All posts by sharmashyam

The Power of Professional Learning Networks

Miscellaneous, Nelta branch and members, Nelta Networking, Scholarly Article

Shyam Sharma

Your “social” network is probably represented fairly well with who is on your Facebook “friends” list and how you engage with those people. But what does your professional learning network look like? In fact, what is a professional learning network?

In this entry, I share with you a powerful concept called the “professional learning network” (PLN) and share a few specific tips on how to develop–or become more conscious and deliberate about–a professional learning network in order to enhance your professional development as teachers and scholars, and what is more important, also help others in your professional community develop professionally by sharing your knowledge with them.

The concept of PLN originated from Personal Learning “Environment” (PLE), which referred to the situation and mechanism that a learner develops and uses for setting learning goals, managing learning process, and assessing outcome. With the advent of information technologies, it evolved into Personal Learning “Network” (PLN). More recently, many educators and other professionals have adapted the idea into “professional” learning network (also PLN; here’s some description and here’s some history).

With the advent of powerful networking technologies, professionals as well as learners are now able to access vast amounts and variety of information, aggregate and organize that information, prioritize what to read and/or respond to and how, with which community to share what and how much, and so on. As an example, here is an image in which I attempt to visually describe my own personal/professional learning network (you can click to see a larger image or right-click to download the file). I am still unsure how to integrate many other things that are not in the image and how to better organize an relate what are there, but trying to visually represent my PLN really helped me to think about my professional goals, management of time and energy, and so on. I call mine personal and/or professional because my roles as a learner and a professional overlap quite significantly.

Having introduced the concept, let me now share a few suggestions about how we can develop our professional learning network (both for ourselves as individuals AND in order to benefit one another).

1. Subscribe to blogs in your areas of interest. This means asking the blog to send you an email alert when a new entry is posted. Except with blogs (like those of news outlets) that may publish too many entries, blogs don’t usually flood your inbox. I guarantee that this blog will only sent you a few emails and only once a month, and I reassure you of that in order to (yes) suggest that you can go ahead and subscribe now.

2. Follow professionals on Twitter. Twitter, as many of us know, is a microblogging site where people share very brief (140 characters max) messages–breaking news, teaching tips, pithy comments, humor, hyperlinks, and whatnot–with their network. Compared to blogs, these are short and therefore good for mobile devices, as well as busy/mobile people. Compared to the full experience of social networking on Facebook (including its silliness, narcissism, distracting pictures and videos, and worst of all, too many “friends” ranging from the principal of our childhood school to maila kakaki saliko jwainko bhatijaki soltini to NELTA colleagues around the world to what-the-heck-when-did-I-add-this-guy kind of people)–okay, compared to Facebook, microblogging allows you to “follow” professionals in your field(s) of interest and let people “follow” you… and I don’t think maila kaka will follow your ELT Twitter feeds and hashtags, unless he happens to be an ELT person, which would be great.

3. Use Social Bookmarking. How often do you find yourself sending a link to an interesting article or educational video to a colleague, or two… well, post it on NELTA’s Yahoo Mail and flood the inboxes of 500 (?) people? You don’t have to share resources on the web like that. Just save your bookmarks in applications like Diigo or Delicious (install extensions on your browser) and people can see what you have “saved for later” and you can see theirs. That “theirs” could be people you know or it could be the whole social bookmarking community who have used “tags” to describe their findings on the web. (Here’s a fun video intro to  social bookmarking.)

4. Sign Up on Listservs and/or Mailing Lists. You probably are on NELTA’s Yahoo mailing list, which will send you a copy of all mails any member sends to the list. While it’s no longer the most efficient mode of conversation (though it is a still a good means for organizations to update its members), being on mailing lists is very important to stay updated. Listservs are more advanced forms of mailing lists.

5. Remember to Use Plain Old Personal, Human Contact. Motivated professionals as well as learners communicate with their colleagues and peers with both the intention of socializing and the intent of learning. Attending training events and workshops, conferences and seminars, and just asking questions or sharing ideas with colleagues are all extremely important aspects of persona/professional learning network. It is on top of this basic network that we want to take, as much as the resources allow us, that we take the human network into the web and extend it to people you may not be able to meet in person, add the affordances of synchronous and asynchronous exchange of ideas, conveniently store and retrieve information, and use the technology to help you aggregate and organize information for you.

There are many benefits of PLNs. First, it not only increases access to information and ideas that are relevant to us, it also allows us to organize that information. Second, the accessing/aggregating and organizing of information is mostly done by the invisible hands of technology, saving us huge amounts of time. Third, even when we are not using too advanced technologies, the very process of identifying our learning network and planning and organizing it makes us more efficient learners and professionals. Fourth, the network takes us from the isolation of our roles as “masters” of our classrooms where students do not engage with us as an equal into an open society where we can talk to our own learning peers. Fifth, we get the opportunity to learn by sharing our own knowledge  with others (and most of us learn by teaching!), and because we share that knowledge and experience with like-minded people, we also get useful response in return. (Here’s an interesting representation of the benefits of PLN).

Before I paint any rosy picture, let me add an important caveat about PLN that we, as members of a smaller, younger professional community, need to keep in mind. For us, it is not enough to sit there and try to access and organize knowledge and experience shared by others; very often, there are simply not enough sources or people for you to gather the information from. We must create and share new knowledge with one another. By contrast, if you think about teachers in Europe or America, because of the number of teachers and scholars in those societies who have access to the web, the resources that they need, the amount of time they have been on the web, etc, individual teachers there can access cache of information even without giving as much back. In our case, if we want our professional learning network to be rich in local/relevant and really useful information, we must contribute to our own new pool of knowledge, as well as utilize what is available from teachers/scholars from other societies. Let us use a specific example. If you have read the humorous examples of broken English shared by Parmeshwar Baral in this issue, no one else but Nepali English teachers can explain and help us understand/tackle these error patterns. So, we need to share our knowledge with others, as well as learn from them, if we want to make our PLNs useful.

Using the comment function, please share with other readers of this blog any general or specific ideas about your own PLN. Let us use this forum to exchange ideas among as many of us as possible, rather than use it to passively read the ideas of a few of us. Thank you in advance for your time.

Sounds and Images… Thinking about Teaching

Global thought, Miscellaneous

To the diversity of ELT khuraks of this month, let me add a different kind of material, a few inspiring web videos, with some reflections and questions on the issue of education in our time.

As a teacher, I believe that we must not just go to class with a lesson plan but we must have a broader understanding of the goals of education, a sense of how our education relates to the challenges of the larger society as well as our students’ futures, and the willingness to engage our students in thinking about larger issues than the textbooks provide–whenever and wherever possible or appropriate.

And as an English teacher, I believe that there is more to teaching this “global language” than language itself; for instance, we can teach English as a means for intercultural communication and understanding, as a means to access and contribute to global platforms of knowledge, and so on.

We need to think how we can adapt our teaching and make it more relevant to the changing needs and realities of our students’ and society’s present and future. If your bandwidth allows, let’s start by watching a video in which a British educational philosopher discusses the changing paradigms of education.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U]

In the video, the scholar, Ken Robinson, says that the current education system(s) in the world–which Nepal has adopted and often lags behind in adapting to the society’s ground realities–was conceived of and developed in Europe in the age of Enlightenment, or the age when positivist science including rather simplistic developmental psychology, industrial progress, and a class division were the order of the day. For example, the very word “class” that we use for describing a group of students tells something about the structure of our education: students move, from year to year, in a linear manner, towards a “higher” grade, until they are ready, like coke bottles in a conveyor belt at a bottling company, to exit on the other side of the educational factory. We can see that this structure was modeled upon efficiency of the industry, and we should ask how it can be updated to fit the information society and the knowledge market where we should be training our students as producers of knowledge, capable of networking with intellectual and professional communities  on a global scale, and so on–and not just train them  with basic literacy and professional skills that the industrial model did. The structure matters, underlying epistemological worldviews matter.

The industrial/enlightenment model of education–which is physically structured like the conveyor belt and is philosophically based on the nineteenth-century European enlightenment values/beliefs–is highly efficient in some ways. But this model seems to also have outserved many of its original purposes. We need to think about what it still does well and what it does not. For instance, what if one student who has the potentials of Einstein in science or that of Picasso in art fails in math or English?–actually what about thousands of SLC students across the country who continue to fail in English, and therefore in “education,” as we watch or talk about “enlightenment bases” of modern education? What can we do at the level of the lesson plan, the exam we are giving tomorrow, the curriculum that we have the power to change as members of a university department’s curricular committee, or at the level of discussions among NELTA members in on and offline venues?

Again, if your connection is not bad, here is another video on the theme that shows how even in the “advanced” societies the persistence of the conventional model of education has clashed with the reality of who the students sitting in the classroom are, what their life is like, [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o]and what their and the society’s changing realities and needs may be–and I am not thinking about changing education by adding technology or anything here, but instead rethinking education in terms of our local socio-cultural as well as material conditions.

Finally, here is another video–I’ll just link and not embed this one, but see the next one–in which another educational thinker, Mike Wesch talks about re-conceiving education from the perspective of what new technologies allow us to do. In our case, not many of Wesch’s ideas will apply very easily or directly; but maybe some of the developments in the fields of communication and information should make us think about how we can utilize those changes towards more locally adapted modes of teaching.

If you watched the three videos embedded or linked above, you might be thinking that we can’t do all those big things, that there’s not much benefit to just thinking and talking about those abstract things because you have to prepare students for the final exams within a system that you can’t change anything about… well, but watch the small things that these big thinkers do in their classrooms.

So, here’s Mike Wesch, the scholar with the big ideas in the video linked above, talking about some really small changes that he makes in his class, changes that we too can always make in our classrooms, not matter how well-resourced our classrooms are, no matter how capable we are making impacts/changes in the larger system of education. Certainly, this is not a community that lacks such simple ideas about improving teaching styles–I’ve learned thousands of things from the NELTA community since I joined it in the mid ’90s–but the changes in classroom teaching that Wesch is talking about here, and which I want to highlight in this entry, are changes that are connected to the larger questions of the goals of education, the need to make education relevant to students’ lives and societies, the changing paradigms of education  as they matter to our local conditions and realities. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhDCwRSHC4]

I will be delighted to read your response about anything. Thanks for reading.

Nelta Choutari, July 2011 Issue

Editorial

Shyam Sharma
(and Sajan Karn)

July 2011 issue of Nelta Choutari is rich.

From the reflections of teaching English for the first time by a young scholar from the other side of the world to an oral interview with a veteran at home who has taught longer than some of us have lived, to critical reflections on speaking a foreign language, a travelogue by a group of teachers, observation about participating in the Humphrey Scholarship by the immediate past President of NELTA, honest thoughts of another Fulbright scholar about abstruse words in Nepali text books, to thoughts about the challenges of teaching poetry combined with a practical lesson plan, the materials we have collected for you are varied. They are also all thought-provoking.

Kent Grosh, a Fulgright Teaching Assistant, jumps right into his subject: the gap between students’ current vocabulary and the vocabulary their text books often use. His analogy is memorable: you don’t use calculus to teach basic multiplication. If we think about it, the analogy of using calculus to fourth graders not only applies to the case of vocabulary but is also true about many other aspects of our curriculum, materials, and often pedagogy: we often fail to meet students where they are. Luke Lindemann, another Fulbright scholar, points out a similar problem, which is regarding the increasing use of English as a medium of instruction by public schools, like the one where he taught. We know how proud parents are when their children are taught in “English,” the media gets equally excited, and even ELT scholars are prone to jump on that bandwagon of “English” as a measure of good education. But if we think about the negative impact of suddenly beginning to use English as a medium of instruction on teachers’ instruction and students’ understanding in class, the issue is much more complicated than English or no English. Lindemann’s article is absolutely thought-provoking. Four NELTA members from Birgunj–Praveen Kumar Yadav, Ram Abadhesh Ray, Ashok Kumar, Kamlesh Kumar Raut–share a lot of good ideas from the experiences that they had from their travel to a conference in south India. Their piece serves as an inspiration for colleagues who attend conferences, trainings, and other events: if we reflect on and write about what we do or experience, that can become useful resource to our professional community. In another entry, Ganga Ram Gautam, immediate past President of NELTA, shares his experience of participating in the Hubert Humphrey Scholarship at Boston University, US. His observations about ELT practices, educational leadership, and professional networking are worth thinking about for all of us, because those are activities that all of us should be engaging in at our own levels. How can we be more observant and reflective teachers? How can we integrate leadership into our work? How can we promote and engage in professional networking? Finally, Gambhir Man Maskey shares in his own voice the experience of teaching English for forty years and a few observations about the changes in ELT over time. His interview gives us a glimpse into the past and a sense of how much progress we have made as a professional community. (In an editorial extra, Shyam shares his own experience and a thought about the mission of developing professional networking among Nepalese English teachers.)

Contents

  1. So Many Textbooks, So Little Time, by Kent Grosh
  2. Speaking a Foreign Language Makes You Less Intelligent, by Luke Lindemann
  3. Teacher Travelogue: A Journey to ELT@I Conference in Vellore, India, by Praveen Kumar Yadav, Ram Abadhesh Ray, Ashok Kumar, Kamlesh Kumar Raut (members of NELTA Birgunj)
  4. A Brief reflection of my Humphrey Fellowship Program at Boston University, by Ganga Ram Gautam, Immediate past Present of NELTA
  5. Interview with Gambhir Man Maskey, a podcast by Hem Raj Kafle and Eak Prasad Duwadi
  6. Strategy and Challenges for Teaching Poem at Secondary Level, by Mabindra Regmi
  7. The World is a Big Choutari, but– , by Shyam Sharma

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue. Again, we have five requests for you: 1. Please write at least one quick comment in response to at least one of the posts. 2 Please “share” posts that you like on Facebook or in other ways with your colleagues. 3. Please “like” what you liked—that sends a nice message to the author. 4. Please subscribe Choutari—it’s one click away. (We have 53 subscribed members including ten from abroad and we are surprised why folks are hesitant to use this convenience). 5. Please contribute your own entry for future months by writing to neltachoutari@gmail.com.

Thank you.

So Many Textbooks, So Little Time

Critical Outlook, Scholarly Article, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

So Many Textbooks, So Little Time:
Selection of English Curricula in the Public Nepali School System

Kent Grosh,  Fulbright Teaching Assistant *


Though we are discussing English education, let us imagine for a moment we are with a primary school teacher teaching math at Grade 4.  The students are presented with this problem:

figure of a math problem

The basic approach to solving this problem, the one we would assume that the class 4 teacher would present, might be similar to this:

But perhaps some of the students are still having trouble understanding this problem.  They might not understand the formula, or perhaps they never learned their multiplication tables well and can’t remember what 6 times 8 is.  We would expect that the teacher goes through each step until every student understands how to get the answer.

But imagine that the school, in response to poor student performance in math, decided that teaching advanced math would help the students learn more.  The fourth grade math teacher is provided with an advanced math textbook, perhaps a calculus textbook, and asked to teach it to their students in order to help them improve faster.  In that case, the the solution to Problem 0.1 that the primary level teacher would present might end up looking like this:

Someone with a background in math would recognize that this approach is just as correct, mathematically, as the first solution, but it is not nearly as appropriate to the audience.  What good would teaching calculus to students in class four do, even if the math is right and we get the right answer?  Would the teacher expect this to improve the students performance, or would this perhaps confuse them even further, and distract them from the fundamentals that prevented them from understanding the question to begin with?  If the students have trouble with this simple problem, teaching them to solve it with calculus would likely result in hopelessly confused students who do not understand how to find the answer at all.

This scenario may sound absurd, but it is unfortunately more or less the approach that many public schools have taken to improving student’s English.  Most public schools, whether English medium or not, teach two English periods per day.  One period often uses the government text, but the other uses a supplemental text, examples of which are Headway English, New Nepali Reader, Lotus English, or Harmony.  Private schools, whose students are generally ahead of their public school peers in English, use similar texts, and the understanding among those who choose and write the textbooks seem to be that using similar curricula and materials to that of the private schools will create similar results.  Thus, the texts at use at least half the time in public schools are frequently much more advanced than the corresponding government text.  There seems to be a general consensus among public schools that the more advanced the material presented, the more students will learn.

Unfortunately, creating unrealistic expectations for students does not improve the quality of their education. There are a variety of reasons that factor into the gap between the performance of students in private schools and those in public schools, but attempting to correct poor English by increasing the difficulty of the textbook is analogous to correcting poor math performance in class four  by teaching them calculus. Frequently, these textbooks are so advanced that the majority of the material are too far above the level of the students’ understanding for anything useful to be learned.  Rather than improving their English, the students gain nothing from the material presented, wasting the time that should be spent on creating a good, foundational understanding of English basics and fundamentals.

This is a writing sample I received from one of my class six students.  I present this not for criticism but simply for the purpose of comparison:

Ones upon a time there live in tiger and deer.  one day tiger was very hungry tigers look his lift side deer is going to drink and tiger eat that Deer.

In my experience, this sample is representative of a standard class six ability in English, and while it isn’t bad it is also clear there are still errors in basic grammar and spelling that need to be addressed; it seems that the simple past tense is not understood by the students, nor is punctuation.  By comparison, here is a sample from the textbook being taught in this class, this unit featuring a poem:

I saw a boy with eager eyes,/  Open a book upon a stall,/ And read, as he’d devour it all;
Which when the stall man did espy,/    Soon to the boy I heard him call,
“You, Sir, you never buy a book,/ Therefore in one you shall not look.”
The boy pass slowly on, and with a sigh,/ He wished he had never been taught to read,
That of the old churl’s books he should/ have no need.

            ~Mary Lamb, in Foning and Panlook, Headway English Book 6, pg. 123

Imagine the student who wrote the first writing sample reading this poem.  Look at some of the words used, such as stall, devour, espy, churl.  Not only are these words advanced and infrequently used in conversational English, but in the case of espy and churl the student might never encounter these words again until a Ph.D. program.  So what is being taught here, aside from obscure vocabulary?  There is no basic grammar construction being focused on, in fact much of the grammar is incorrect due to the flexible grammatical rules of poetry.  As a teacher, there is no lesson to teach here, little to be practiced or taught that students will find useful, and nothing to engage them.  There is little option for the teacher but to simply translate the poem into Nepali and have the students memorize the required vocabulary for the exam, all of which they are will likely to forget afterward; it is unlikely they will encounter, or they will have opportunity to use, any of these words again anytime soon.

Unfortunately, this example is representative of many, if not most, of the supplemental texts at use in public school classrooms.  Not only does this approach to learning actually result in students learning much less than they would with a simpler textbook, but there are a number of other more subtle, but equally damaging consequences.  As most Nepali teachers will be able to tell you, Nepali students frequently find speaking English extremely difficult.  It is not unusual to come across class ten students who, having studied English for six or seven years and who can read and even write proficiently, find it difficult to have a simple conversation in English.  In part, this is a result of the student never having learned fundamentals properly.  While their vocabulary is impressive, students are often never properly taught the basic grammar necessary for simple speech.  Speaking in another language is difficult, even terrifying, for a language learner, and without confidence in simple structures and grammar students will never have confidence in speaking.  When will class six students ever use espy or churl in a sentence when they need to communicate something?  And why should they, when simple past tense and correct punctuation are still a struggle for them?

But perhaps the most unfortunate result of these texts is that it removes the potential for fun from the classroom.  Students do not and cannot enjoy learning material that they cannot understand, and when the text being taught is incomprehensible to them, how will they be able to take any interest in it, even if the story or passage has good content?  Overly difficult material eliminates the possibility of games, activities, or creativity that engages the students, resulting in boring, dry lessons and a rote-learning approach in order to do well on the examinations.  A good teacher will always be able to engage students with material that they already understand, but even a good teacher will struggle to make the incredibly advanced textbooks presented in the public school classroom interesting or fun.  A good teacher can always make simple material challenging to the students by incorporating creative activities, more difficult vocabulary, or language production like writing and speaking, which are things teachers should be doing anyway.  But it is much, much harder for a good teacher to make anything useful of the difficult and irrelevant content provided as textbooks in the public school classroom.

It is true that public school students are often behind their private school peers, but there are many positive aspects to public school English education, not the least of which are fantastic government textbooks for class six, seven, and eight.  If public school are serious about increasing the quality of education that their students receive, work needs to be put into making sure that students have a solid foundation in the fundamentals, especially at the lower secondary level.  Only then will they be ready for more advanced materials.  Without that, attempting to increase student’s English with the use of textbooks above their level is like teaching calculus to class four students who have trouble finding the area of a rectangle.

————-

* From the Author: My name is Kent Grosh, and I have been teaching here in Nepal in a public school for about nine months.  It has been a wonderful experience; the students are enthusiastic and hard working, the teaching staff is dedicated and friendly, and there are many positive and encouraging things happening in the Nepali public school system that are often overlooked while lamenting the challenges at hand.  However, in this article I’ve chosen to highlight one common approach in public school English educational curricula that I believe is in need of change, with the hope this article might inspire some teachers and school administrators to assess their schools textbooks and ask whether they are appropriate to the abilities of their students.      

Speaking a Foreign Language Makes You Less Intelligent

Critical Outlook, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

 Luke Lindemann*

Speaking a foreign language makes you less intelligent. This is a fundamental truth about speaking a foreign language, but it is often forgotten. And forgetting this truth can have profoundly negative consequences for the classroom.

I do not mean that the practice of learning a language is harmful to intelligence. What I mean is that when we express ourselves in a language that is not our mother tongue, we must simplify our thoughts. To give a personal example, I have been conversationally fluent in Nepali for almost two years, but even today when I speak Nepali I feel less intelligent. I know fewer vocabulary  and the words I do know are simpler than those of my Nepali friends. It takes me longer to parse sentences and longer to respond. I forget words and mix others up and am often laughed at for some amusing mistake (my students were quite confused when I told them that their homework assignment was due ‘pharsi’ – I had meant ‘parsi’). For me, thinking in Nepali is just harder to do. It takes longer and it is exhausting.

When our students speak or write to us in the English language, they are the same students as when they speak Nepali to us outside of class, but the outward manifestation of their personalities can be very different. They may be bolder or they may be more shy, depending upon how they face the challenge and potential humiliation of being forced to express themselves in a less intelligent (and oftentimes laughably simplistic) way. This is the discomfort and terror of learning a language, and also its exhilarating challenge.

As teachers who have long since mastered the English language, we sometimes forget this. We teach language as if it were a simple skill like long division, and not a fundamental means of expressing ourselves. We scold our students for not speaking out in class, for being timid and quiet when their names are called and they must stand up and speak out in front of their friends. But when we do this, we are forgetting the terror and frustration that we experienced when we were students. We are inhibiting their learning.

By teaching only in this way, we make speaking English a terrifying ordeal for the less confident students. And it is almost impossible to develop communicative competence, in which students are able to hold a spontaneous conversation. Without communicative competence, the students may be able to pass the SLC but they will never be able to speak English fluently.

We must also take language into account when considering the medium of instruction for other classroom subjects like science and social studies. Most of the students where I worked spoke Tamang as a first language, Nepali as a second language, and English as a third language. The decision for medium of instruction is a very important decision in a country like Nepal that has such vibrant language diversity. In choosing to include instruction in the medium of English, Nepali, or a regional language, a school must respond to the desires of the community, the pressures of competition with other schools private and public, the resources available, and the strengths and limitations of the government curricula and examinations.

Ideally, students should be given the opportunity to learn in the language with which they are most comfortable. Speaking a foreign language makes you less intelligent. When students learn history or science in a language that is not their own, their grasp of the subject matter is unavoidably simpler. The depth of their questions and their creative capacity are diminished. They do not learn as well.

Unfortunately, in many places throughout Nepal today this is something of a necessary evil. A good command of the English language is considered one of the most useful skills, and English medium instruction is held to be one of the best ways to develop that skill. Schools must compete with each other by offering quality instruction in the areas that foster high SLC scores and attract students. Schools in poorer areas can also be hampered by a lack of materials and staff.

But regardless of resources or medium of instruction, in every single classroom in Nepal there needs to be the realization that language study is less about memorizing words and more about learning to communicate. Language study is difficult, often scary, and (when mastered) extremely satisfying and valuable. Speaking a foreign language will make you feel less intelligent, especially at first, but mastering a foreign language will make you brilliant.

————– 

* Luke Lindemann was a 2010-2011 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Shree Udaya Kharka Secondary School in Chapagaon VDC, Lalitpur. Before receiving this grant, he worked as an English teacher for Bhutanese refugees in the United States. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from Pomona College, and his primary interests are language issues and education. 

Teacher Travelogue: A Journey to ELT@I Conference in Vellore, India

Nelta branch and members, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes 
 Praveen Kumar Yadav, Ram Abadhesh Ray, Ashok Kumar, Kamlesh Kumar Raut, members of NELTA Birgunj

Our trip to Vellore* was not an easy one, with no train tickets available at one point, the train we somehow got to board being late, and so on. But once we reached the venue, we had a great time. We were able to attend nine of the 147 concurrent sessions, which ran in 19 rooms where eight papers were presented during 2 hours (so each presenter only had about 15 minutes). During tea breaks, we were able to meet participants from India and other countries and shared what NELTA is doing for the professional development of English teachers in Nepal. When we informed them about the forthcoming international conference to be held in February, 2012, many teachers said they’d like to come and  participate in our conference in Nepal. We shared our email addresses and went back to more sessions. We then attended the plenary sessions which consisted of two facilitations on ‘Materials Design: From the back of an Envelope to Full-fledged Unit’ by Prof. Numa Markee and ‘Teacher Power’ by Raja Govindasamy from India.

Prof. Markee argued that as Prabhu (1987) demonstrated in the ground breaking Banglore project that was implemented in Southern India from 1979 to 1984, good materials design is fundamentally grounded in classroom experimentation by teachers. Prof. Markee illustrated this position by showing how a task based module he had presented at the 16th International conference of NELTA recently held in Kathmandu, started out life in 1990 as a demonstration lesson of task based language teaching for teachers in training at the University of Illinois originally, the hospital drawing task shown here consisted of a hastily drawn pictures and a few scribbled notes on the back of an envelope. Over time, he had the opportunity to refine these ideas into “real” materials as he repeated this demonstrated many times. In addition, he was able over time to incorporate various improvements based on evidence from video recordings of some of the early demonstration lessons. Prof. Markee concluded his talk by suggesting ways in Indian Teachers of English can adopt these ideas to their teaching situations.

The plenary session had another presentation ‘Teacher Power’ by Raja Govindasamy from India. Teacher power simply means the influence of teacher exerts on students by virtue of his/her commitment and competence. Such a quality ensures leadership status to the teacher. Then a teacher enjoys power in five ways as appropriated from J. R. B. French and B. Raven’s book, The Bases of Social Power (1959). The first power is legitimate power by virtue of designation on the basis of qualification. The second is reward power which enables the teacher to assess and appreciate student performance. The third is coercive power which empowers the teachers to nudge and pressurize the students to move away from ignorance, indifference and inhibition to interest, intelligence and improvement. The fourth is expert power, the most imp0rtant power by which the teacher establishes his/her stature as a mastermind/specialist. The fifth is referent power, a sequel to the fourth, which means that the teacher is referred to as a role model for the students to emulate his/her. The powers make a teacher a mentor.

A reflection of our trip to Vellore wouldn’t be complete if we don’t mention the typical south Indian food that was provided by the conference organizers. Almost all the food items contained coconut in them!

After lunch, we attended the special lecture given via online technology by Mrs. Claire Bradin Siskin, director of Excelsior University, USA, in the Anna Auditorium Hall which is equipped with advanced technology. The sound at the hall was so clear that it looked as if the presenter was behind the curtain. At the end, through text message and microphone/voice chat, questions were asked to her and she answered them. It was an innovative and creative presentation we have ever attended. In the same hall, three authors Mrs. Usha Jesudasan, Dr. K. Srilata from IIT Madras and Mrs. Subhasree Krishnaswamy jointly presented their paper on creative writing. They started with how creative writing begins, continued with how creativity can be promoted, and ended with encouragement to write creatively.

After a valedictory session and speeches by various dignitaries, prizes were given for the school toppers in English for Standard X and XII. Prizes were also distributed for three Best Paper Presenters of the Conference. The programme concluded with the vote of thanks by the Director of the School of Languages, VIT, Dr. C. Annadurai.

The Conference was indeed a confluence which brought together over eight hundred delegates. The ‘connection’ the meeting has given to, many hoped, would be long lasting.

When compared to NELTA conference, the gathering was not as much as we had in our 16th international conference. The number of presenters was more in comparison of NELTA Conference, but ELT@I had fewer delegates from foreign countries. About 90 percent from India.  We also learned that ELT@I organizes more national conferences than the international ones, and that may be something that we need to start doing in Nepal. If we hold more national conferences around the country, more teachers would get the opportunity to attend them.  Among the finer details, 15 minutes only was allotted for one presentation during concurrent sessions, which seemed too short to us was that rapporteurs were highly active: they introduced the presenters at the beginning and they summed up the key messages of the presentation at the end.

Our journey to Vellore was very fruitful because we learnt a lot of things related to English language teaching in India. We got the opportunity to compare the conference with ours and learn new things from their, we saw new ways of presenting papers, and we heard about new perspectives in ELT. Our visit strengthened the relationship between NELTA and ELT@I. And we had a good interaction with the secretary of ELT@I who said that ELT@I is looking forward to collaborating with NELTA in coming days.

 

Acknowledgments 

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Consulate General of India (CGI) Birgunj for providing the opportunity and supporting us to attend the conference. We could not have been able to take part in the mega event of India without support of Chairperson Hemant Raj Dahal of NELTA Central and Kedar Prasad Sah and Sajan Kumar Karn of NELTA Birgunj.

—–

* This was the Sixth International and Forty-Second  ELT@I Conference, held in Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University, Vellore. It was organized by the English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELT@I).

A Brief Reflection of my Humphrey Fellowship Program at Boston University

Teacher's Experience/anecdotes


Ganga Ram Gautam*

Dear Valued NELTA colleagues and Choutari readers,

In this brief reflective note, I would like to share with you how this year has been professionally rich for me and how I was able to expand the network for NELTA. I expect that this reflection will be useful information for those who are looking for similar experience.

I felt both honored and privileged to participate in the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship in the year 2010/11. This is a highly prestigious program that brings mid-career professionals to the US and offers professional opportunities to foster mutual exchange among educational leaders working in the US and other countries. This year there were 217 fellows from 93 countries based in 17 different universities in the US. The fellowship year has been a rich professional experience for me. I feel that I have been able to expand my network with scholars here in the US and the world. Expansion of professional network, meeting people and sharing information about NELTA activities were my top priorities. I attended some courses in the School of Education at BU. I also observed some of the English language classes at the Center for English Language Orientation Program (CELOP).

Let me begin with the course experience at BU. Among the courses that I attended, TESOL Seminar and TESOL Field Observation were the ones that I would like to particularly talk about. TESOL Seminar is a course in which students are guided through the steps of curriculum design and writing a book. The professor introduced us to the concept of Tri-dimensional Syllabus that combines the Topics (Themes), Language Functions, and Grammar. By combining these three elements we can really address the topical interest of the learners, expose the learners to the desired language functions and provide them with the type of grammar they need. In addition to this, we also analyzed some of the textbooks and curricula in line with the class discussion on curriculum and materials design.

Another course that I found very useful was TESOL Field Observation. In this particular course, we observed the student teachers in class and shared our experiences. The students were assigned to observe at least three classes per week. We had to take notes of how the class began, how the learning goals were communicated to the students, how the learning activities were organized in class, what the types of errors the students committed were, how those errors were detected and addressed by the teacher, whether or not the students learned from the errors they committed, how the classroom dynamics were managed and so on. At the end of the week we would come to the class at the university, share our experiences and plan for the next week’s observations.

In addition to this, I also designed a Google that I plan to use with my students back in Nepal. In this website, I have tried to include the wonderful online resources that English teachers can use in their class. Also I have hyperlinked a lot professional development resources. I will regularly update the page and please do feel free to browse the page and use the resources available there. Also, please do send me your feedback and comments so that I can make it more reader-friendly and user-friendly.

The website address is: https://sites.google.com/site/gangasprofessionaldevelopment/

Nepal is now going through a shift and English language is going to be one of the key languages in the Nepalese education system. One of the things that I wanted to learn here in the US was how English is taught in multi-lingual and multi-cultural contexts so that I can share my experience with my colleagues in Nepal in order to address the linguistic and cultural diversities in Nepal. I observed English language classes both in university and schools here and talked to the teachers. I found that the teachers use these cultural and linguistic diversities as resources in their class. They encourage the students to share their cultural practices in relevant lessons and compare the linguistic elements among different languages.

During the fellowship year, I attended a Leadership Seminar Series by Prof. Jack McCarthy from the School of Management, BU. The leadership seminar was one of the highlights of the fellowship year. Prof. McCarthy helped us carry out the Leadership Survey through which I was able to see my leadership qualities from the perspectives of the people I was working with back home. One of the things that I would like to share from this experience is ‘leadership is not what you think about you but what other people think about you’. If one wants to become a successful leader, s/he has to develop a mechanism to get regular feedback from the colleagues, co-workers, sub-ordinates and the wider audience. This is the key to a successful leadership.

I was lucky enough to participate in the mega ESL event i.e. TESOL conference in New Orleans. The conference was a great learning experience which not only connected me to the global ESL/EFL community from around the world but also updated me with trends in ESL/EFL scholarship. About 5300 teachers from around the world presented and participated in the conference.

During the same conference I attended a Leadership Course organized by TESOL for TESOL members and the leadership workshops that I attended gave me the confidence to volunteer myself to lead the professional organization at the regional and global levels.

I have established a great network in the conference and I have volunteered to one of the global forums to develop the key performance of the English language teachers of all levels of education.

I also did a series of presentations in different forums and I highlighted the role that NELTA has been playing to promote and enhance English language teaching in Nepal.

These are some of the activities that I did in the last ten months and I am now looking forward to sharing these experiences in Nepal and contributing to the professional growth of NELTA and its members.

I encourage NELTA colleagues to apply for this kind of fellowship and be a part of such great experience.

 

* Ganga Ram Gautam, Humphrey Fellow 2010/11

Immediate Past President, NELTA

Strategy and Challenges for Teaching Poem at Secondary Level

Miscellaneous

We all understand the challenges of teaching poetry in ELT classrooms, a point that Kent Grosh addresses from a broader perspective about education in this issue. But if we are able teach well, poetry can add an important aspects to our students’ language skills, including understanding metaphors, connotations, symbolic meanings, and so on. In this entry, Mabindra Regmi shares a lesson plan for teaching a particular poem. – Ed.

Strategy and Challenges for Teaching Poem at Secondary Level
(in reference to the poem “A Girl” by Ezra Pound)

–          Mabindra Regmi

A Girl
by Ezra Pound

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

Challenges for a teacher

A Girl by Ezra Pound is a product of what is called imagist movement in modern poetry. The preference is given to the picture that the poem portrays rather than the meaning. There could be many challenges that the teacher can face while teaching this type of poem.

1.      Structure

One of the complications that the teacher might face while teaching the poem “A Girl” by Ezra Pound will be the structure of the poem itself for it does not follow standard metric stanzas. The lack of stanzas is perhaps deliberate as the whole poem centered to the page looks like a picture of a tree. This is one of the qualities that a imagist poet aspires for- to give the poem form of the topic under discussion.

2.      Meaning

Since the poem is created in order to paint a picture of the poet’s expression, it will be very difficult for the teacher to come to a singular conclusion as to what the poem might mean. Nonetheless, it does not affect the beauty and the creativity of the text and the profound impact that it will inevitably have on the reader. The teacher has to be careful not to ladle preconceived meaning for this poem, but encourage the students to come up with their own interpretations. It is also advisable not to consider any of the interpretations as totally wrong.

3.      Criticism

Literary criticism permeates any literary text. Many a times, it is the text itself that draws onto one or the other type of literary criticism. Even if the theories are not explicitly discussed in a secondary school literature classroom, certain inferences are unavoidable. Because “A Girl” is a poem of post modern times, it can be safely assumed to be critically appreciated through the lens of post-modernism in literature. But again, post-modernism is not a clear cut literary theory and the resulting explanation will retain some of the ambiguities and the surrealisms that post-modernism theoretical explanations propagate.

A Lesson plan for teaching the poem  

Exercise 1

Draw a picture of a tree and a picture of a girl side by side on a blank piece of paper.

Exercise 2

Read the poem “A Girl” by Ezra Pound. Look at the drawings that you have made. Now consider the questions below.

  1. Does the poem evoke a sense of comparison between a girl and a tree?
  2. How is the tree compared to a girl?

Exercise 3

Make two columns and list down the words related to a tree and those related to a girl.

Exercise 4

A Poem can be interpreted in many different ways. Read the poem once again. What do you think is the poet trying to say in this poem?

Exercise 5

There are many metaphors used in this poem. Can you make a list of them?

——————————-

Lesson Plan: Teacher’s Copy

“A Girl” by Ezra pound

Task A

Set Scene

Talk about pictures and paintings and how they might be similar to poems.

Ask the students to draw a picture of a tree and a picture of a girl and ask them to compare and see if there are any similarities.

Task B

Preteach vocabulary/prediction

Discuss and preteach the following vocabulary:

sap                                           moss                                        violet

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Exercise 4

Task C

Metaphors

Metaphors are devices used in writing poems or any other form of literature where comparison is made between two things which have some similarities but are essentially different. There is no use of comparing words like “like” or “as”.

He is a dog.

In the sentence above, (he) is compared with a (dog).

Exercise 5

Task D

Follow up

Ask the students to create metaphors for another object or person. Since a girl was used as the subject of the topic, you can use a boy instead to create some metaphors.

Suggested activities in the lesson plan

Few activities have been suggested in the lesson plan for teaching the poem “A Girl” by Ezra pound.

Pre-teaching Activities

Activity 1: Scene setting

Setting the scene for the matter to be taught will enable the students to activate the schema and in turn, it will make the comprehension of the subject matter easier to comprehend. Here, as a scene setting activity, the teacher is suggested to talk about how there are similarities between text of poems and pictures. Moreover, words can also be an effective means to express picture-like representations. As an imagist poem, “A Girl” also paints a picture of a comparison between a girl and a tree.

The teacher can further ask the students to draw a picture of a tree and a picture of a girl and try to see if there are any similarities that exist between them. The students can work individually, in pairs or in groups and give a short presentation on what kind of similarities that they have found.

Activity 2: Preteach vocabulary items

Although the vocabulary items presented in the selected poem are reasonably simple and most of the words can be understood by the students of secondary level, it is a good idea to discuss some of the items so that the students will have a complete comprehension of the poem that they are reading. Here, three words sap, moss and violet are referred for consideration for discussion. Of course the list can be contracted or extended based upon the cognitive knowledge of the students regarding vocabulary.

It is suggested that the vocabulary items are discussed in contextual and context free manner regarding the poem. The words might have been used in a different way in the poem as it so often happens while studying poetry. The students should have a clear concept of what the words mean in the poem before they start reading.

While-teaching Activities

Activity 3: Reading and comprehension

Ask the students to read the text of the poem, preferably aloud. Ask them to answer the comprehension check questions given at the end. This will enable the students to get a basic gist of the poem and what it is trying to say.

Activity 4: Vocabulary used for comparison in the poem

            There are different words used to describe the tree and to describe the girl. Ask the students to make a list of these words so that they can get an idea how these two unlikely items are compared using more or less equal number of words.

Activity 5: Finding the metaphors

One of the figurative devices used in this poem is metaphors. After explaining what metaphors are, the students can be assigned to make a list of all the metaphors used to compare the girl with a tree.

Post-teaching Activities

Activity 6: Creating Metaphors

After the students are familiar with the concept of metaphors, they can be asked to create some metaphors of their own. Here, the students are asked to create metaphors for a boy since the poem deals with metaphors dealing with a girl.

The world is one big choutari–but…

Editorial, Miscellaneous, Teacher's Experience/anecdotes

Shyam Sharma

The world is one big choutari.

Yesterday I received a few emails from fellow editors and a revised article from a contributor for Choutari July issue, which I am assigned to put together, with support from my colleague Sajan Karn. My bus was leaving for Boston at 4pm, so I replied to the emails and left New York. On my way to Boston–where Ganga Sir is wrapping up his one year visit as a Humphrey scholar and where I am joining him and Hemanta Sir, who happens to be here at this time, for dinner–I was able to return the article with some minor editorial comments with a 24 hour turnaround time. On my way, I was also able to read about the  training in Majuwa, Gulmi (which is my old home town) that Gopal Sir gave and also shared the update with us via Yahoo mailing list. It’s just amazing how much communication technologies have advanced around the world. But–

But when I write about the connection that some of us happen to have among the Nepalese ELT community at home and abroad, some of us more reliably and permanently than others, I think about the colleagues across Nepal who do not have (reliable) connection for joining the professional networking that others do. As I write this, I imagine that I could have been one of those teachers in Majuwa who requested Gopal Sir to please return for another training. It could be years from now when we hear from or about Majuwa. Or–

Or, it could be not that long, if we make the best of use of what is available, if those of us who are connected help make more connections . Choutari editors have talked about this. In our attempt to promote professional networking through online forums like this, we might sound to some readers that we are oblivious of the reality on the ground. We are not. We just want to make platforms, practices, and resources available to our colleagues who are increasingly able to connect to the web AS AND WHEN they are able to do so. We don’t want to wait until everybody is connected. Therefore–

Therefore, our request to you as someone who has already some level of access is this: please do one small thing to increase access, participation, contribution for or by a colleague or two. Please print an article that you like and provide it to someone who doesn’t have the access. Please collect something from someone who doesn’t have access and type it up and email it to us. Even for those who are already connected, please “share” entries here on your Facebook, please “like” articles, please “subscribe” to the blog as a whole (link on right), and please write and send a longer, independent entry/article for the coming months. If you need some guidelines, please either see this page or email us at neltachoutari @gmail.com.

Thank you for reading this issue of Nelta Choutari!

—-
Shyam Sharma, University Doctoral Fellow
English Department, University of Louisville,
Louisville, Kentucky, USA

How to Enhance Collaborative Learning Environment in the ELT Classroom

ELT Resource

Shyam Sharma*

As language teachers, perhaps none of us underestimate the value of collaborative learning: interaction is at the heart of how we teach students speaking, listening, and even writing and reading/comprehension skills. However, conventional scholarship and practice of collaboration in the ELT classroom are usually teacher-designed, teacher-managed, and teacher-dominated group activities. In this post, I would like to highlight the value of creating a collaborative learning environment in the ELT classroom by sharing my personal experience of using student-managed, student-centered group work.

The current context in which I use student-managed group projects is that of business communication at the intermediate and advanced college level, but I will focus on ideas and strategies that are adaptable from my current context to that of ELT classrooms at the middle and high school levels. I must admit that there are significant difference between the high-tech, small class, two class periods a week context from which I want to draw some insights and the low-tech, large class, every day of week teaching situations from which I come and to which I am trying to implement some of the insights about collaborative learning. But while teaching in a hi-tech classroom where both students and teacher have access to a lot of hardware and web 2.0 collaborative technologies, I increasingly realize that collaborative learning environment is not a challenge bur rather a solution to the difficulties that I would face if I had access to fewer technologies, my class size was bigger, and my teaching load were to increase. In other words, I am trying to answer this question: “How would I achieve the goals and benefits of collaborative learning environment in low-tech, large class, high teaching load situations?” Let me start with some theoretical insights on the importance of creating/enhancing collaborative learning environment in the classroom; then I will describe the techniques and technology for doing so; finally, I will reflect on how I would try to achieve similar goals in more challenging situations.

In Learner-centered teaching, Weimer (2002) points out a fundamental problem with most teachers’ attitude towards students with regard to letting them “drive” the process of their learning: “We might squeeze over closer to the door and let students sit next to us, maybe even hold onto the [steering] wheel, but for all intents and purposes, we are still doing the driving” (p. 38). Frankly speaking, except perhaps when we are discussing the idea of teaching/learning in a more theoretical or a training situation, most of us are not ready to “let students drive” their own learning: we normally think we know what is best for them, we want to deliver the content, we need to control the class, and so on. I remember that when I was teaching at a private school in Kathmandu many years ago, the director/owner of the school happened to pass by as I was passionately implementing my ideas about “how to teach speaking skills” on which I had presented a paper at NELTA Conference the previous week! He immediately went to the Principal’s office to tell him that Sharma sir’s class looked and sounded like a circus and instruct that I change my teaching to a more acceptable way if I wanted to continue to have my job in that school! Thanks to the principal who happened to be an English teacher who had also kindly come to my session at the conference, he explained to Mr. Proprietor that I was doing students a great favor by letting them learn language by using it! Had it not for this rare principal who understood something about ELT, I would lose my job that day. Simply, most stakeholders, often including students themselves, want the class to be “under control,” a condition that is hard to achieve when we don’t know how to let collaboration happen. Besides the challenge of keeping especially large classes under control, we are culturally not wired very well to relinquish authority and let students speak, explore, present, etc.  But it is not just “eastern,” as opposed to “western,” cultures that have this issue of authority. In their book Electronic collaboration in the humanities,  Knowles and Hennequin (2004) state that “Our students arrive in our classrooms trained to devalue collaboration by their previous educational experience; they often resist collaborative work, and when required to do it, they may not know how to proceed”—and this observation is about teaching in the US.

In theory, no one argues against creating collaborative learning environment or even letting students plan, manage, and direct the course of their learning based on the ground rules, frameworks, or encouragement provided by the teacher. In Cooperative learning in the classroom, Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec (1994) state that “Cooperative learning results in significantly higher achievement and retention than do competitive and individualist learning. . . . [it] tends to result in more higher-level reasoning, more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions . . . and greater transfer from one situation to another.” It would be hard to find any language teacher who disagrees with this position in theory, or while they are attending a seminar or training; the challenge is when we return to our classrooms and are faced with the challenges like that of managing class, having the resource or energy to prepare well-structured activities, having enough time let collaborative learning happen, and completing the course before the end of the term or year—not to mention the problem of a thin wall between our classroom and the next one where Buddhi Sir wants quiet to teach his chemistry class.

We all—even perhaps the director of our schools—know that today’s kids are used to interactive learning from the other modes and means at home and outside class. The rising trend of interactivity due to increased access to the web and social networking have been pointed out as making children of younger generations increasingly attuned to networked social relationship and interactive learning environment, and our society is no exception to that trend. In Millennial rising, Howe and Strauss (2000) pointed out that wherever the new information technologies have reached, young people have adapted to doing “teamwork” through the use of technology outside school, for instance quickly communicating how a group of them want to divvy up and do a task. What Howe and Strauss call the “millennials”—or people born around the turn of the new millennium, spend time communicating with friends and family, and are savvy with ICTs. As they grow up many of them are even involved in “grassroots reconstruction of community, teamwork, and civic spirit.” So, it is natural and necessary for the younger generations of school children to learn in collaborative environments, whether or not the technology is available/accessible in the classroom itself. Let me now briefly describe the use of technology that I have, before moving on to reflect on how I would try to achieve those teaching/learning goals without it.

Continue reading How to Enhance Collaborative Learning Environment in the ELT Classroom →

Exams, Academic Writing, and Nepalese ELT

Critical Outlook

Related to the issue of testing vis-a-vis its role and justification in education, I would like to share in this brief post a few thoughts about the other side of testing: engaging students in academic writing that allows them to express their ideas more freely and creatively.

I recently attended a pre-conference full day workshop at the Annual Convention of the college chapter of US National Council of Teachers of English (the CCC) in Atlanta City, Georgia. This workshop, which brought together scholars of English and Writing Studies from different countries, focused on the need to understand how academic writing is done in different parts of the world. It is traditionally assumed that academic writing is only taught as a separate subject in schools and colleges in the United States; it is believed that academic systems in other places (like our own) only use writing as a testing tool. Increasing amount of research and scholarly conversation is showing that that is not always the case: writing may not be taught as a separate subject in other countries but schools and teachers do find ways to use writing to fulfill more than the purpose of testing students’ knowledge on the subject matter of another course. For instance, when listening to a French professor of writing, I felt that there are much more complex epistemological functions that writing serves between the simple distinctions between writing to learn and writing to be tested on the knowledge gained. However, the workshop made me feel very strongly that the Nepalese education system does not integrate writing as a form of learning nearly as well as many other countries around the world seem to do.

In Nepal, we have not yet developed curricular and pedagogical practices that foster epistemological agency in our students. That is, we do not let students write in order to generate their own new ideas. Students write to demonstrate knowledge, not to create it. This is not a matter of distinction between us/east and the west, but in Nepal (and more generally in South Asian societies) teachers and curriculum developers seem to be still stuck in the classical idea that knowledge is out there, that new knowledge is the domain of the few “jannes,” (the knowers) that the teachers’ job is to transmit immutable truths from the real jannes up/out there to the students down there, and that it is good enough for students to just learn and regurgitate what we teach them. We do not yet see that it is only by generating new ideas as part of their learning process that learners become capable of succeeding in the knowledge economy of today’s world. Our students don’t solve problems, they just understand problems identified by others and solutions found out by others. Like Sajan has said in the editorial, our academic institutions produce owners of certificates, not producers of new knowledge.  We don’t prepare our students to respond to novel situations in life and work with new ideas. We teach theories, they go solve practical problems, rarely making any connections between the theories and the real problems. We never encourage students to question the books, rarely ask them to respond to thula manchhes’ (big people’s) ideas with their own, and we do not instill in them the respect for and confidence in their own ideas. I sometimes mentally visualize our education system as a bizarre place where books written in distant places/times are hanging from the ceiling of a room, with teachers trying to read and explain the  content of the books to the students who are sitting on the floor, passively listening to the teacher. What the books say is not only out of reach and question of the students, it is also out of the teacher’s own ability and desire to critically assess and understand.

But to me more optimistic, let me segue from that bizarre image to how some new and better developments are also taking place in the sphere of literacy and education in our society as well. At the CCC conference after the workshop, I presented a paper that was based on a book chapter that Balkrishna and I wrote recently. Based on our observation and interviews about popular culture and literacy practices of Nepalese youth online, I talked about the ways in which alternative learning spaces on the web are now beginning to provide young people in traditional societies like Nepal some powerful motivations to adopt/adapt knowledge and popular culture practices  from other societies, to create and share new knowledge among themselves, and to subvert the hierarchical knowledge structure that is sustained by hierarchical socio-political structure of our traditional society.

the real jannes and the child

The issue that connects this reflection with my point in the paper is this: educational systems reflect social structures that allow certain groups to “know,”  and and they also reflect social worldviews that legitimize and make respectable some people’s knowledge and not others’.  For example, when people my age or older grew up (and to a lesser extent even today), younger people were/are constantly reminded  NOT to be “janne” in front of the adults: “Janne na ho hai phuchche!” An implicit social norm only allows a few groups of people like the ascetic, the shaman, old men, those with feudal/political power, and recently professional teachers to behave like they know something, to use their knowledge in society. Not kids. In our society, kids can’t act like they know, even if they do know something. And that implicit understanding that only the knowledge of those who wield social and political power should be considered legitimate and meaningful pervades our thinking about education; that understanding shapes the educational structure and prevents new models to enter or thrive. In other words, it is unfortunate but the underlying reason why exams and certificates fundamentally define education itself in our society is because we continue to accept the conventional social structure where knowledge is considered to be the exclusive domain of the few “jannes.” The current model of mass education that lays too much emphasis on examination/testing came from the colonial and Industrial Revolution era of Europe when class and power structured education, not the other way around; but we in South Asia adopted it long ago (from the colonial education in the south) and we are not yet ready to move from there to something more democratic, more learner-centered, an educational mechanism that is more attuned to the knowledge economy of the present century. We don’t want the kids to steal the fire, and that is why we don’t feel the need to ask them to voice their opinions, challenge old ideas develop new ones, and use writing to create and share new knowledge that matters to them. We either don’t know or don’t care how much this old worldview will hurt our future generations’ opportunities and ability to compete in the increasingly globalized knowledge economy.

The strength of a society’s desire for something, or lack thereof, is determined by its worldview. Our educational systems are the manifestations of our lack of desire to help students to create new knowledge; they are designed to make students tell us back what we tell them. In my paper, I talked about how the socio-epistemological structure of traditional societies are changing as a result of the new wave of new technologies, connection to popular culture activities online, and access to information. For example, the fact that Nepalese youngsters now can find more information online–more interesting and more relevant to them–than their school provides them has greatly increased the chances of them sharing their own ideas with others without the inhibition of the janne adults. But unfortunately, while alternative affinity spaces like social networking and media sharing sites online have created such new possibilities, our students have to ultimately depend on our accreditation of their learning with formal certificates, which in turn come from regurgitating what we or the textbooks told them and not from creating and sharing new knowledge.

In my talk, I invoked the idea of the “choutari,” which reminds us that even in the hierarchical social and knowledge structure of our traditional society, there were indigenous spaces where people came together to share ideas, solve problems, and let the younger generations gradually take over the conversation. So it is not that we the easterners had it all wrong in terms of democratic ownership and use of knowledge; indeed, it is our adoption of the “modern” model of formal education that ironically replaced several organic knowledge structures that existed in the society.  The modern model of “western” education is actually what came out of the industrial model that has outrun its purpose and utility for a new knowledge economy in a globalized world.

What we need to do, then, is to seriously think about how we may be able to mitigate the stifling effects of turning education into testing machines, adopt and adapt models of education that make space for learners to engage in creating ans sharing new knowledge, and where possible find out what local knowledge structures are worth drawing on towards enhancing the epistemological agency of our students. The advancement of academic writing as a part of learning is one of the practical solutions to the problem of stultifying education with exams and tests. It is time that we look at other societies and their educational systems for better uses of writing than for administering exams. In the west, hypercapitalism’s invasion of the educational sphere has put the cart of testing before the horses of education; we in Nepal seem to be obsessed with testing because it gives us a false sense of security by disallowing the kids to threaten our power and positions by questioning our knowledge or trying to replace/improve it with their own.

We have taken just enough exams since the establishment of “modern” education: it’s time to really modernize our education by giving our students real opportunities to create and share knowledge–through writing as knowledge-making.

Lekhnath Sharma Pathak

Miscellaneous

Lekhnath S Pathak is an Assistant Professor in the Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University and Secretary, QUEST-Nepal. A former Central Executive Member of NELTA, Membership Secretary and Editor of Journal of NELTA and NELTA Newsletter, he has in recent years been active in training and promoting Quality Circles in Nepal and beyond. For his contribution in the organization of 13th International Convention of Students’ Quality Circles in 2010 and promoting SQC in Nepal, he was awarded with “Quality Leader Award” by World Council for Total Quality and Excellence in Education. He was a Visiting Fellow (Overseas Teaching Fellow) to Kingston University, London, UK in 2011. This essay is a condensed version of a paper presented at the 16th International Conference on Quality organized by Asia Pacific Quality Organization (APQO) combined with 1st Conference on Quality organized by Network for Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness, Nepal (NQPCN) at Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel in September 2010.

Nelta Choutari – Second Anniversary Issue (January 2011)

Editorial

EDITORIAL

Namaste and Welcome to the Second Anniversary issue and third year of Nelta Choutari.

(go to contents)

10,000.

That’s the number of views that Nelta Choutari crossed on December 16, 2010. That’s incredible, and we are excited about it, but we also feel more responsible towards the increased number and probably variety of readers. We define responsibility by relevance–and we can only address that challenge if you participate in and contribute to the discussions in this forum.

At the end of 2008, inspired by the ELT conversations in NELTA’s Yahoo Group mailing list, three of us (at the time) wanted to make that kind of intellectual resource generated by Nepalese ELT teachers/scholars available beyond email inbox of NELTA members and the archive of the mailing group. We thought that our professional conversations must become a resource for future generations as well as shared with the ELT community in the world outside (please see related article by Prem). We first started with a wiki site with the simple aim of letting fellow teachers share their teaching stories, while we shared our own thoughts and reflections. We were not sure what NELTA colleagues across the country might want to read about–we still struggle with that question today–and we were also worried that load shedding and lack of internet access would make our effort towards building a professional conversation forum meaningless. For some time, the visit counter on our wiki seemed to confirm our fears; but instead of giving up, we started a blog, moved the materials, and continued to share our own ideas every month, assuming that if nothing else the blog would be a means for us to read one another’s ideas. But soon, our expectations were greatly exceeded. By the beginning of the next year, the statistics started soaring. statistical trend of choutari two years

The statistics is exciting. The average of 5 views a day last year has gone up to 26 views a day this year (not counting admin views), and the rate of increase is quite encouraging:

statistical trend by month

In the background, however, we have always been more concerned about how to increase the contribution “by” our fellow teachers from NELTA branches across the country, or the grassroots level, than just how to increase the readership (please see related post contributed by NELTA President Ganga Ram Gautam, who was our guest at a recent meeting); while readership is important, the key mission of this professional networking initiative is to contribute towards the blurring of lines between reader and writer, teacher and scholar, practitioner and theorist, student and researcher, center and branch and so on. So, at this time, we are beginning to discuss how to encourage students (future teachers) to read and respond to professional conversations in forums like this. Most importantly, we are talking about how to let this discussion forum contribute towards building our own local scholarship, research, theories, and pedagogy. We want you to join the mission.

We would like to ask fellow teacher-scholars to please shun the scholar-teacher distinction and come forward and share your ideas in this and all kinds of professional discussion forums. Colleagues from across the country who have some access to this forum, please join hands with us: let us overcome the hesitation due to center versus branches distinction (see related past article). So the question is not just how to increase viewership of this blog. This blog is, in fact, a part of a larger mission: to make professional networking, discussion, and development a fundamental aspect of ELT practice as well as scholarship in Nepal. We often worry about the 5 or 7 of us posting our own ideas rather than posting the ideas, experiences, and challenges of teachers on the ground and discussing them instead; but to tell you the truth again, we are just beginning to get more of those contributions. Thank you very much, dear NELTA members from Palpa, Surkhet, Gorkha, and Birgunj, for your contribution for this special issue. We dedicate this issue to you!  Until now, the small team of editors have been posting our own ideas a lot of times, and, indeed, blogs are usually run by one or more individuals who are interested in an academic or professional subject; but this team has tried to appropriate the rather “individualistic” culture of blogging in order to create a “community” platform. We have gradually tried to develop this forum into a magazine-like form, with monthly issues, editorials, and columns related to specific interests (research, teaching, training, learning about ELT, developing ELT resource, professional updates, integration of new media into networking, etc).

We would like to dedicate the first issue of 2011 to NELTA colleagues in NELTA branches across the country, asking you to help us make this a venue for teachers at the grassroots level to post their ideas and respond to one another. With your active participation and contribution, dear teacher-scholars across the country, we can shape the course of scholarship and professional development, research and resource development, teaching and learning in ways that are specific, relevant, and engaging to us in Nepal and in particular local contexts. Let us gain the knowledge created anywhere in the world, but let us also network and work together to create our own knowledge and scholarship.

CONTENTS

1. BRANCH SPECIAL (several articles and updates from NELTA branches)

2. Towards Local Literacy: Globalization and Nepalese ELT (an article by Prem Phyak)

3. An Inside View of Choutari’s Professional Networking Activities (a guest observation by Ganga Ram Gautam)

4. Interview with an English Teacher (Ekku Maya Pun, a podcast by Hem Raj Kafle)

5. Networking, Nepalese ELT Teachers, and Professional Development (an article by Kamal Poudel)

6. Student Special: How to Assess Online Sources (an article by Bal Krishna Sharma)

7. English Access Microscholarship Program in Nepal (an article by Shyam Pandey)

8. Educated but illiterate (an article about education and information literacy by Sajan Karn)

(go to top)

Please remember to write comments for as many entries as you can. Also, please subscribe to Choutari by email. Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011.

(*This entry was posted late, as an exception, to encourage contributions from colleagues from outside the Valley; please send in your contributions before the 15th of the month so  they can be lined up for the next month. Thanks. Ed.)

BRANCH SPECIAL, January 2011

Native Perspective, Nelta branch and members

Namaste!

We dedicate this issue to the colleagues from NELTA branches across the country, with special thanks to colleagues from Birgunj, Gorkha, Palpa, and Surkhet. There is no doubt that our readers will be glad and grateful to you if you can continue to publish news updates about training or other professional development events, success stories of individual teachers or schools that take new initiatives in ELT, personal anecdotes, annual summaries of ELT activities in your branch… anything you can share with the rest of the NELTA community and readers around the world. To repeat what we said in the main editorial, our vision is to make this a professional discussion forum where teachers at the grassroots level ARE the ELT scholars and researchers. We don’t need to remind any fellow teacher that the best types of ELT resources are pedagogical solutions that evolve from problems overcome by individual teachers, classroom/action research, teaching tips shared among teachers who are in similar material and institutional situations, and reflections and theorizing done by teacher-scholars in the geo-political contexts of Nepal and the local settings around the country. Simpy, this forum is yours, and you should contribute what you know, what you have, what you are interested in. The discussions of scholars at the center or in different types of professional academic settings around the world are also important, but those postings and discussions will also become more meaningful if they are based on the situations, challenges, innovations that you face at the classroom and local levels.

Here is a special set of materials from NELTA branches from across Nepal. Enjoy the local flavor and promote the conversation!

  1. NELTA Palpa Conference Vibrated the Teachers in the Area (an article by Gopal Bashyal, NELTA Palpa)
  2. NELTA = Novel ELT Activities (an event update and article by Gopal Bashyal, NELTA Palpa)
  3. NELTA Surkhet in 2010 (a branch update from Surkhet, by Mukunda Giri, NELTA Surkhet)
  4. “Teaching English with a Difference” (a report from Birgunj on a recent Training Program, by Suresh Shrestha*)
  5. English Access Microscholarship Program in Nepal (an article about a new ELT initiative in NELTA branches, by Shyam Pandey)
    (also linked from main editorial)

Please remember to leave a comment to these posts and promote updates and discussions from NELTA branches across the country. Please subscribe to Choutari so you will be alerted when there is a new post.

(back to front page)

Towards Local Literacy: Globalization and Nepalese ELT

Critical Pedagogy, Native Perspective, Scholarly Article

Prem Phyak

Introduction

Anything that is ‘local’ is generally better in terms of quality and permanence. Let me give some examples: local chicken is tasty, local fruit is hygienic, local vegetable is fresh, and local people make a big difference in your life. What about local literacy? In this short article, I highlight the importance of local literacy in relation to ELT in Nepal. I will also briefly discuss how local literacy in ELT can be promoted in the classroom. Let me start with some perspectives on globalization as the basis of this discussion.

Globalization and Local literacy: What?

We all know that English has become a part of our social and individual lives: it is not only in our education and professions but also in our homes, through television, internet, mobile phones, and other information and communication technologies. Through social networking and new media in particular, English is continuing to work as one of the most powerful means of globalization (See related article in May 2009 issue of NeltaChoutari). We cannot consider the trends of globalization and the spread of English as neutral without being extremely naïve. As Bourdieu (2001) tells us that

“Globalization” serves as a password, a watchword, while in effect it is the legitimatory mask of a policy aiming to universalize particular interests and the particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers…It aims to extend to the entire world the economic and cultural model that favours these powers most, while simultaneously presenting it as a norm, a requirement, and a fatality, a universal destiny, in such a manner as to obtain adherence or, at the least, universal resignation. (as cited in Phillipson, 2004)

The term ‘globalization’ has now become a buzz word in every field, and it has very important implications in ELT because the English language is the most influential means of “universalizing particular interests and particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers” as Bourdieu argues. To say that we are simply “using” a “common” language for “communicating” across linguistic borders is both absolutely correct but absolutely ludicrous if we don’t “also” recognize/admit that languages belong to societies that wield cultural, social, and political powers through their languages: as language teachers, we must not limit our understanding and scholarship to dictionary definition of “language” because we must also know that the relative difference of the power that different language communities makes huge difference in both material and intellectual terms for people and societies. So, it is important to understand what role English plays in globalization of ideas and practices of dominant cultures. English is considered a ‘global’ language (Graddol, 1997; Crystal, 1997), and the number of researches on the role of English in globalization has increased in the last decade. Recent scholarship in this area helps us understand why and how the role of English as a global language should be assessed critically. The views about the role of globalization in language teaching are, however, more divergent. In their groundbreaking edited book ‘Globalization and Language Teaching,” Block and Cameron (2002) summarize following major views regarding globalization:

  • Hegemonically Western, and above all extension of American imperialism
  • Extreme of standardization and uniformity
  • Synergetic relationship between the global and the local- globalization

We see that the first view takes Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ and Phillipson’s ‘linguistic imperialism’ about globalization considering it as a means to disseminate the Western and American economic, cultural, political and educational ideologies. In this sense, globalization is another face of Westernization and Americanization. This view is concerned more with the political and ideological discussion which, as I see, does not make more sense in ELT. But the second and third views have a great impact on ELT.

We can relate two major issues – native speakerism and imported method – regarding the ‘standardization’ and ‘uniformity’ in ELT respectively. Standardization here means many things. The most obvious point related to ELT is that in order to maintain standard we have to follow ‘native’ English representing maybe CNN and BBC English. The uniformity can be interpreted as ‘adoption’ of the same textbook, method of teaching and learning material all over the world without considering the ‘local’ socio-cultural context.

The third view – glocalization – is the negotiation between the global and the local in which we find the mixture of the both. At present, this cocktail idea has come to the fore to soothe the criticisms against globalization on the ground of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘imperialistic’ ideology. With this view, we can argue that globalization has its presence at local level as well. We can also say that it is the continuum which has greater impact at the global context but have less impact at the local context. This degree also differs in terms of power, economy and technological advancement. It is obvious that the societies which are poor, powerless and technologically underdeveloped have less impact of the globalization. In this regard, Block (2008) claims

Globalization is framed as the ongoing process of the increasing and intensifying interconnectedness of communications, events, activities and relationships taking place at the local, national or international level. (p.31)

Although it is accepted that ‘local’ components can also be incorporated in the ‘globalization’, questions which have been ignored are: To what extent we have recognized the value of ‘local’ in ELT literacy practice? Which one (the global or the local) is dominant?  How can we bring the ‘local’ into ELT pedagogy? In the remainder of this article, I discuss these issues with reference to ELT in Nepal.

Local literacy and local society

Going through various literature and studies regarding literacy (e.g. Wallace, 1999, 2002), we find three major interpretations of local literacy. First interpretation takes local literacy as teaching through local languages. This is concerned more with the anti-linguistic imperialistic discussion pioneered by Phillipson (1992). Second interpretation is grounded on the use of language for daily communication. Teaching of English, in this regard, is considered as a planned and systematic academic endeavor to help ‘local children’ [Nepalese] use English in informal communications outside the classroom. But to what extent, Nepalese children, studying at Grades 1, 2, 3 in rural areas have to speak English while shopping, for example? Does such a projection of the English language as a means to achieve commodity help children achieve true essence of education? These issues are often ignored in academic discussion especially in the global ELT discourse. At the same time, as Cameron (2002) claims, ‘The dissemination of ‘global’ communicative norms and genres, like the dissemination of international languages, involves a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern cultures” (p. 70).

The third view, which I want to focus in this article, is concerned with the contextual sensitivity of any language literacy including ELT. According to this view, ELT should be in consonance with the socio-cultural and politico-economic realities of particular context where literacy in English takes place. Moreover, this view believes that English language learning is a ‘situated practice’ which happens with the ‘bottom-up’ fashion rather than ‘top-down’ and through so-called expertise-delivered-knowledge. To be more specific, let me ask some questions (although there are many) regarding teaching English in Nepal;

  • Do the methods we are adopting while teaching English address our children’s values, beliefs and expectations?
  • Are the textbooks that we use for teaching the English language appropriate to our local socio-cultural and politico-economic realities?

We cannot answer these questions in a ‘yes/no’ manner. However, we can be realistic while discussing these issues. Elsewhere, Canagarajah (2002) vehemently argues that the global methods of teaching (e.g. communicative language teaching) have created inequalities in the global pedagogical village. Following a single method with ‘fits-in-all-context’ assumption does not really address learning needs and expectations of local children. Moreover, such an assumption does not empower children rather it marginalizes them psychologically and cognitively as well. This clearly indicates that we need to think about exploring our own practices of teaching English which is relevant to our own soil and people. At the same time, I am not claiming that we should not be aware of the global practices. We should be well informed with them but we should critically scrutinize those practices keeping our realities in view. I think I can discuss much about this when I come to textbook issue in the following paragraph.

In many parts of the world like in Nepal, textbooks are sole source of teaching and learning English. In that sense, textbooks are the most important component of ELT pedagogy in Nepal. However, it is not bizarre to say that, writing and production of textbooks is the most neglected agenda in Nepal. Let me start with the textbooks prescribed by the government. The textbooks in many cases include ‘foreign culture’ as reading texts and situations for conversation, which are difficult to conceptualize for children, are also foreign in some cases. In a way, such situations and texts take children away from their own context. If our goal is to develop reading skills of children, why don’t we bring the texts which deal with local issues, cultures, realities and challenges? Let us research which text (related to local or global text) is effective for enhancing reading skill of Nepalese learners of English.

The textbooks in private schools are more frustrating in terms of local literacy. The global textbooks like Headway/New Headway which are considered to be the global textbooks are prescribed in private schools without any approval from the government. Such global textbooks seem to promote more European and American culture, and project an affluent commodified life style (Gray, 2002). Through the texts like how much Bill Gates earn (New Headway/Upper-Intermediate, 1998) and going on holidays in London, New York, Paris and other expensive cities of the world, the global textbooks are projecting pleasure in life but they are ignoring pain of how a farmer in rural villages works hard to earn and feed his family. Why don’t we have reading texts on holidaying in Jomsom, paragliding from Sarangkot, trekking in Karnali and so on? Can’t we think about including the texts related to Maruni, Kauda, Dhan-nach, Deuda, Goura, Maha-puja, and so on? Are they not useful in teaching English? Of course, YES.  On one hand, such texts promote interconnectedness between society and classroom teaching/learning and on the other hand, they help to address precious linguistic and cultural diversity we have. However, we, teachers of English, should always be ready to take the role of ‘transformative intellectuals’ (Kumarivadivelu, 2003) by going beyond our traditional role – teachers as a passive technician in the classroom – to accepting the extended role to show our concern in social reflection and situated practice of teaching English.

Future Directions: Critical Literacy and Postmethod Pedagogy

The above discussion implies that the so-called global textbooks and methods of ELT do not seem to be inclusive and appropriate in diverse world contexts. ELT in Nepal has the same problem. The fundamental reason behind this is that ELT policies we have made are so far shaped by the traditional notion i.e. ELT means teaching about the English language only. But this notion is already obsolete because ‘methods’,  ‘textbooks’ and ‘assumptions’ which work better do not fit in other contexts. Moreover, ELT is more than ‘teaching about English’ it is a part of education which is heavily loaded with culture, identity and ideology which need to be scrutinized in relation to local contexts.

How we can promote local literacy is another crucial question we need to discuss. I am not expert at prescribing ideas which work better. But I think, Critical literacy and Postmethod Pedagogy are two major approaches which are helpful to promote ‘local literacy’ practices in Nepal.

The basis of critical literacy is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) in which he criticises the transmission or ‘banking’ model of education (teachers are depositors and learners are depositories) and advocates for ‘dialogic’ model  in which learners are not passive recipient but  an active ‘agent’ of whole learning process. We have already discussed this issue in a January 2009 article of NeltaChoutari.

One major issue that critical literacy addresses is inequalities that persist in ELT. It focuses on bringing social issues and controversies into the classroom. Moreover, this approach involves students in a continuous process of thinking critically through a dialogic process in which students are provided opportunities to discuss the issues which have relevance in local socio-cultural context. Thus students clearly see the relevance of learning English in their life which, moreover, promotes local literacy.  In this regard, Norton and Toohey (2004) claim

Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future” (p. 1).

The Postmethod Pedagogy (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) is another approach which may be helpful in promoting local literacy in ELT.  The three parameters of the postmethod pedagogy include particularity, practicality and possibility. According to the pedagogy of particularity, “Language pedagogy…must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu” (p. 538). Similarly, the pedagogy of practicality “does not pertain merely to the everyday practice of classroom teaching. It pertains to a much larger issue that has a direct impact on the practice of classroom teaching, namely, the relationship between theory and practice” (p. 540). Finally, the pedagogy of possibility is concerned with “participants’ experience which draws ideas not only from the classroom episodes but also from border social, political and economic environment in which they grew up” (p. 542). We can see that ‘local realities’ and ‘experiences’ of participants (teachers, and students) are core of ELT in every world context. This indicates that we need to share our experiences to generate more local knowledge which can be a treasure for the whole ELT community of practice. To this end, we have initiated NeltaChoutari as a voluntary work to tell Nepalese ELT stories to the rest of the world. We hope this sharing through monthly publication in future will provide a basis for producing local materials for ELT in Nepal.

Conclusion

The looming trend of banishing ‘local practices’ due to acceptance of ‘global practices’ as a granted is one of the serious global issues in ELT around the globe. The notion of uniformity and standardization do not seem to be appropriate in linguistically and culturally diverse world contexts. At the same time, the expectations, values and beliefs of learners should be addressed through all kinds of pedagogy including ELT. In this regard, we should think about the use of locally produced materials and be fully informed with the process of adapting ‘creative and critical instructional practices in order to develop pedagogies suitable for their [our] community’ (Canagarajah 1999 p.122). Moreover, as Holliday (2005) has argued, we should discuss whether methodological prescriptions generated in BANA contexts (British, Australia, and North America) have ‘currency’ in our contexts, whether they are locally validated or appropriated. In this sense, whole idea of local literacy in ELT is concerned with the idea of (re)generating locally appropriate methods of teaching, (re)producing local materials using local resources and incorporating local issues and identities and accommodating learners’ experiences through a dialogical process in the classroom.

I am not saying that the ideas discussed in this article address all dimensions of local literacy nor I am saying that we should not be aware of global issues. What I am saying is our full dependence on global methods, norms and textbooks in ELT may not help to promote and sustain our identities and treasure of local knowledge.  What I am saying is that we have wonderful ELT practices that we are not able to share with the people from other parts of the world which we need to do urgently. Let me give some example: we have very precious linguistic and cultural diversity in which English is being taught as a foreign language. We have been teaching under the shade of tree and sometimes in the open sky. We have been teaching more than 100 students in the same classroom even without chalk, duster and blackboard. We are teaching students who come from various linguistic, ethnic, religious, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Don’t you think that such realities and experiences are important source for teaching English? Of course, they are. We need to document these experiences so that other members of ELT community of practice will benefit a lot. Why don’t we take initiation of using local cultural texts (in addition to the texts given in the textbooks), for example, to teach reading and writing skills and see how it works? Can’t we bring stories of child labor, gender discrimination, inequality, poverty and so on to teaching English in the classroom? Of course, YES. But we need to work hard to achieve this end. We cannot make changes overnight but if we collaborative through different means like NeltaChoutari we can accomplish so many things for better ELT in Nepal.

Finally, the future of ELT in Nepal will be even better if we don’t consider teaching of English not simply as teaching about the English language but also as part of education that aims to empower children and to bring some positive transformation in the knowledge-based society. I argue that English teachers are not merely ‘classroom teachers’, we are ‘agent of change’. This is possible only when have a strong foundation at local level. We can access global means only with the strong ‘local foundation’.  I would say that the best ELT practice is the practice which accommodates local realities and helps learners to link them with global ones. For this, we need to be aware of maintaining balance between local and global.

(back to editorial/contents)

References

Block, D. & Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Block, D. (2008). Globalization and language education. In S. May and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, 31–43. Springer Science+Business Media LLC.

Bourdieu, P. (2001). Contre-feux 2. Paris: Raisons d’agir.

Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and the teaching of ‘communication skills’. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Canagarajah, A.S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canagarajah, A.S. (2002). Globalization, methods and practice in periphery classrooms. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Graddol, D. (1997). The future of English? London: The British Council.

Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2001). Toward a postmethod pedagogy. TESOL Quarterly, 35/4, 537-560.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond method: Macrostrategies for language teaching. NewHaven, CO. Yale University Press.

Norton, B. & Toohey, K. (Eds.) (1997).Critical pedagogies and language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Phillipson, R. (2004). Review article: English in globalization: Three approaches. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 3:1, 73 — 84.

Wallace, C. (1999). Critical language awareness: key principles for a course in critical reading. Language Awareness 8, 2:98-110.

Wallace, C. (2002). Local literacies and global literacy. . In Block, D. & Cameron, D. (eds.) Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

An Inside View of Nelta Choutari’s Work

Miscellaneous

Ganga Gautam, President, NELTA
31 December 2010

Dear valued NELTA members and colleagues,

If you have wondered how our NELTA colleagues involved with Nelta Choutari collaborate from across the world or would like to know about their vision for the promotion of professional communication in NELTA, let me share about a close view of their collaboration and inside discussion that I recently had. I have been greatly appreciative of the work done by this brilliant group of NELTA scholars, so I would like to share about a particular in-depth discussion of their mission in order to inspire other colleagues.

About a month prior to the meeting on December 13, 2010, I was invited to join a Skype-based international conference with the Nelta Choutari team*. For about two weeks before the meeting, a long list of possible agenda started to be discussed in a private Facebook Group discussion forum, and Mr. Kamal Poudel prepared and shared priority based list of agenda based on that discussion. Taking up the agenda one by one, the team deeply reflected on the mission of the Nelta Networking initiative where Nelta Choutari is a key component. We started by reflecting on the journey of the Choutari in the last two years. I do not have the space to describe the technical difficulties that came up during this international virtual conference, but let me tell you how the team was ready to overcome any challenges. For example, Shyam Sharma was recording the conference on his computer with an audio recording program, which he would share with everyone afterwards if necessary; he also took extensive notes, while also helping to technically coordinate the conference, which he uploaded to the team’s Web Document archive. When the call failed for individual members, another member dialed his phone to let the member who lost internet connection continue to listen. When a member’s sound input was not going through, we asked him to type responses in the chat area, including letting us know that he was listening to others. At times, almost everybody lost connection and we redialed the group and summarized the discussion on the preceding agenda, before moving to the next, set agenda. The group had asked me to keep the meeting focused on the predetermined agenda. As the notes below indicate, the meeting was amazingly effective in spite of the tremendous technical difficulties.

The meeting began with the sharing of our experiences on how this forum has contributed to the professional development of the NELTA members and the ELT community in Nepal and abroad. We looked at the facts and figures and the content of the discussion generated through the past issues of the Nelta Choutari. Shyamji has shed light on this aspect in his posting and I would like to focus on the specific agenda items that we discussed in the Skype meeting.

One of the issues that came in the discussion was that of time that members contribute to NELTA. NELTA as a voluntary organization, runs through the voluntary contributions of its members. In this context, allocation of specific time for NELTA activities remains a big challenge due to our insurmountable professional, social, personal and other commitments. Despite this fact, NELTA members have tried their best to find time to work for NELTA because they think that professional organization greatly contributes to their own professional development. So we agreed to continue Nelta Choutari initiative with new zeal and enthusiasm involving as many members as possible in professional conversations. Let me outline some of the points about how the team plans to achieve its key goal of promoting professional conversation among NELTA members.

1. Coordination and Roles of the Members:

Nelta Choutari team is a non-hierarchical professional team. We work on the specific tasks and members are engaged according to their professional interests and expertise. We want to keep this like this and members are responsible for the specific role they voluntarily choose. For now the division of the role among the members is like this:

As a Secretary of NELTA, Kamalji works as a liaise between the team and NELTA Executive Committee and he will be mainly responsible to circulate the information of Nelta Choutari to the NELTA network and vice versa. He along with other two members Prem and Sajan, will promote contributions and participation by members from the NELTA branches on the blog. Also, these three members will run workshops in the regional and branch level and encourage the NELTA members to participate in the blog discussion.   There will be a Nelta Choutari presentation in the forthcoming International conference in Kathmandu and Pokhara. Similarly, Hemji will contact some of the experienced English teachers, the gurus and guruamas, interview them and post their experiences in the form of podcasts. This “oral history” project has the potential of archiving extremely useful scholarly material for future generations, especially considering that scholarship and research is gradually accepting multiple media. By doing this, our English teachers will be exposed to the world professional community and we will also learn from their experiences.

Shyamji is extremely good in the technical aspect of the blog and he will manage the overall blog in coordination with the other members. He will manage the resource pools and will also contribute to the blog by writing issue based posts. Balji will make online resources available for NELTA colleagues and students; he will also make thesis abstracts from universities abroad available to our blog readers through hyperlinks. Premji and Sajanji will write the issue-based materials and coordinate with Kamalji to post the branch activities on the blog.

2. Dissemination and Promotion of Nelta Choutari

The more members read the blog, the more meaningful it becomes. There is a great deal of resources available on the blog and online which otherwise are not easily accessible to many of our members. We need to make this forum as widely accessible as possible for the greater ELT community in Nepal. Thus, we decided to hold series of workshops in Kathmandu and NELTA branches so that our members are aware of the availability of these wonderful resources. The workshop organized on the 25th of December 2010 of December in the NELTA office coordinated by Kashi-ji is the first event of this series. Nelta Choutari team will organize many such events in NELTA branches during their future visits. In these workshops, we not only talk about what Nelta Choutari is and what it offers but also engage the participants in the use of the blog for sharing their knowledge, ELT best practices and grassroots level classroom experiences.

3. Sharing our local knowledge to the wider ELT Community

Teaching is full of innovations and excitement. Our members have rich and diverse experiences and they have a lot to offer to the global ELT community. In order to bring those innovations to the broader forum, we need to develop a simple mechanism to have access to the blog and post their materials.  Nelta Choutari can offer an excellent platform for this. Let the NELTA members and English teachers know that just by clicking an email they can connect themselves to the global ELT community. Please do encourage teachers to write their experiences and send them to nelta choutari@gmail.com. Once the mail comes to this address, the material will be posted on the blog and anyone from anywhere in the world can read it and respond to it. Shyamji will manage the posting.

4. Make the Nelta Choutari resources available to the existing ELT network in Nepal

We have some established ELT networks in Nepal. To name the key ones, Tribhuvan University (TU), Kathmandu University (KU) and NELTA are the major places where a lot of ELT activities take place and we have thousands of ELT practitioners associated with them. The thesis abstracts from TU and KU are the excellent at hand resources for literature review for our Masters students. The research students can be asked to read some articles and include them in the literature review while they submit the research proposals. Faculty members can also encourage the students to submit their thesis abstracts to the Nelta Choutari mail as soon as the thesis is approved by their respective departments. Premji, Kamalji and Sajanji will take the lead in this regard and they will coordinate with the respective chairs of the Subject Committee. I, on behalf of NELTA, have already written official letters of request to the Department Heads of TU campus and Mahendra Ratna Campus and similar request will be sent to the other campuses in the near future. I will also coordinate with the senior teachers of the universities to request them to share with us their valuable experiences.

Also, we have good professional network with the regional and global ELT network and our blog can be interesting for the members of those network. So Shyamji will set up some tools such as pingback, google search and blogrolls so that other educational bloggers can read and respond. I will use my current network to disseminate this in the international arena.

5. Publication of Nelta Choutari materials

In the context of Nepal, we still have problems of the power cut and access to the internet  is still a big issue. In order to make the Nelta Choutari materials easily accessible, NELTA can publish these materials in the regular newsletters and branch newsletters. Also, a separate publication of the selected articles and posting will not only promote the blog but also contribute to validate the knowledge in the form of publication. NELTA Central Committee and the Branches could choose this option based on the resources available at hand.

6. Subscribing to auto-alert on Nelta Choutari

There is a very easy option available on Nelta Choutari home page which will automatically send the Nelta Choutari to the individual emails. Kamalji will coordinate with the NELTA office staff and branch colleagues to facilitate this process and encourage the NELTA members and training participants to subscribe the blog.

7. Nelta Choutari as classroom resource

We all need to encourage our students to read the blog for various ELT materials and we can do so by sharing what we have read and posted. We can also share the anecdotes with reference to the blog materials and ask the student to share theirs in the similar manner. Similarly, we can share part of the materials from the blog and encourage the students to read the details on the blog.

8. Review Meetings

We also agreed to hold similar skype (online) meeting among the team members on regular basis in every three months.

With these discussion points we committed ourselves to give Nelta Choutari a new dimension from the first issue of year three and we firmly believe that this can only be materialized if we all work together for our professional development. Let’s contribute to this blog either by posting or responding to the posts and learn from one another.

Thank you very much. I wish you all a very happy new year – 2011.

——————

**Members of the Nelta Choutari team joined the meeting from separate places: Shyam Sharma from Louisville in Kentucky, USA; Bal Krishna Sharma from Hawaii, USA; Prem Phyak from Kathmandu; Kamal Poudel from a separate place in Kathmandu; Hem Kafle also from a separate place in Kathmandu; and Sajan Karn spoke from Birgunj.

(back to editorial/contents)


NELTAChoutari, Networking and Nepalese Teachers

Native Perspective, Nelta Networking

Kamal Poudel

Until about two decades ago, information technologies that were widely available in the world outside were either out of reach for us in Nepal, or we lacked the basic skills needed for using what was available. Even teachers did not have access to teaching materials on the Internet, not to mention the possibility of using it in their classrooms. But in the last ten or so years, there has been a quantum leap in the availability, access, and popularity of information technologies in Nepalese education.

Students directly benefit from the access to knowledge and professional development opportunities that their teachers have, and in the long run the society benefits from those resources and opportunities. From that perspective, teachers are the vanguard of social change. The incredible development in the information technology field has brought all of us quite close that we can find our entire sporadically scattered friends within our room. The new discovery of science and technology have always some pros and cons, and it will be the job of teachers to select the texts appropriately, and use them to maximally benefit the students. The dark sides of the new technology should be left in the dark world itself, and encourage the students to move towards the world of self-enhancement. The development in the societies always gives birth to new cultures, and to my belief, cultures are as dynamic as language, and thus they are prone to change all the time. The new generation people (in this context: present day students) are quite likely to adopt and adapt the new cultures as they are truly native to them. In this context, although the elder generation people (in this context: present day teachers) are immigrant to the newly developed culture, they are required to acclimatize themselves to the new climate or say the cultures developed by the IT. Not only this, they also need to enhance their pace so as to meet the students and be able to lead them. No modern teachers now can escape any student’s problem or question simply saying, ‘well, I am not quite aware of technology things….’ The students are very likely to feel underprivileged to be taught by these types of teachers as they do not get the sufficient learning materials and resources from their teachers. Their expectation is marked with newness and fast pace. The newness can be in the field of using language, for example, as the new culture leads the people to change their linguistic behavior as well. We can refer to this as a kind of paradigm shift in teaching and learning. Along with the pace of modern life, the pace of learning has naturally had the quantum leap.

Public media like BBC concentrates on the value of IT and spells that fame in the modern world can be doubled or easily be enhanced by means of the use of technology. A newly published book or article can be read by millions of readers immediately after the click on ‘upload’, which makes it easier for the the contributors to be attracted by those readers. This positively encourages the beginners to upgrade and update themselves, and thus will always be in such a world where they cannot stop browsing, uploading, collecting materials and be connected in the wider world.

Considering this as significant factor to change the life-style of teachers and the dire-need of the present day world, we have been encouraging our readers, teachers to come to the world of information technology, and thus be connected with the rest of the world. We have the principle of ‘learn and let learn’.  With the motive of empowering Nepalese teachers (ourselves), NELTA is committed to create the new ways of teaching and learning. For this, would like to invite you all English teachers and be the part of NELTAChoutari, and help the Choutari finally in order to help yourselves and thus transform yourselves. Cheers NELTAChoutari anniversary!!!


(back to editorial/contents)

(back to editorial/contents)

“Teaching English with a Difference” (a report from Birgunj)

Nelta branch and members

Choutari Ed.: Here’s a wonderful branch update, which we received late but would like to add to the Branch Special segment this month. Please share comments.

TRAINING PROGRAM ON ELT (a report from Birgunj)

Suresh Shrestha, Birgunj

Introduction

Training programs are today’s most effective dais to share experiences and interpret them critically, to develop local perspectives on ELT, and to share ideas and shape and reshape our ongoing activities, thereby enriching ourselves professionally. It is a part of a chain, a link that gives connection to the next one. The next related program may come up as a reformed and more effective one, reinforced by the former one. And again it lays a platform for the newer one to be launch better. What could be considered to come out clear in this regard is that the whole universe is in motion; nothing is stationary at all. Everything is on the move, so ought to be our knowledge and experience. Such thoughts if united with the common spirit pave a straight way to the reality of the demands of several programs on a regular basis. Moreover, if it is an ELT program, no doubt, it may charm us to the global benefit through broader realizations. In the similar connection, the Training Program on ELT that was held in the premises of Thakur Ram Multiple Campus in the second week of December by the Department of English Education, TRM Campus, Birgunj and NELTA, Birgunj was naturally a significant continuance of the chain of ELT activities, giving rise to the hope of ELTism in the Terai, especially, in Birgunj. Let’s be optimistic that there will be many more such events for the foundation of a firmly established trend tending to be nationwide.

Highlights

The three-day Training Program on ELT, thematically, Teaching English with a Difference, organized by the Department of English Education, TRM Campus, Birgunj and NELTA, Birgunj under the chairmanship of Mr Kedar Prasad Sah, the Chair of NELTA, Birgunj and the Head of the Department of English Education, TRM Campus, Birgunj was facilitated by Dr Barbara Law (an English Language Fellow), Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Michigan, USA. The program comprised of nine sessions was focused on different contemporarily relevant and highly demanded topics such as-

  • Teacher training for the faculties on academic reading and writing, and research skills
  • Training on effective teaching of new B.Ed. and M.Ed. courses
  • Teaching writing
  • Making the best of your textbooks
  • Developing reading habits in students
  • Authentic materials adaptations for classroom use
  • Exploring resources and opportunities for self professional development

About Sixty-nine participants, college students, school and college teachers and others inclined to English language and literature, attended the program with great zeal and zest. What surfaced as the ultimate charm of the program was the highly inspiring due remark by Prof  Jai Raj Awasthi on the program, a message for all the ELT enthusiasts to be on the regular move for good Englishism all across the country.

Bird’s Eye View

8th, 9th and 10th December

After the inauguration of the program chaired by Mr Kedar Prasad Sah, the  Chair of NELTA, Birgunj and the Head of the Department of English Education with formal rituals as scheduled, the first-day training sessions one and two were focused on the topic Using Reading as a Spring Board for Writing. The first session began with the reading of a story. Dr Law read it out for all the participants as they all moved their sights along line after line. It was not only a taste of native pronunciation and accent but also a good chance and challenge for the better listening comprehension. The participants got enough time to read the story at their own speeds. Then, they were asked several related questions to answer. What she highlighted was all the reading urgency – more and more reading for clearer and better comprehension, the most-required practice-cum-quality the students have to have for the courses of BEd and MEd. The participants did the job trying their best and could answer the questions properly. Thereafter, she got them to compose something related. Actually, it was a letter by a character to another. It was a practice for them to place themselves in place of the character and imagine how the real character felt in the story. In session two, the participants were made to go through a paragraph on My Name and explore what similar and new things they could get in regard to their own names. She talked about her own name openly and made others comfortable to talk about theirs. It was much more participant-oriented. And, her instruction was to usher what way and how freely one could move ahead, imaginatively, creatively. Almost all the participants were found to have realized the significance of good reading for better writing– an inescapable step. Apparently, it conveyed a true message that if someone would rather be an excellent diver into the pool of solid writing, they must be used to springing artistically up the springboard of untiring reading, which seems to be uncared-for even to many more teachers, much more students. Anyway, most of the participants sounded to have realized how significant reading is.

The second day began with Teaching Poetry.  Dr Law typed several lines of a poem on the computer getting them projected on the wall. She recited them just for the trainees to capture how to. She explained the reality behind the lines, and added that people could interpret a poem in their own ways, but logically. After that, the participants were given two poems and guided how to recite them poetically. She interpreted it with the clear social and cultural background. In the second session, Critical Thinking was served by means of a story. It guided the participants to sort out the facts, to pick out the key point, to highlight the possibilities, and to come up with a single idea and explain why so. There arose several thoughts in the form of answers. It was an effective way of letting our own perception flow out as a critical thought.

The third session on Research Skills was so fruitful for the would-be researchers to interact on how to carry out a genuine research to understand the gravity of reading for an easy access to the duty assigned.

The third day was especially the day of exploration. The participants were guided along the lines of poems with the close analytical look at its constituents, the types of words! They were practicably encouraged and made to feel and explore out the potential poetry of poetry (, not only prose), hidden, suppressed, subdued- awaiting a way out. And, of course, most of them did dig out the quality trapped within themselves. It was a very marvelous beginning of the exploitation of the latent talent, the innate treasure people take birth with and they do not know themselves; they are just made to realize!

A few last words

In conclusion, conclusively, the three-day ELT Training facilitated by Dr Barbara Law, a well-experienced well-versed English Language Fellow, was of great value and remarkable inspiration to all the participants, irrespective of their ages and designations. What was truly for self-realization was our germinating the true unfeigned feelings of keeping on learning something more, something newer, devoting ourselves to unceasing reading, the most accessible source, observing and thinking from some different angle, i.e. critically, and creating something logically. Dr Law’s writing her name in Nepali as well as in Arabic on the second day and desire to have a Nepali name form the participants was not merely a matter of fun – many more might have taken like that – but also a psychological motivation and reinforcement for all the witnesses to realize learning as a life-long process and to carry out teaching in some different way with curiosity and making the learners curious. That was the most powerful secret of grand success and beauty of teaching – learning relation. Her candid expressions with no NO and moving around encouraging and enquiring the trainees was also a very good lesson of learner-centered teaching to the teachers present there. At last, in the program, no doubt, was something unique left for the participants to grasp, and it succeeded in relaying a subtle message of innovations in the teaching-learning fields with high flexibility along with feasibility.

Another beginning of linguistic enlightenment!

Writing skill development on the ground of reading skill, teaching poetry, Critical Thinking, Research Skills and so on

Everything, everything is on the move

English Access Microscholarship Program in Nepal

Miscellaneous, Nelta branch and members

Shyam Pandey

‘English Access Microscholarship Program in Nepal’ is a new program under the direct supervision of NELTA and U.S. Embassy to develop English language proficiency and cultural understanding for the needy children in Nepal. The purpose of the English Access Microscholarship Program is to make the study of English more accessible to adolescents from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who are between 14 and 16 year old. In addition, while developing the participants’ language skills, they will learn American culture and democratic values increase their ability to participate successfully in the socio-economic development of their countries, and gain ability to compete for and participate in future US exchange and study program. A greater sensitivity to cultural differences, coupled with the language skills they acquire, will enable the participants to take advantage of opportunities that had previously been unavailable to them. In the initial phase of the project, the Access will be implemented in Kathmandu, Bhairahawa and Gorkha.

Objectives

1. General Objectives

This program addresses three main areas

a. English Language Acquisition

Students will develop the four traditional skills with a special emphasis placed on listening comprehension and oral production which are normally ignored in their regular English classes in schools due to the paper pencil test system. In this program students will learn how to speak proper English and develop appropriate reading and writing skills by being exposed to a variety of texts and writing tasks. In addition to this, the students will also be exposed to the English language culture which will further enhance their language skills.

b. Culture

One key element of the program is to familiarize students with some important features of U.S. culture. Students are encouraged to develop respect for and interest in other cultures, customs and beliefs.

c. Personal Development

Various elements of the program seek to foster students’ personal development, with a special focus on community service. The aim is to work towards a balanced intellectual and emotional development so that students will be better prepared to assume an active role in their communities.

Semester Course Components

The semester program will be structured on a weekly basis:

a. Face-to-face classes (1.5 hours twice a week after school)

Total: 3 hours

b. Culture in Context / Enhancement Activities / Multimedia classes (Saturdays)                    Total: 2 hours  * Each year students would attend classes five hours per week for 36             weeks.

Total Weekly: 5 hours

Minimum Entry Requirements

The program is designed for public high school students, between 14 to 16 years of age, who have a minimal knowledge of English. This program is exclusively directed at economically disadvantaged youth.  An equal gender balance (half girls, half boys) will be achieved at all sites. There will be exactly 120 numbers of students in the different four sites. The following is a list of minimum requirements:

Educational Establishment Public high school
Age 14 – 16 years old
Entry Requirement Minimal knowledge of English (High / middle beginner)
Socio-Economic status Disadvantaged
Academic Performance Final GPA for  previous year at least 50 (on 100 scale)

The Access Teachers

The six access teachers in Kathmandu, two access teachers in Gorkha and four access teachers in Bhairahawa get two day intensive training in their respective venue from the NELTA teacher trainers according to the curriculum of access program in the beginning of each semester. The teachers work for access are highly experienced and well trained. They have minimum of Bachelors degree in English.

Class Locations

  1. Nepal Japan Children’s Library – Lainchaur, Kathmandu
  2. Madrasa Islamiya School – Ratna Park, Kathmandu
  3. Public Secondary School – Gorkha Bazaar, Gorkha
  4. American Corner of Bhairahawa – Chamber of Commerce Building, Bhairahawa

(back to editorial/contents)

Educated but Illiterate

Scholarly Article

Sajan Kumar Karn,
Department of English Education,
T. R. M. Campus, Birgunj

 

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder (Wales, 2004)

We are now in the process of connecting all of the knowledge pools in the world together.

Thomas Friedman, the author of The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005).

The above statements are not merely informative but they trigger some immediate illocutionary actions on the part of academia. Education in many parts of the world has already responded to digital intervention and has consequently leaped forward. What about ours? Are we literate enough to exploit the tools available online?  Can we sustain and grow ignoring this boom in education? What needs to be done urgently to address this new literacy issue?  What are loopholes in our instruction that digital tools can trim down? I share some reflections about these burning issues in Nepalese education in this article.

They but We

There should be no doubt to the fact that the advent and explosion of technology has altered the customary definition of literacy. Conventionally, one needs to be able to read and write in order to be called literate. Of course, those core abilities are still vital to learning, but they are no longer adequate to ensure comprehensive understanding of the present day world. Today we live in a digitally networked atmosphere where a large number of things happen online and envisioning academic endurance and growth in paucity of access to and knowhow of digital tools will be nothing but an utter innocence. The enormous use of technology in education around the globe has raised a serious question mark over the literacy of majority of Nepalese academicians and professionals including teachers (This may apply to other parts of the world). To be frank enough, most of our teachers seem to be unaware of the boom fetched by digital tools in teaching and learning, let alone their applications and efficacy in classroom.  Nearly all observations illustrate teachers practicing conventional trends in classroom. Please, do not take it otherwise, but committing and vomiting seems to be most common practice in schools and colleges of Nepal if we exclude some updated ones in urban areas. This is very unfortunate that we have not been able to take a departure from the narrative model of instruction yet. Most of us still consider ourselves to be the knowledge providers when knowledge is just a click away at google.com and wikipedia. com. Google is currently attempting to scan and digitize more than 50 million books from five of the largest research libraries from around the world. Wikipedia is another online encyclopedia where knowledge is open and free. This is the website where anyone can edit anything anytime they want (Richardson, 2009).

The role of teachers as depositors of knowledge as critiqued by Paulo Freire (1967) creates hierarchical relation between teachers and students and this  is never going to bring to the fore inherent potentiality of students, which, however, should be the first and foremost goal of education.  The indifferent attitude towards the fact that all learners are innovative and it is on the part of teachers to unwrap and tend those veiled talents has virtually paralyzed our teaching and learning activities. Who cares for autonomy of learners? It is tremendously paradoxical that we practice most undemocratic teaching in a fully democratic country. Most of us do not take a heed of the reality that teaching and learning have grown much more horizontal and collaborative undertaking around the globe and it feels reasonable for us as well. Sadly, most of us are still in illusion that knowledge comes from abroad or from a few counted experts while the fact is that Knowledge is shaped and acquired through social process and we can practice it in classrooms. Very few of us seem to agree that there is need to build local knowledge to address local teaching and learning issues. Very few of us seem to accept that teaching is not a lecture but has become a conversation and ideas are presented as the starting point of the dialogue as Geroge Siemens (2002) argue, not the ending point. These are some of the gaps in Nepalese Education required to be bridged at the earliest.

Touching the moon

Yes, we should have bigger target as Devkota said. Let us imagine we have a classroom described as follows.

If you walk into some classrooms around the world, you will see fixed data projectors, interactive whiteboards (IWBs), built- in speakers for audio material that is delivered directly from a computer hard disk, and computers with round –the –clock internet access. Whenever teachers want their students to find anything out, they can get them to use a search engine like Google and the result can be shown the whole class on the IWB (Harmer, 2002, p.175).

Such a classroom may be beyond our imagination for some time. But it is high time we and the concerned realized that this is the need of the hour. Ignoring this boom means falling back and remaining in dark, continuing to be oppressed, accepting hegemony and literary colonialism and practicing the age old methods.

Varsity teachers we are!

We are in our well dry-cleaned suits and ties, shiningly polished shoes, helmets on our heads and mobile phones in our hands and we introduce ourselves as university teachers. We complain about the lack of technological resources or internet connection in our departments, but we also not have an email account, nor a Facebook or Skype account, nor have we used or contributed to flickr, posted a message on Twitter, nor learnt how to download teaching materials from educational websites, not to mention whether our universities have free access to academic journal databases–for free–and we are not able to prepare for a class or a presentation by using a simple PowerPoint slide, we do not have personal blogs to share ideas, we do not know how to download from and upload videos on media sharing sites like YouTube and we do not have any idea about wikis and we cannot create web documents like Google Docs and collaboratively draft anything with others. All these and many others skills are beyond our capabilities–actually, they are beyond our interest or sense of need–but still, don’t worry, we are university professors, associate professors and assistant professors of education, science and management. It’s not what we do, what new skill we learn, whether and how well we update… you got it, it’s about who we ARE.

Tools but Fools

What are we if not fools in front of digital tools? Web tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, screencasting, live streaming and many others have brought ground breaking changes in teaching and learning. Researches and experiences have already revealed that technologies have many advantages. For instance, weblogs promotes creativity, critical analogical and analytical thinking of both students and teachers. They increase access and exposure to quality information (Richardson, 2009:20). Further, other digital tools make learning networks more interactive and practical. They connect teachers and students to global conversations and collaborations and allow students to work individually at their own pace according to their own needs. They offer open content, provides a platform for discussion and collaboration, a space for cultivation of creativity.  Nevertheless, this feels merely like playing a flute before buffaloes.

Revolution required

Handicapped we are and we have been left. A revolution is required, a true revolution in education, unlike fake ones fought by political parties in Nepal if we want to go ahead, if we want to do realistic education, if want to compete with the world, if we want to practice democracy in classroom, if we want to address local academic issues. And it is technology that can function as a powerful instrument for this revolution. Yes, technology will work as sharp sword to deconstruct the insensible conventional practices we have been suffering from.  I do not agree with Jill and Charles Hadfield (2003) who argue passionately that we can do a lot with minimal or even no resources. Claims as such only make us chauvinists. Effectiveness of technology based teaching is far above the one without technology.

A final plea

Digitalize Nepalese education and re-literate the educators because the educated do not want to be called illiterate, the educated do not want to be called illiterate.

(back to editorial/contents)

References

Fredman, T. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty first century. New York: Farr, Strauss and Giroux.

Frieri, P. (1967). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English language teaching. London: Pearson Longman.

Karn, S.K. (2009). Bridge the digital divide. Contemporary Issues in ELT, journal of NELTA Birgunj.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. California: Corwin Press.