The essay's last part/ Title : A tesseract on the democratization of the teaching of English language and literature in India

The realist position.

I teach a syllabus with prescribed textbooks; and a written exam the students have to take, at the end of the year, by which their "performance" will be assessed. At the parent-teacher conferences and some of the staff meetings and through feedback I have received from some of the more voluble students I have come to realise that for most parents, for the majority of (Western/national) universities and for ninety-nine percent of the students what "really" matters is grades. There is also a "vast" syllabus to "finish off" with only limited time to do it in. Added to these issues is the cumbersome paperwork connected to the Western idea of documentation which has its plus and minus points, if looked at objectively. These are the constraints that I work in. I can also call them factors securing/offering security to the students, teachers, parents and school managements. Structure is, after all, necessary. However, the studies done on this kind of a partially closed system leads to conclusions like the ones drawn by Anita Rampal , the remedies suggested always including the same objective of freeing children from the very strictures that it seems impossible to get rid of. As for the children themselves, while the constraints irk them they also impart a certain sense of safety to them because of their strongly felt need for a "clear" structure.Can constructivism provide the balance? One would have to give a double-edged answer, i.e; yes and no. Two schools of thought - one, that believes in subverting the system gradually and the other that thinks of just getting rid of it lock, stock and barrel and ushering in the new in a revolutionay coup d'etat are both theories that yield mixed results in actual application. Facilitators who have moved through the three positions - I mean, including the traditionalist one (i.e; keep things as they are and make them function to peak levels in efficiency-) will understand what the present writer means. Another school opines "give the students what they want".

The absence of a cut and dried solution is our strength. As long as reflection and review goes on of the entire pedagogical process and things are in a flux there will be a vibrancy to our attempts to better quality education . It will ensure that we see ourselves as learners first and foremost rather than as all-knowing eduactors , keeping us on our toes.

Solutions that raise more questions than answers.

When we think of major educators and thinkers India has had in the recent past like Gandhi with his metaphor of the gardener and the plant, Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and J. Krishnamurti and of the democratization of education , an issue that was felt to be of the utmost importance by all the above mentioned giants - and we also think of the topic at the personalised level of one's own professional practice ; it seems obvious that one has to work on two fronts. One front has to be broad, group activity that would include revamping the curriculum and the syllabus including the textbooks.
The other front would be narrow , considering how to apply these things at the miniscule levels of giving attention to individual students and the groups that we call a 'class' at present.

As far as English - an international link language that is also the language of technology and one of the nation's own languages- is concerned its democratization in the overall curriculum has to include ceratin new drives in framing the curriculum. I shall concern myself more with the syllabus.
Suggestions could be listed thus: a) the students should be consulted as to what they think their needs are and then the drafts can go into the written form.
b) The syllabus must offer the freedom to the teacher to teach in more than one language if it fetches results. This applies especially to ESL . This would be an option and not a must.
c) The rewriting of textbooks that such a directive would result in must be rigorously tested for quality and their abilty to interest ALL the learners.
d) Where literature is concerned the choice of texts must include an international work of repute - in translation -, a work from Britain in English, a work from Indian literature and a local/regioanl work - both again in translation, if need be.)
e) Another option would be choosing short pieces making the coursework light on the students but taking into consideration different genres and forms and including different ideologies and cultures. A syllabus like this would teach a short story, an essay , a drama - preferably, a short one-act play, a novel(a novellette would do just as well) , an essay (personal or dealing with critical theory, theory or criticism) to be taught over a period of two years. The learning objectives would be limited to thinking, speaking, presenting, listening, writing and reading by whichiI mean literary and semantic appreciation.
f.Asessment would be entirely revamped. While grades and marks would need to be retained for the sake of the "system" the emphasis would be on thinking skills, creativity, innovativeness, effort , presenting, listening and writing skills collectively. Critical analysis would be as important as producing creative output with both being wighted equally.
g. The output of another of the language-oriented papers beisdes teaching language and literature w/ should be aimed towards vocational use somewhere down the line so that teaching skills like writing CV's etc, i.e; introducing subjects like fucntional, communicative English would be a plus. This would take skills like translation, medical,legal and other kinds of transcription, technical writing,business English, creative writing, televisual presentation, news readers, copy writing, script writing, reporting for journalisms -radio,TV, film, print,web - editing, making publisher's choices, criticism, reviewing, research and scholarship and other job oriented vectors of language use into consideration

This list could go on but space doesn't permit it.

Practical application.

The real challenge for the facilitator is in the "class". It is possible to come to an assessment of a student which is accurate and easy to help him/her in such a way that s/he doesn't slip back
but true democratization would include the satisfying result that the student/each student actually improves in his skills over the period of time that he/she works with you. This is the real challenge. He should not go away feeling that he was taught well but , more important, there should be a clear difference brought about in his ability to learn and do. His potential to be a 'mover' must be tapped and maximised. This is an area fraught with possibilities and I feel the answer lies in allowing contemporaneity - i.e. working with what the student knows and is interested in, and the latest advances of technology adapted inovatively to meet the present situation to mesh with the latest teaching techniques is the way forward. This, along with the radicalization that could be brought in by ensuring greater student participation in "all " the activities the teacher considers his forte at present, is a possible solution.

Concretely speaking, what this means is discussing with students the choice of textbooks, self-assessment and peer group evaluations, sharing of lesson objectives and everything else with students who would be interested in knowing of the documentation process of the teacher, self-and group-teaching by the students and adapting the possibilities of technology in an innovative way to situational and contemporaneous needs of learning. The tech must be simple, low cost and environment friendly. Alternates should be kept readily be available, in case of one method not working, in the same way the teacher goes into a class with two or three options at least.

Examples: In my class while teaching poetry I took some students over to the computer lab and showed them a few hypertext poems and hypertext fictions and this set them thinking about the difference in the forms of poetry and fiction when it is 'written' down and 'programmed' in. They became aware, to some extent, of concepts like interactivity. hyperlinks and lexias/emes and consequently of the complicated changes occurring historically in the two above mentioned forms without my having to bring in the academic jargon connected to such modifications which might have only ended up confusing them in the beginning.

In ESL at least immersion and the dual language format has to be employed simultaneously and the stress has to be on simple performance related objectives rather than mastery . This is common sense and not very novel but a few things can also be taken from the antiquated systems wherever essential.

I am unable to say everything that has to be said on all these topics due to the word limit and all that has been said has not been comprehensive .But all of it can definitely be used as pointers to start meaningful discussions in the hope that they will lead to reification of strategies of learning and facilitation, for steady improvement to occur .

The great king and patron of arts of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, was made to say by the script- writer, in a film about him, that we should start English schools in India because " We will conquer the language that is conquering the world." The sentence gripped my imagination . Fifty eight years after independance I can say that we Indians /I / many of our students have indeed conquered the language that is still conquering the world, even to the extent that we are producing writers in it that rival the best anywhere. But the price many of us have paid is less facility in our own languages. The democratization of English and the teaching of literature in this beautiful language has therefore to concentrate primarily on the objectives of ensuring that Englishes (SMS english, chat English, English in Kerala, English theory jargon) are encouraged as much as British English and that this is not done at the cost of other languages or of quality. Literary appreciation has to deal objectively with real-life students and actual situations in a graphic and interesting way so that true democratization takes place whereby all the students are enthused to love languages and its infinite possibilies and go away considering the learning of Language to be a " poetic experience"that ignites their love for the logos and the mythos in a teleological way, as in the parable of the sower and the seed so that the memory of it will be one of progressive instruction and mastery gained by delight as Horace wanted it to be and as Edenic as life's first learning experiences were and are. The only war we faciltators need to constantly wage, therefore, is one whereby there is a ceaseless effort to keep closing the gap between our notion of perfection and our consistently and constantly evolving practice.


By the way I removed the journalspace section so please don't click on it.





Tha's it folks. Now to edit and make it 2000 words. Wishing you all luck.