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.

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