Editorial
Usha Kiran Wagle
Journeys begin with thinking so they lead us from creativity to reflexivity. It has been almost a year since the journey with the new team running this blogzine started, and in the shed of the Choutari, we have collected thoughts and creations of many contributors. In many of the posts published this year, fellow teachers have very creatively described their own way of teaching.
Scriven and Paul (2004) state that though thinking is a natural process it is often biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, and potentially prejudiced. This reminded me how we as teachers are also biased and how we may simply try to follow the ideas of “foreign teachers” who had developed classroom techniques based on very different contexts and needs of their own. Until a few years ago, methods for ELT were too often derived from other contexts, and that used to be ineffective.
But things have changed in recent years. While editing this month’s articles, I found that the contributors are talking about how things can be creatively used in our classrooms, considering our own local contexts and needs. Teachers are highly encouraged and that seems to be developed from their active learning and active participation in professional conversations. Their experiences and explanations show that they are determined with their teaching/learning objectives and they move toward teaching through active learning and the reflection process.
In this issue we have four articles by different contributors who discuss issues about teachers and teaching process.
- “Easier said than done but if worse comes to worst, just hang in there!” by Umes Shrestha
- “Socio-Cultural Identity of EFL Teacher in Nepal” by Ashok Raj Khati
- “Towards Multilingual Education in Nepal: Reflections on MLE Conference 2013” by Praveen Kumar Yadav
- “Developing creative- linguistic abilities through classroom poetry” by Dinesh Kumar Thapa
Finally, I’d like to thank all contributors, and also thank Praveen for his technical support.
