here in this country; varying degrees of their previous exposure to the globalized university as well as their familiarity with the American educational culture/system is seldom taken into account. What is necessary in this context is a new approach that both recognizes the intellectual resource that international graduate students bring into the academy while it also recognizes the need to educate these students about American educational culture. The workshop that I developed and presented collaboratively with other international and local students in the last three years has addressed and balanced both those needs in helping international students do their best after their arrival.

Third, it is necessary to emphasize that there are variations in the academic and professional practices and even value systems of different academic disciplines within the U.S. Often, those differences are as wider than cultural and national differences. I call this aspect of making the transition the only generally applicable feature about the American university: Never generalize anything in America! (adding that we shouldn’t do so anywhere). In order to represent the diversity of academic conventions and practices, I invite 3-4 fellow graduate students from across the discipline to join the panel of presenters. And, more interestingly, in order to emphasize the notion that graduate students in U.S. universities must be self-directed—one of the key themes discussed during the workshop—I also request faculty members from different disciplines to be present at the workshop and answer any questions that the participants have (as well as chime in whenever they want). This workshop has been a great success in the last three years.

Finally, to emphasize and extend the point about “transfer” that I discussed above, it is extremely important to NOT focus on what new international students don’t have, don’t know, can’t do…. The research that I did while developing this workshop, I must add, was a little frustrating for the reason I indicated above: too much focus on what international students don’t have! I call this the “attention to deficit” approach, and I think that this can be quite counterproductive. If you can a few extra moments, let me link a story that shows what happens when you focus on what students can do instead of what they can’t—unexpectedly helping them achieve the same positive goals of learning! To give you an example of the current literature that I call “frustrating,” here is what William Badke does in his article “International students: information literacy or academic literacy?” First, the author rightly highlights the need to help international students learn about the educational philosophy underlying the academic practices and culture in the west; but then he falls back into the convention of making black and white contrasts of values in the west and the rest of the world! This kind of simple painting is out of sync with the reality in the globalized world where universities across cultures share a significant range of practices, methods, and principles of higher education. A brief passage on this issue from his article is worth quoting here:

Western education may be contrasted with that of much of the rest of the world by observing that for Westerners information is not a goal but a tool. Unlike the centuries- old cultures around us, Westerners have largely abandoned reliance on their informational heritage in favor of a new ethos based on discovery. Most cultures derive their intellectual nourishment from their large and ancient knowledge base, valuing information for its own sake, passing it on to other generations through education, and adding to it only after considerable thought. Westerners, for the most part, value their knowledge base only to the extent that it is useful. In the classroom this means that there are usually many options in which vigorous debate is considered a higher function than merely “knowing.” For the international student, the ability to memorize is no longer the highest measure of intelligence. No longer is the teacher revered and never contradicted. Instead, a profoundly barbaric methodology is perpetrated in the classroom–knowledge is not a treasure to be valued but a tool for analysis and critique, bound up in the concept of “critical thinking.” Students challenge the views of their teachers and teachers of their students. Virtually anything that has been published is open to vigorous scrutiny. (7)

The idea of information as a goal in the “rest of the world” which Badke seems to suggest are “centuries old” in their outlook about knowledge is nothing but funny for anyone who has the experience of studying in some universities abroad which have become almost completely American, or universities that have never been based on the intellectual “myths” that western scholars like Badke have created and perpetuated. Every statement that Badke makes about “other” cultures in the passage above can sound like an insult to many international scholars today. Badke goes on to cite Kris Torkelson who suggested that “the only solution to learning how to function in a Western classroom is for these students to change their educational philosophy” (ibid.). The approach that our workshop will take is not to “change” anyone’s educational philosophy but to make them aware of potential differences between what they previously believed and what they come across.

Thus, it is necessary to help new international students become aware that whenever they are confused about new academic practices in the new academy, they may be failing to understand the rationales underneath those practices. But it is equally necessary to help them reflect on, utilize, and build upon the intellectual resources that they bring into the new game.

References

Badke, William. “International students: information literacy or academic literacy?.” Academic Exchange Quarterly 6 (2002): 60-66.

Parker, D. Randall. Teaching, Learning, and Working with International Students: A Case Study. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association (1999): 5-7.

Torkelson, Kris., “Using Imagination to Encourage ITAs to Take Risks.” Paper presented at the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL. 26th Annual Convention and Exposition, Vancouver, British Columbia (2001).

Translation, Multilingual Kids, and Myths about Language Learning

I have read, taught, and talked about teaching and learning language for a long time. But when I think about some of the things that my three and one year old children do with the languages they are learning, it seems to me that some of the most prevalent folk wisdom and even some research/theories about multilingual language learners are inadequate.

Discussions among parents about children’s language learning process in bi- or multi-lingual homes always make me feel that parents have various types of anxiety and concern about their bi- or multilingual children. Many parents seem to be afraid that their children’s language proficiency will be negatively impacted if they try to make their little ones learn two or more languages at a time when they should be learning basic communication in their home language. Some of them seem to resort to strong prohibition against the use of English at home, constant lecturing about the importance of the home language and culture, and/or sending children to formal classes designed to help them with the home language. Others seem willing to give up their desire of teaching their kids their own home language for fear of them not learning English early enough and well enough. Yet others seem to try to keep the two or more languages separate. In one case, a 4-5 year old child, who was neither speaking English nor one of the two home languages very well, was taken to a specialist for consultation. The expert advised the parents to start speaking in English Only at home so the child was “not confused.” The neighbor of that family tried to solve the problem before it became too serious by maintaining clear language boundaries: the father spoke English Only and the mother Nepali Only with their daughter.

In all the above cases, the belief is that learning multiple languages can be a confusing hassle to young minds because it involves constant translation from one language to another. And, as the response of the language specialist above indicates, even scholars and researchers of language acquisition have not yet quite started questioning conventional fears that multiple languages and translation might have negative impacts upon young children.

Finally, the issue that intrigues me most is this: some parents are afraid of what they think is an act of “active forgetting” of home language(s) by their children: they say that when their kids start going to school, and more significantly when they grow up, they try to avoid home language because they consider doing so as being foreigners. This is quite likely because young people do try to not identify themselves with foreign languages and cultures. The problem, however, is that parents should be educating their children against instead of in favor of that kind of “foreigner” anxiety—-because if you think about it, there are so many other things that cannot and some that should not be overcome, like skin color, intellectual perspectives of different cultures, family traditions and relationships, etc. (And, by the way, I don’t even want to talk about parents who express great and often audible pride to see their children speak in English fluently… which, in short, makes me think, “Duh, that’s like saying that your dog barks like a dog—-what a surprise, है साथी, आम्मममम भन्या, खतरा भ’छन्त हौ?)

Yes, I must admit that as a parent, I have not yet reached the stage where the bilingual/multilingual parents who I’ve talked to have been. At age three, Umber is gaining fluency in English and Nepali (plus a few Chinese and Spanish words and phrases); and since her first birthday, Ava has only learned to utter a few Nepali words (including बाबा and आमा in the the most lovely and folksy Nepali accent), though she also understands some English spoken by her favorite cartoon characters. But I’ve not only been observing and thinking a lot about how these little ones—-especially the prattling toddler—-learn and use language; I have observed the children of some of my multilingual friends whose children speak two or more languages so well that they seem good enough evidence to disprove all the concerns and anxieties and theories that I described above.

And, while I wait to take the challenge of multilingualism with my children as life rolls on, I will go ahead and share a few thoughts here. First of all, I don’t (fully) agree with the conventional beliefs regarding multilingualism among children. In fact, I want to go on a limn and suggest that the prevalent beliefs/folk wisdom about multilingualism among children may actually contribute to the “problems” as perceived by the parents. Let me share some thoughts on the subject by using personal experiences with my kids, avoiding my terrible tendency/habit of beginning to add what “studies have found” even in reflective blog entries like this. (Just to make sure: Except for talking about what I learn from how the little ones learn or use languages, I will not use them as guinea pigs.)

Here’s an incident that recently occurred with my three year old that seems to negate prevailing beliefs about translation and language learning. The other day, when I said to Umber, “Go keep that fork in the kitchen,” he responded to me by saying, “No, iss not keep. Iss ‘put’ee back’!” Not fully understanding what he was saying, I said, looking away from the screen that occupies me all my time, “किचेनमा लगेर राख भनेको, बाबु |” Then he said, “ए, लाख भनेको ?” The second response made my head reel. I have spoken English for 30+ years, taught it for a long time, and English is what do in one way or another all the time; and here’s my three year old who is correcting me about how to use the word “keep.” My translation of the Nepali word “राखनु” was less accurate than his understanding of it, in English itself! He must have heard both the words “keep” and “put (something back)” in English from the cartoon characters on TV or baby movies that he watches: “keep” as in “Keep it, it’s a present for you” and “put” as in “Put it back in the box.” Nepali has only one translation “राखनु” for both words!

For me, as I semi-jokingly tell people, English is a “first” language when I am talking/writing about academic subjects and in many other contexts; however, I have rarely used English at home with family members—until now. Therefore, the more basic/homely words, phrases, and idioms are much harder for me to handle than the more specialized words, phrases, and syntaxes that I do outside the house. In a sense, my home has an artificial linguistic border that separates my family life with my social/professional lives. Apparently, that’s not the case with the kids.

It seems that for Umber, English is a co-first language with Nepali. Because he is not concerned with which is his “first” and such, he switches and shuttles between the two languages depending on which one works better for a given purpose, often mixing or mashing them whenever necessary. I must add that that Umber does seem to have a highly sophisticated sense of which language is more appropriate in what context (and I’m not exaggerating this, because I’ve had him put his index finger over his lips and say “sssh” when I start speaking in Nepali at a grocery store, and I’ve never found him talking in either of the languages without first deciding what language a guest speaks). And yet, when he is talking to someone he knows is bilingual, like he knows his parents are, he draws on the resources of both languages, switches back and forth, depending on context/purpose and efficiency, and he specifies his meaning by meshing the two languages at the level of words and phrases as well as higher units when he wants to.

Furthermore, even when using one language in a certain situation, it is possible that Umber will be better at drawing from other languages better than I have been, because I learned and used different languages in relatively separate situations, with artificial boundaries, hierarchies, and often through imposition by adults. Even I feel that though my fluency in any language, at the level of spontaneous speech and writing, varies by context, subject, interlocutors, and so on; my proficiency with any language, at the level of meaning-making, is significantly increased by my ability to draw on the semantic and epistemological resources of multiple languages. Thus, to state the obvious, if we promote multilingualism among our children, I am sure that the multiple languages they will use can greatly add to the process of generating and communicating ideas within and across different language communities. For example, the distinction between “keep” and “put” in English could help Umber give clearer instructions in Nepali, as either आफैसंग राख (“keep it with you”) or उता लगेर राख (“go keep it over there”).

So, here is how my three year old is exposing the myth that translation will confuse language learners: since communication involves translating thoughts into words and words into other words, whether one is monolingual or bi/multilingual, translation is a natural process that the human brain is good at. The more you let it translate thoughts to language and one language to another, the better their thinking and communication will be. To use the example, when I said “keep it,” Umber showed a better understanding of “keep” than mine because unlike me, he had two clear options and didn’t try to keep one out of the game.

At home, I seem to speak by translating one way: from Nepali to English; and at work I rarely have to translate, but if I ever do, then it is the other way around. I learned languages by deliberately putting them in hierarchical orders: thus, grammar for learning a new language in contrast to learning by speaking for the home/local languages.

In contrast, Umber doesn’t put one or the other language as his “first”: he seems to naturally/intuitively decide what language or their resources to draw on in terms of the context/subject, people, and what language someone is using with him. He seems to translate in a two-way manner within the same context. (If you don’t have firsthand experience of little smarty pants, trust me, they really seem to be capable of what I am describing here.)

I must add at this point that it is not only technically multilingual individuals whose understanding and communication may be better because of their access to multiple linguistic resources; the same phenomenon can be true with people who use only one language, simply because they too can, if they want, draw on the rich resources of that language. So this is not about language identity and how many languages you know–because we can’t count Umber’s few Spanish and Chinese words unless he productively draws on them–but about what people do with language. That is, if we consider that English language, for instance, has millions of additional words today than some of the historically less diversified languages, then we need to look at so-called monolingual English speakers also have at their disposal as much resources as other multilinguals may have. My point is that we should focus on the mechanism and how rich the process of meaning making is in an individual’s attempt to communicate or generate ideas.

Of course, do not forget that if your kids speak only English, only Chinese, only Spanish, only Nepali, they will be much better off–not worse–if you encourage and facilitate their desire and effort to learn and use more languages.

Which brings me to the issue about children not wanting to sound like or identify themselves as linguistic and cultural foreigners. I will first admit that in this regard I don’t have direct experience yet. But like in the case of the translation myths, it seems to me that parents need to think again. In fact, as I indicated above, I think that parents’ beliefs about children’s fear of foreignness may not only be inaccurate and simplistic, they may be actually feeding into the children’s language attitudes. I hate to add such a comment here but I have often seen a kind of double-standard among multilingual parents about their children’s language proficiencies. On the one hand, they belabor about the dignity of home language and culture (and for many, “culture” only constitutes what one child innocently called “demons from Nepal,” because his parents from an erstwhile upper family had only showed statues/photos of the Hindu gods as everything Nepali “culture”). And on the other hand, the children can sense in the very air at home, hear in their parents’ talk with other adults, and understand through patent pats on their back from their parents that knowing how to speak English well is a mark of prestige and pride.

As for the other funny problem of parents being proud of their children’s English abilities in a totally English speaking society, let me share a funny incident that happened at a gathering where parents were sharing their concerns about their children not learning or forgetting their home languages. The wife of one of our friends who was engaged in the discussion had been hearing our discussion, until she decided to interrupt the discussion and in a somewhat upset tone tell the group, “Who says that your kids don’t learn your home language? I’ll tell you what. Instead of sitting here talking about your child’s dislike of your home language, go ahead and stop boasting about their great abilities to speak in English [implying "only" English], and your kids will do as well mine!” Indeed, her two daughters daughters speak Nepali like they just came down the mountains from the countryside, and they speak English like “native” speakers.

As the mother in the above anecdote suggested, if you add the weird pride in your children’s developing monolingualism (and nothing but occasional complaint for not speaking your home language(s) well) on top of the real or perceived social pressure that they may have at school to progressively un-foreign themselves, then it is completely unsurprising that your children will both actively and conveniently forget their home languages relative to English. I think that it is essential that we teach our children that cultural diversity (in the sense of accepting and promoting co-foreignness, rather than “tolerance” for someone else’s foreignness) is a good thing; if we let them believe that knowing and using different languages is a bad idea, we will do grave injustice to these citizens of the twenty-first century. We are their best (and often) only teachers in this regard—-no one may help us take up this worthy challenge.

I will not yet bet on how easy it will be for me and my family to help our new members learn, appreciate, and harness the power and beauty of multiple languages and cultures—-and thereby learn from and communicate with people beyond one (or a few) linguistic borders/boxes in their lives. But I am sure that if in the process of living and communicating with a family that is spread across the world and collectively speaks about a dozen languages, our little ones come to appreciate and use the resources of multiple languages and cultures, they should consider themselves very, very fortunate.

And I am likely to continue learning from their learning process!

The New Knowers… Subverting Soio-Epistemic Structures

The New Knowers: : How Young People Subvert Socio-Epistemic Structures Through Participation in Popular Culture and Literacy Practices Online

I came home from school one day to find my father and uncle Padam sitting beside the beautifully decorated “muth” (a raised platform for the Tulasi plant in the front yard) that mom, sister and I had just built. I said “namaste” to the guest and stood on dad’s side. I had no plan to join the adults’ conversation, since that wasn’t appropriate for a mere twelve year old in a South Asian culture like ours, but when the grown-ups were  completely wrong, I had to speak:

Uncle Padam: Brother, you have great artistic skills, you know. Look how beautiful that “muth” is!
Daddy: [smiles and continues smoking]
Me: No, uncle, dad didn’t build that. Mom did, and sister and I helped her decorate it.
Uncle: Hey, phuchche [little kid], don’t be a janne [knower]. Go to play.

I look at the twelve or fifteen year old kids in Nepal today and wonder what uncle Padam would say about their activities on Facebook, YouTube, online games, even blogs and other venues of popular culture and literacy practices where they can usually say what they want and not have to shut up or “go to play.” No matter what uncle Padams might say at home and in the society outside, today’s young people have access to alternatives social spaces where they can respond to, create, and share ideas in ways that defy and even subvert what I call the socio-epistemic structure of traditional societies like Nepal’s–or the structure of social relationship among individuals in terms of whose knowledge counts.

I talked a little about the issue of socio-epistemic structure in my group blog here, and there is a research project behind this thinking which Bal Sharma and I did last year. Here I want to some thoughts on how young people challenge/subvert socio-epistemic structures by creating and participating in alternative social spaces where their ideas matter, where they have much more confidence sharing the ideas, and where the same adults who limit their authority over knowledge otherwise also exchange ideas through less hierarchical relationships. Moreover, I also argue that while the socio-epistemic structures in more “advanced” societies are less hierarchical in general, the same phenomenon is at work in more places and ways that we may assume, including in institutions of formal education, in the professions, in cultural and social organizations, and so on.

In the old socio-epistemic structure, a twelve year old would have few or no choices other than to say “hawas” and stop talking–or at best share their ideas with one or two other people about how wrong uncle Padams are; that is, if the same incident happens to a twelve year old today, he or she has alternative spaces and options for responding to the adults and sharing new ideas.

But even in more “advanced” and democratic societies, socio-epistemic structures are rarely actually flat. This reminds me of Ira Shor, who in his book When Students Have Power, thus comment on the undemocratic structures in formal education in the United States: “A grand cultural canyon yawns between education and democracy, which simply represents the distance society itself has to travel to reach the democracy it claims to offer” (211). Even the most advanced societies are not really “democratic” when comes to formal education: too often, the very process of teaching and learning is shaped and designed to reproduce hierarchical socio-epistemic structures of the past. Even when schools and universities adopt, often grudgingly, alternative modes of learning or creating new knowledge, they tend to appropriate the new things in the service of the same old structures.

Of course, the relative prevalence of more democratic cultures and more egalitarian outlooks towards education in socially developed societies do allow the development of educational theories and experiments that help many educators, and sometimes institutions, subvert traditional hierarchies that give privilege over knowledge to older individuals, to richer communities, and to elite groups of all kinds. So, there is at least a difference of degree if not that of kind kind between the “underdeveloped” and “developed” societies when it comes to socio-epistemic hierarchies.

However, it is unfortunate that in the more democratic of societies, there are other kinds of hard-to-overcome forces like the all-powerful and “invisible” hands of the market which help perpetuate more often than change entrenched socio-epistemic hierarchies. Because of the same incentives, many educators are much less interesting in subverting the hierarchies than in sustaining them.

Having said that, let me turn to how in both the developing and advanced societies, the emergence of alternative spaces, especially outside of the venues of formal education, have in recent years significantly increased opportunities for young people to engage in creating and sharing new ideas, texts, and cultural practices.

In traditional societies where young people are just beginning to have access to the alternative spaces of what may be called “popular literacy” practices—for instance, writing to have fun or describe experiences, or using new media to create and share alphabetic or multimodal texts—the subversion of the traditional socio-epistemic structures is quite visible and often dramatic. To take the case of Nepal, where Bal and I conducted an online research study involving almost 400 college going students in 2010 and 2011, popular literacy practices stand in stark contrast to how young people have to communicate in the regular social or educational settings. At home, young people see a clear hierarchy of who can be “knowers”: parents, men, and older members of the family have a clear sway over knowledge in relation to younger and female members. Similarly, in the society outside, the ideas of landlords and other rich people, older members of the community, and again men will matter clearly more than the ideas or experiences of poorer, younger, and female members. And at school, what the student knows never constitutes knowledge in front of the teacher, nor even the teacher’s ideas count before the ideas in the books written by the authorities “out there.” That is why a Nepali teacher will rarely ask her students: “What do you think about the chapter you read for class today?” Nor will a student ask his teacher: “Do you agree with what the book is saying on page 17?” It is mainly for this reason that students in the Nepali classroom will meet before having read the chapter; class discussion, if there is one at all, will be based on the teacher explaining the chapter to the students; and all that the students will typically do is to receive knowledge in the book, via the teacher, with both the book and the teacher considered as absolute. In the structure of relationship among the students, teacher, and the author who wrote the book, there is a clear and explicit hierarchy: the teacher doesn’t question the author and her students don’t question her.

But the moment a ten year old logs on to his Facebook, a college student starts blogging on a subject of her interest, an activist starts posting a video on YouTube video, or for that matter a thirty year old man blogs on political or professional subjects these people are using alternative spaces like never before. In a society that leapfrogs from word of mouth to microblogging, the bypassing itself seems to be fast becoming the culture. While the new affordances that new information technologies provide are also new in the developed societies, their impact on the socio-epistemic structure is much more blatant in in societies like Nepal.

In more democratic cultures, the popular literacy practices that young people engage in may give rise to relatively less visible or dramatic results, but they happen here as well. Here too, social organizations including institutions of formal education are forced to adopt and appropriate popular culture and literacy practices and restructure their systems and behaviors so they don’t get left behind. Here too, alternative spaces of knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing are undermining their powers as well. To use an analogy, when Microsoft Word did not release a code that was necessary for Open Office (a free alternative) to save and open its document format with MS Word, the software giant started losing tens of thousands of potential customers every month; so Microsoft yielded to the pressure of the Open Source Revolution. Sometimes, traditional structures of knowledge or power get ahead by pretending to be democratic, open, and sensitive to new demands.

Thus, the leapfrogging that is happening in the global peripheries make visible and help us understand the same phenomena that also characterize the socio-epistemic structures in more “advanced” societies.

In the case of Nepal, I can see uncle Padam reading Facebook posts by my twelve year old niece who I imagine would unhesitatingly comment something like this if uncle Padam tells her to “go to play” when she tells him the truth: “LOL. Face it, Lila, you are in love! You’re like uncle Padam who doesn’t want to hear the truth. Like the other day, I told him that our mom and not dad build the muth, and he’s like, kiddo get outa here!” I can almost hear uncle Padam groaning.

In more advanced societies, too, we have seen even the most conservative politicians (in the non-American sense of the word)  turn to Facebook and Twitter to win elections–as much as they will turn to Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protesters.

——————-

For some fun, here’s a music video parodying a US politician defining the Internet.  I mean even the gentleman who said that the internet is made of a “series of tubes”!

English Studies in Nepal, Thangne Budi, and Shoving Our Pedagogical Heads in the Sand

When I was a kid, there was this mad old woman from a nearby village who walked around the town carrying a huge bag about whose contents we kids wanted to know. But none of us were able to get near the woman to ask what her bag contained and why she carried them. We guessed and argued about the subject, not knowing much about her health, until one day when it occurred to us that we should be able to approach her as a group, and we did: “ए बजेई, तिम्रो पोकोभित्र के छ ?”

After chanting the question together, as we were ready to run away in terror, we heard the woman say: “थाहा छैन ! थाहा भएको भए यो हालत हुन्थ्यो मेरो?” (I don’t know. Would I be in this state if I did?) And she continued to drag her feet along the dusty way, not paying much attention to our curiosity, or our fear.

I don’t mean to use the anecdote of the poor mad woman as an analogy for how English Studies is practiced in Nepal, but I have a point to highlight by starting with this anecdote: we don’t know and don’t seem to care much for how practically relevant what students learn from English Studies is to their professional careers, social lives, and intellectual development when they walk away with their English degrees in hand.

I am not trying to be critical of English studies as the legacy of colonialism or anything like that: I believe that it is very important (and if we do it well, very beneficial) to study the art and literature of influential cultures/societies around the world. Yes, I do find the Matthew Arnoldian kind of view about English literature–you know that view that English literature is the best fruit of “human civilization” which everyone else should therefore adopt and, well, get civilized as soon as they can. That is unfortunate about otherwise great scholars like Arnold. Instead, I am interested in how societies and educational enterprises around the world have adapted English Studies with a view to fitting their local educational and professional needs. In itself, the discipline is a rich and beautiful set of resources. Even in Nepal, English Studies current curriculum has for some time included some घगडान theories that are worth learning to anyone in the university.

The problem is that our curricula fail to match all the great “content” with pedagogical approaches towards making the content relevant to the local socio-political and professional realities that students will face when they get out of the classroom. The students are passive in the process, take exams, usually fail, and go away. Even those who do pass the exams are ill prepared to make good use of what they learned in their future lives and works.

Take for example the bachelor’s or master’s degree graduates from Nepali universities and consider the different professional fields into which they go: teaching, diplomacy, business, NGO/INGO, and important national and international spaces of work and learning. Then consider how useful they find British poetry, intellectual history (aka intellectual history of the world that excludes most of the world), or critical theory including postmodern and postcolonial when working as teachers in higher secondary schools, in business, in NGOS, or even positions of diplomacy. Not much. We haven’t talked one day about this during their degrees. If you ask a fresh graduate–if not so fresh ones as well–how they find the content of their degree relevant to the work that they are doing, they are likely to give you a vague sentence or two about how “literary thinking is good for the human mind” or something like that. I’m not denigrating the students (they are all brilliant, honest people, and as one of them, I also believe that I had similar potentials as a student). I am saying that even though I walked away from my BA and MA degrees with enormous, enormous amounts of content knowledge of the discipline, I took a long time until I was able to make connections between the content and my professional and social lives.

[To add a different angle on the issue, let us watch a video of  one of our political leaders speaking at the United Nations!!! This woman might have spoken better if she had studied English, one might say, but as far as saying something with and through language is concerned, and not just the accent, I don't think the current curriculum and pedagogy of English Studies is producing much better products.]

Unless English Studies starts teaching students how to make sense of the content in the kinds of work that they are challenged to do upon graduation, the false sense of pride that we instill in our students about knowing “about” the great traditions, canons, and theories will make them like the mad woman with the big bag.

Speaking more theoretically, teaching the content/canon means “banking” information on students, which is essentially (intended or not) helping already dominant geopolitical discourses to continue dominating the minds and outlooks of the less powerful societies and their discourses. Unfortunately, even when we include critical theories in the curricula, if we teach them in the same old banking method, the discipline will continue to serve the same dangerous, albeit unintended, ends. Education must be useful.

It is hard for most teachers of English Studies to see how a banking model of education can insult generations after generations of youths. The poor marks that students receive is largely the consequence of their inability to understand foreign content and worldview, of the lack of pedagogy that values the learners’ own ideas and experience as knowledge, and of the lack of motivation that comes from not seeing much practical application of the knowledge that they are gaining. As a result of these problems, generations of students have left the university in humiliation of being defined by a percentage score rather than by engagement in learning and the opportunity to produce and share their own ideas. Education that doesn’t promote the learners’ epistemological agency is not genuine education.

Unless the current content-based model of English Studies is changed into a learner- and learning- based model where the ideas and experiences that students bring from their real life, professions, and society are valued as being legitimate like what Derrida talks about in his terribly difficult works, students will continue to fail. Higher education should not be limited to sitting among a hundred people and listening to someone summarize and repeat what “the books” say ALL of the class time—rarely getting a chance to share and create new knowledge through productive dialog with the teacher or fellow students. Even in the same classroom with a hundred students, it is possible to do simple things like let students connect Derrida to what they do in their society, what is related in their culture, how they can use it in their professions, whether they can also connect it to their personal/social lives, and so on.

So, generally speaking, what we need is critical pedagogical methods translated into classroom practice: “A discursive transformation,” argues Shi-Xu (2001), “can be accomplished, not by some external decree, but through an internal, teacher- student, theorist-practitioner dialog which initiates, (re)formulates, motivates and practices those discourses” (280). Critical pedagogical practices of dialog learning can be developed by drawing from the tremendous body of knowledge in various fields of educational practices in the world. Shi-Xu, shows how

bringing in/about . . . pedagogical, discursive changes involves methodological issues: [that is] how to introduce and implement changes? These issues may be seen and tackled at three levels of pedagogical practices . . . . at the textual level . . . . at the interactional level, [where] teachers . . . should try to establish and follow new and alternative rules of pedagogical interaction or discourse . . . . [and at the level of] society as a whole. (288)

Thinking about traditional anti-dialogical academic cultures like the one we see still in English Studies around the world today reminds me of Paulo Freire‘s ideas from his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire (1994) says that

antidialogical action has [the] fundamental characteristic: cultural invasion, which like divisive tactics and manipulation also serves the ends of conquest. In this phenomenon, the invaders perpetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latter‘s potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression. (133)

Paradoxically, in the case of English Studies as we practice it most of the times in countries like ours, there are no human invaders involved, just the content of the curriculum that is based upon the outdated and dangerous notion that as long as students are exposed to the great canon—plus a few other tokens, again content—they shall be fine. Because students don’t have direct access to learning about the societies and cultures from where the content of English Studies came, as in Nepal, the attitude that content is king can result in more intellectual domination of the learner by the content of education, which is supposed to intellectually open up their minds.

Many teachers of the discipline are uncritically convinced that since the great tradition of literature, the canon, is what matters, there is not much space for critical dialog with the body of that knowledge. Even when critical dialog about the cultural politics of the canon enters the classroom, the learner does not become an active epistemological agency in the typical literature classroom. Perhaps the assumption is that after all the student of literature is there to learn from greatest creative writers and philosophers of all times, and not to create knowledge themselves. It is essential, therefore, that we start thinking of education as dialog between the learning and the content, as well as with their teacher and among themselves. The use of more dialogic, critical pedagogical practices can help us achieve one of the most important potentials of a global discipline like English Studies—knowledge-making, as well as knowledge-getting.

It is sometimes even worse with the “educators” on the English Education side of English Studies in Nepal. English educators wshave been doing a damn lot better for a while—on many fronts like professional development, community building, relatively less politics, and so on—but they too subscribe to the content fetish, in this case the fetish of English language for English language’s sake. Like if you can make your students speak bhatatata in English, wow, you deserve lots of phul mala. [Wanna see what happens when teachers don’t think about education but just teach word meanings and such? Here’s a funny video of an Indian teacher teaching words, words, words.]

But what I am proposing is the integration of Critical Pedagogical methods that promote the knowledge-making agency in our students, that allows them to value what they know from life and society as legitimate knowledge, and that allows them to question and understand and use and appropriate knowledge in the thick books written ten thousand miles away into their work and life in ways that make sense—and even encourage to say what doesn’t make sense to their life and work. I’m not advocating for the pure critical pedagogy of Paulo Friere or anybody else, but a generally critical approach to teaching and learning, with particular attention to the question of relevance of education and also attention to involving students in the process of learning. To give you a quick definition of “critical pedagogy,” here is one by Peter McLaren (1998): “Critical Pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society, and nation-state” (441).

It is obvious that English students’ motivation to study this discipline is largely economic and that they will become a tool of propagating that same capitalistic order by participating in the commodification of “English.” The critical‖ function of Critical Pedagogy will not only expose the more abstract injustice inherent in the content of the English Studies discipline but also help the student learn to tackle the many kinds of injustices that they encounter in their own and other people’s lives. Valuing the lived experience of the learner alongside the content that was created in distant times and places can keep the praxis of this discipline from essentially being the praxis of social, cultural, and intellectual oppression. Elevating the learner to the status of knowledge-maker, starting by recognizing the need to let them make sense of the content of their education with the context of their lives and work, can allow the discipline to promote the potentially limitless opportunities to understand the world.

There are precedents of Critical Pedagogy’s use in English Studies even in South Asia. If you are interested in this topic, you might want to start with Kailash Chandra Baral’s essay “Postcoloniality,   critical pedagogy, and English Studies in India.” In this essay, for example, Baral, illustrates how Critical Pedagogy  can  resolve  the  double  bind  between  practicing  a discipline that imports hegemony and rejecting the opportunity of  learning  about  other  cultures  of  the  world. He suggests that in order “[t]o  ensure  a desired social change, Critical Pedagogy is relevant in both its liberating and strategic dimensions” (484), the liberating being the more political and activist dimension of the approach to education and the strategic as how to practically implement what might at first sound impossible to implement. I discuss how to strategically overcome the seeming barriers in an article in the latest issue of Bodhi (and I’ve used a few points from that article in this blog entry).

One thing that I must add before I give the reader the impression that I am “against” English studies or anything like that is that I do believe that the extremely rich and complex discipline/discourse of English Studies has many, many positive potentials for our students in their pursuit of becoming intellectuals of the twenty-first century who understand the world and its many intellectual traditions better. English Studies in itself doesn’t hurt anyone: the way we practice can.

I used to be somewhat upset about how the western academic communities and political forces which valorize a few of their own creative writers and their writings as the “pinnacle of ‘human’ thought and civilization.” That’s what conventional postcolonial literary criticism and theory often teaches us. However, but when I consider how the “local” dynamism of how colonial forces are appropriated and used by the dominant classes, castes, institutions, and discourses, I am much more bothered by the latter dynamics than the former. No Rudyard Kipling is telling anybody that he has the burden of imposing his worldviews upon others; yes, the global politico-cultural and economic mechanisms make it awfully hard for marginalized nations, cultures, and epistemologies to come to light, but nothing makes any impossible either. If we think about it honestly, it is those of us who have the privilege or get the opportunities to climb the ladder of higher education and become the club members of the elite community of English Studies—that is, after weeding out roughly seven out of ten aspiring students who applied for club membership—it is us who perpetrate injustice in the name of education.

But the irrelevance of English education to life and work of the majority of students could come down on its own burden or irrelevance—one of our own making—if we don’t do anything about it. If we don’t do anything about it, time will throw the baby with the bath water.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough that we cannot resist the practice and indeed the need for promotion of English Studies in Nepal: the potential dangers, that of our own making, that English Studies can have on our students will not in and of themselves justify a fundamental resistance of the discipline itself on our part. As Seonagh MacPherson (2006) says: “Yet, these are the questions [the questions of relevance and justice] that we need to suffer to hold in our awareness without wincing, without fighting or swooning in the dubious bliss of ignorance. The response we do not want to make is to bury our heads in the sand with the hopes that the questions will go away or prove mistaken” (81).

If we can criticalize English Studies with the means of dialog and empowerment of the learner, we would be able to realize the potential function of English Studies as a global discipline that can also serve as a “conduit to the ‘global,’ transnational network of education, justice, economic development, and mobility … [or] what liberation means to most people in the world” (MacPherson, 86).

But, we can’t hide our heads in the sand of just teaching its wonderful contents. In fact, we neither afford to walk along the dusty way of English Studies without bothering to know what our bag contains and what the contents are relevant for–or more precisely how the contents can be made relevant.

WORKS CITED

Baral, K C. “Postcoloniality, Critical Pedagogy, and English Studies in India.” Pedagogy. 6.3 (2006): 475-491.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (20th anniversary ed.). NY: Continuum, 1994.

MacPherson, Seonagh. To steal or to tell: Teaching English in the global era. In Y. Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as cultural practice: Postcolonial imaginations. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2006.

McLaren, Peter. “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education.” Educational Theory. 48.4 (1998): 431-62. Print.

Shi-Xu, . “Critical Pedagogy and Intercultural Communication: Creating Discourses of Diversity, Equality, Common Goals and Rational-Moral Motivation.” Journal of Intercultural Studies. 22.3 (2001): 279-293. Print.

Namaste, Sir. How are you?

A former student of mine (let us call her Reema, to not name a real person) wanted to chat on Yahoo Messenger today. As most of my former students do, she wrote, “Namaste, sir, how are you… and how is your family?” I engage in the phatic communion sincerely. But the conversation takes the same old irritating path: “Sir, you were our inspiration…” Frankly, I feel good to know that I’ve inspired someone, but the fact that Reema says nothing of substance during a half hour chat bugs me, for several serious reasons. Reema completed the MA in which I taught her many years ago, she has become a teacher herself, and she has gained a lot of professional experience as well as disciplinary understanding. But Reema believes in a teacher-student relationship model that is frozen, locked, mummified at a moment where I was role-playing a teacher and she a student, in Kirtipur. For that reason, she is unable to consider me a colleague with whom to share ideas as a fellow teacher and scholar, even when I strongly urge that she does so. She actually says it emphatically that once teacher is forever teacher; she cites our old guru culture . . . and that mummified view of a culture which leads to mummified way of thinking and acting is what frustrates me.

Another former student emails me once in a while (let us call him Sabin). Sabin says, “Hi Sir, how are you? . . . How is ma’m? . . . I’ve heard that you have a new baby. How is he? . . .” That’s fine too. Sabin is a father himself, and he’s naturally interested about family life. But the problem is not what he writes, it is what he doesn’t write. He doesn’t write about his studies, profession, intellectual progress. He doesn’t respond to my earlier response to his “namaste, sir… yours sincerely” email in which I had suggested that Nepali scholars of English Studies, like he and I, both in the country and outside, should discuss our discipline in Nepal through an online network of some kine—or at least spend five extra minutes to add one or two things about education, profession, society, etc in our emails. In a brief chat one day, Sabin said that he doesn’t know the technology to be able to do things like discussion board or blogging—I said that writing a response to a blog entry or a discussion forum thread is easier than emailing, and that I could help him right at the time—to which he added that there is too much load-shedding in Nepal. Yes, I fully understand that serious problem, but here is a problem I don’t understand: estimating by the amount of his work on Facebook, it seems to me that Sabin probably spends about 2-4 hours a week online. What I suggested is a few extra minutes in his emails, if not half an hour or so in a month: “I will set up and manage the forum, and you simply periodically check in what others are saying—this is called “lurking” in technical terms—until you feel like saying something, then you can decide whether you want to do more.” To this, Sabin said, “Sir, I don’t have ideas like you do.” I know that this statement comes from the same old “guru knows it all and who am I before him?” attitude, but I go on: “No, Sabin, it’s not about writing an academic article or something online, it’s about taking interest in discussing ideas of common interest with your professional community, about modeling the discussion for younger generations. . . by simply saying ‘I find such and such thing interesting in this discussion because in my experience…’ and so on.” Even simply reading the discussion and mentioning it among your colleagues and students will increase the traffic, and you or someone might pick up the interest to join the conversation. Sabin then said, “I will try.” That was a perfect answer. Problem? Sabin gradually stopped writing his “Hello, Sir, How are you and how is ma’m and how is babu?” emails altogether. I sent him links to a discussion board last year, then after a few months a link to a blog, then recently I suggested that he join a professional mailing list of English teachers. Sabin did write once during the last year to say hello sir, and has been lost for several months now. I didn’t want that, although, honestly, I don’t very much miss the emails of a fellow scholar that said almost nothing anyway.

Then there are teachers, let us say my former professors. They are my inspiration—yes, I am recycling the students’ anecdotes above. I too still call them “priya guru,” “dear sir,” etc—there’s no problem with calling someone X or Y. Even though I am shocked, for instance, by one year younger colleagues calling me “Sir” just because I happened to study one year earlier, there is not problem with this or that word, partly because there seems to be no good alternative to these awkward words like “sir.” But I feel extremely uncomfortable to not say anything other than “Dear Sir, How are you? I am fine. Your obedient chela. Shyam.” in my emails. I write about what I am doing and studying, my professional progresses and challenges, my cultural experiences. . . besides quick mentions of personal and family lives.  I get nice responses. Most of my former teachers love me very much, so they write back with encouragement and praise. But that is precisely the problem. After so many years of teaching me, they still don’t write to me in ways that indicate they think I have become capable of talking with them about anything serious—academic, disciplinary, professional, curricular, social, philosophical, pedagogical, etc. In response, I too lack the courage to ask them about their professional projects—well, even when I do ask them, as I have several times, there is no response to that part in their response, just “I know you are doing great. Keep it up!”

Now, the problem is not with my teachers or me or my students: it is with the conventional relationship between teacher and student in our society where teachers rarely talk with their students about their own professional projects, their intellectual explorations, their teaching, their writing, their reading. There is by default a gap—a gap created by the guru culture which we never question—which makes teachers see their students as some sort of forever kids. Because this philosophy is not only accepted but also respected, I become, for instance, the forever lovable young MA student in Kirtipur in the eyes of most of my former teachers. That evergreen image of me is fine in the romantic sense, but it is dangerous from professional perspectives.

Nepali academics talk about how older political leaders of our country stand in the way of younger generations and hinder them from taking leadership and  even from making significant contribution. We all know that our country wouldn’t be in the forever broken shape if the oldest and often dumbest politicians would make way for younger, often brighter people. Ironically, we don’t even question the same culture among us that we lambaste among the politicians! In other societies, “older” people seem to not forever want to lead the flock in order to be respected. Because they are happy when their ideas are respected, they seem not to be afraid of being nobody when asking new people to lead, as long as they can somehow contribute. We don’t seem to realize that it is not age but  ideas that we need.

“Oh, no, you are against our age old culture!” Well, what about updating it? “Now, you are talking about the entire academic system! We can’t do anything about it.” Well, why not? We can reject the underlying cultural worldview about who can and cannot design a course. Afraid? Let new people mess it up, in new ways. The silly worship of few heroes intellectually hurts the worshipped heroes themselves–on top of preventing possible opportunities for anything new, different, and better. Few among us care to think what happens when young intellectuals who have different ideas, approaches, and skills do not even speak up. Guru devo bhava.

We tout our knowledge of western intellectual, cultural, and political ideas; but we seem to never pick one or two good things from other cultures in our own practice. We know in the cultures whose literature, philosophy, history, and education we study about, there is no hierarchy among people; mature university students and younger colleagues are not seen as inferiors but intellectual cohorts. But our students and younger colleagues are forever students. I remember one of my professors in the English Department literally yelling at me on the first day of my teaching there, “What the hell, Ghanashyam, why are you standing at the door? Just come in, sit here, and start asking questions!” A thesis viva voce was going on. That was an isolated incident of someone telling me to not take forever to act like an intellectual and professional. But as long as I believed in the ideal of guru-culture, I didn’t really ask my best questions in front of my forever teachers. Many of my former teachers might have wanted me to behave like a colleague, to engage in professional discussion, to propose to write an article together, to lead them organizing a conference, and so on. Many of their former students, now colleague, might have liked that change as well. But the change has never happened, and it is not likely to. This dead thing called guru-culture—yes, I called it dead—instead of any other form of professionalism that would better suit our intellectual status in the world today, this outdated bogus worldview, is keeping us from letting change happen in practice. By “guru-culture” I don’t mean the religious garbage, nor the disgrace of caste-based culture where some people, however lazy, were considered intellectually superior, because they were born to the learned class/caste. The guru-culture, which in the context of Nepalese university does the work of “fixing” people’s relationship in one still point of time, is completely out of sync with what education means today, with what we are doing with education, with English studies or anthropology or modern medicine. In a world where the very ideas of “student” and “teacher” have been radically redefined and adjusted to vastly different professional conditions than the original context of guru-culture, it is foolish to not start looking at our students as fellow intellectuals. We must tell our students to stop respecting us for nothing and start respecting our ideas instead (which is the best form or respect anyway). We should be looking at our former teachers as fellow intellectuals/professionals and tell them honestly if they are not making any sense. Yes, we must start talking about our assumptions, cultures, practices in ways that make us uncomfortable, that unsettle our existing values, and that allow new and better kinds of professional relationship possible. And one way to open up that possibility is to bring up issues like this in public, in chiyapasals, in blogs (instead of or after posting pictures in facebook), in conferences, at department meetings.

“But, sir, we don’t have the access to the web.” What about the little amount of time we already are getting to spend online? What if one out of a dozen among us take interest in professional networking so whoever has the access can at least read? We all know that in spite of the terrible material condition (especially of power supply), professional networking (on and off line) is going to redefine the nature of our discipline. We can no longer daydream a better professional future–individually or as a community–without defining our own intellectual and professional identity, without substantially increasing professional work like refereed journals, international forums and conferences, and now professional networking on the web. We know that we should be modeling the practice by spending what little time or access we have in order to encourage new generations to build upon the resource and network that we create today. A few colleagues in NELTA (Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association) recently started ELT conversations through mailing group, wiki, and blog, and in just a few years, networking has become a standard project among folks in education. I am proud to say that I have worked as an active participant of that networking. On the side of Humanities English Studies, we are good at blaming those in power, not saying anything, and not responding to/encouraging new ideas or efforts. In my experience, many people in this community see politics where there isn’t any, create imaginary camps and lump people on this side or that (I never knew which camp I belonged to, but others, mainly students, did the work of guessing/deciding that for me), and are good at climbing the stairs through personal favors or political influence. The moment you open your critical mouth, people will start guessing whether you are striking against this camp or that camp. Then, there will be a Kathmandu Post war. The audible and inaudible, the real and imaginary wars that I have seen in the past two decades mostly involved taking sides of people and much less often of ideas. We are afraid to upset the camps, so the underlying values that keep both sides unprofessional remain stable. As you read this, if you are trying to guess which camp or which particular  teacher, colleague, or former student, etc this guy is trying to criticize here, sorry, save that energy: I love and respect each individual member of the community as individuals. But I  have serious issues with the outdated cultural ideology underlying the structure of relationship among intellectuals in our society. THAT IDEOLOGY MUST CHANGE.

Why should it bother the teachers among us that our former students forever say Namaste and nothing more? Why should it bother today’s students that our teachers share nothing about their work with emerging scholars? Because these are manifestations of deeper, larger cultural problems that need to be addressed. The model of once teacher forever twam-saranam could have been appropriate in the past—say between several milennia to a half century ago—where knowledge was seen to be flowing one way. That conception of knowledge posited knowledge as a set of stable, permanent truths. If a teacher said Brahma created the earth, that was it, forever. You just took it from your teacher and gave it to your students, and they did the same, which was supposed to continue until the end of time. We live in a different world today. But unfortunately, we are using that conception of knowledge and education to do a vastly different thing—for example, for teaching students who become knowledge-workers in a global knowledge market. No, we can’t use the jug and mug model of education to prepare engineers who will lead development projects for the UNO, business women who must compete in a global market by continually developing new business strategies, physicists whose professional lives in the US or UK will be determined by their innovative approach to research, and so on and so forth. Even when we think of the narrowest professional scope such as that of teaching in ten plus two, our university should be seen as preparing teachers who are shaping whole new generations of knowledge workers for a global economy. My first badge of ten plus two students is now all over the world, and many of them who are at home are working in positions where they prosper by generating new ideas, not transmitting what I told them. In their real, professional lives, they have little to do with grammar rules or Wordsworth’s poems—the cognitive model of learning which claimed that people would become more intelligent by studying poetry is pathetically out of date—they don’t summarize “Structure, Sign, and Play”—the disconnect between academic and professional life must make us teach theory and philosophy differently—they never ever write 40 pages of answer to 10 questions set by someone within 4 hours—the very education system we designed decades ago needs to be significantly revamped—and they don’t get forever locked in professional relationships where one person says Namaste and the other person says hello and it’s over. They compete, they overtake, they leave the country, they explore cultures, they create a company, they network professionals around the country, they generate and write new ideas and get things done every day. They figure out on their own (or never do) what to make of the same grammar rule that was taught 12 times over, of Derrida, of the talent they developed for taking four hour exams, of mummified relationship with people.

It is time to face the ugliness, the inaction, the nonchalance—bhaladmipan. It is time to stop blaming the system and getting away with the easy excuse of “well, we can’t do anything about it.” It is time to face the empty conversations in the name of our “great values” (because unquestioned ideals too often hide a lot of bogus in any society). This work of rethinking, challenging, upsetting some of the ideas and values and practices and outlooks that we repeat like Sisyphus are overdue. Let us look in the eyes of what we’ve taken for granted for too long.

My Story of the Computer

When I was in sixth grade (in a Catholic mission school in east India around 1986), an older student who had just failed his high school exam for maybe the fifth time and also broken up with his maybe sevent girlfriend told a group of credulous sixth graders a fantastic story about the computer. Interestingly, this “true story” was as much about love as about the computer, maybe more!  He said that a year or two ago, a hundred or so scientists of the world had gathered in New Delhi to learn more about the universe, the organisms, the society, and so on—from the computer! None of us had actually seen or knew much about the computer till that time, except for the one chapter at the end of our math book that described how the computer uses some common mathematical logic in the form of computing loops.  So all these bald headed men, he said, gathered around the computer and started asking questions which were as yet unanswered. The computer took only miliseconds to answer questions about the stars, the microbes, the oceans, and what not. Then the poet, our narrator raised his finger and lowered his voice, asked the computer the most puzzling question that humanity has ever asked: “What is love?” Our narrator looked around, saw us all dumb and silent, then added: “The computer said nothing, the scientists looked at one another, and several minutes passed. Then, to their astonishment, they saw some smoke coming out of the back of the computer. Before they were able to respond, it burst into flames—boom, like that.” We completely believed that this had actually happened, and throughout the lunch break that day we all shared our dreams with one another that we might live to see the computer one day—hoping that scientists would build others in the future.

Ten years from then, I was sitting in front of a Pentium II computer in a computer training center back home in my country Nepal (in Butwal), using my newly gained typing pride of 45 wpm. I had understood that the computer would not answer questions about love, unless the answers were already programmed into it. And yet, I was fascinated to see the range of things the computer could do: word processing, saving and retrieving information, creating work spaces, programming, emailing, playing music, and playing video games with me!

I have been lucky that within ten more years I got numerous opportunities to learn a lot of different skills including spreadsheet, slide presentation, web design, video and sound editing, social networking, learning management systems, content management systems,  and many web 2.0 technologies. This summer I am going to Ohio State University for a prestigious program called the Digital media and Composition. Last year I got the chance to attend a training called Digital Storytelling with another prestigious organization named the Center for Digital Storytelling. It has been 23 years since I first heard (that apocryphal but fascinating story) about the computer, and 23 years is a lot of time; but compared to the way life, communication, and society worked when I was a kid, in societies that are still relatively low tech, I am amazed by how digital technology has transformed the lives of the more fortunate people like me at home and abroad. I now know that computers don’t do magic, that they further reinforce the division of  societies by multiplying the capacity of a small number of people in the world to own most of the planet’s means of living, and I know that technology shouldn’t be imposed uncritically on anyone… but as for myself, the semi-rational fascination about the computer that I had when I first heard about or used the computer makes me refuse to take what I find or any new digital development for granted. In particular, an odd naivete about how the world’s minds can now come together to improve and innovate ideas and things at a baffling speed today prevents me from leaving technology alone. I guess that the challenge is to tame and appropriate the monster of new technology in the service of people who are less privileged than us—and it is significant that in that pursuit we can use the power of technology in ways that in ten years down the road we have something to look back with satisfaction.

What is your story of the computer like?