Interview with Hornby School Tutor Dr. Amol Padwad

Amol Padwad, who took over the presidentship of ELTAI in July, 2010, holds a master’s degrees in English and Russian. He has other degrees to hiscredit like M.Phil (English), LL.B and PGDTE (CIEFL). He also did M.Ed. (TESOL) from University of Leeds, UK on the Hornby Trust scholarship. Currently the head of thePostgraduate Department of English at J. M. Patel College, Bhandara (Maharashtra), he was a moderator of ELTeCS- India (the regional electronic network of ELT professionals, promoted by the British Council) for a number of years.

He has completed one and is working on three ELT projects, funded by the British Council and the Hornby Trust. He is associated with numerous professional and social bodies, and has published several articles and translations. Here’s an interview with him done by Ushakiran Wagle.

What was the main focus of the Hornby School in Nepal?

The focus of the Hornby School in Nepal was ‘learning in low-resource classrooms’. This one-week residential school was a follow-up on a similar school last year. The main objective was to enable teachers to deal with the problem of lack of resources in their classrooms. The approach of the school was not ‘experts bringing academic knowledge and readymade solutions’, but the participants sharing their rich and varied experience, their ideas and practices and helping each other finding ways of addressing the problem.

How was your experience of delivering the sessions at the School?

It was an immensely enjoyable and enriching experience. The group had in it a range of countries (Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), school contexts (urban/ rural, private/ state, primary to tertiary) and participant profiles (novices/ veterans, male/ female, various qualifications). There was a lot to learn from and share with each other. The sessions were all participatory and collaborative, and participants contributed actively and seriously to each session. The tutors Richard Smith and Jovan Ilic also brought in their rich experience, varied perspectives and ideas from other contexts.

Did the focus for the school and the local context here in Nepal match? If not, how did you respond?

The focus of the school had a great relevance to the local context in Nepal, I believe. As I understand, shortage of resources is a perennial problem in most Nepalese schools. Most schools have what we would term ‘low-resource classrooms’. So the proceedings of the Hornby School, we hope, were very useful to the Nepalese participants, who must have carried home several ideas and insights from the School to be tried out in their classrooms.

What is your opinion on the global trends and local context difference? How can we as ELT professional balance?

Especially in the case of ELT, we (meaning the countries in SAARC region) show a general tendency of blindly following whatever latest trends and techniques that come to us from the West. Global trends, which for us normally mean Western (especially UK-USA) trends, are either completely and uncritically accepted, or completely and equally uncritically rejected. Take, for example, communicative language teaching, to which we have shown one of these two extreme reactions. What we need is not to accept/ reject the whole package, but unpack it and see what has relevance for us and needs to be discarded. I personally believe that the ‘original’ Western model of CLT is not feasible/ relevant in our countries, but also that there are some really great insights and ideas which we may ignore to our peril. As ELT professionals, we might ask of every new development the ‘WIIFM’ question – ‘what’s in it for me?’

What is your final message to the readers?

My final message to the readers (who are all teachers, I guess) is – a teacher can and does make a world of difference to every classroom, whether we like it or not. But it’s in our hands to try to make a planned, thoughtful and positive difference to our learners and classrooms. The first step of making this positive change is to start changing ourselves.

Thank you, Dr. Padwad.

Shankar Dewan

Perhaps no one exactly knows if the early human being was ‘man’ or ‘woman’. But in the Biblical tradition, it is said that God created the two sexes; ‘Adam’ first and ‘Eve’ later by taking of a rib from Adam. God gave Adam the right and power to name and domesticate the animals. This might be the reason why the terms such as ‘mankind’ instead of ‘womankind’;  ‘manhood’ instead of ‘womanhood’; ‘boyhood’ instead of ‘girlhood’; ‘brotherhood’ instead of ‘sisterhood’; ‘forefathers’ instead of ‘foremothers’ were coined and have been very common. English has a lot of words which are formed by adding the terms referring to maleness such as headmaster, manpower, man-made, man-to-man, prehistoric man, man-eating tiger, manhole, fireman, postman, chairman, and so on. Similarly, terms referring to men are put first in the pairs as if the women are the second sex such as father and mother, uncle and aunt, man and woman, king and queen, husband and wife, sir and madam, lord and lady, master and mistress.

English ideology “All men are created equal” is itself gender -biased.  Why can’t we say “All women are created equal”? We can find ‘male’ as a base or root for ‘female’, ‘man’ for ‘woman’, ‘he’ for ‘she’, and ‘Mr’ for ‘Mrs’. These terms show that women are semi-human beings, or subordinate or marginal creatures. Female terms are also formed from the male terms by adding the suffixes such as –ess, -ette, e.g. poet/poetess, author/ authoress, actor/actress, major/majorette, usher/usherette. These examples show that men are core and women are derivative of men.  The famous linguist Janet Holmes views that the use of an additional suffix to signal ‘femaleness’ is seen as conveying the message that women are deviant or abnormal.  It has also been suggested that the suffixes like –ess and –ette trivialize and diminish women, and when they refer to occupations such as ‘authoress’ and ‘poetess’, carry connotations of lack of seriousness. Because the word ‘woman’ does not share equal status with man, terms referring to women have undergone pejoration. If we examine pairs of gender-marked terms such as lord/lady, baronet/dame, Sir/Madam, master/mistress, king/queen, wizard/witch, we can see how female terms may start out on an equal footing, but they become devalued over time.

The English language discriminates against women. When we give our speech, we begin our speech with ‘Ladies and gentlemen’. Does it mean that ladies are not gentle but only men? Why are the men just men but the women are ladies too?  Women are given a title, either ‘Miss’ for unmarried ones and ‘Mrs’ for married ones, but men, whether they are married or not, are given a title ‘Mr.’ Why should we distinguish women as married and unmarried by giving the corresponding title but not for men? Janet Holmes also views that women may also be described or referred to in terms of food imagery such as ‘sugar’, ‘sweetie’, ‘honey’, which is equally insulting. We greet the male teacher using more formal term ‘Bhattarai Sir’ but informal term is used to address the female teacher ‘Meera Madam’. We only use the term ‘doctor’ for male but ‘lady/woman/female doctor’ for female one which conveys the idea that she is not the ‘real’ thing. The word ‘professional’ used with the men has positive sense but with the women has the negative sense i.e. they are prostitutes. Similarly, the term ‘businessman’ has positive connotation but the term ‘business girl’ is used as a slang term for a prostitute. We can say ‘She’s John’s widow,’ but we cannot say ‘He’s Sally’s widower.’ Linda can be described as Fred’s mistress but Fred cannot be described as Linda’s master. Men play golf and cricket, while women play women’s golf and women’s cricket. Why so?

The famous sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine views that language has helped to gender the way we think about space; men’s space is public, in the workplace, while women’s place is private and in the home. This difference is encoded discursively in expressions such as working mother, cleaning lady, businessman, policeman, housewife, making it easier to accept as ‘natural’ the exclusion of women from public life. We have the English phrase ‘career woman/girl’ but not the ‘career man’ as if men by definition have careers, but women who do so must be marked as deviant. Similarly, a man can also be ‘a family man’, but it would be odd to call a woman ‘a family woman’ as if women by definition are family women.

Many grammatical forms are also found gender-biased. We can see or read  the texts where the use of masculine pronouns ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ is very common, e.g. ‘Everyone should get his hat.’, ‘Somebody has forgotten his umbrella.’, ‘The average student is worried about his grades.’, ‘Each student will do better if he has a voice in the decision.’ etc.  These sexist practices have promoted to the ‘he/man approach’ to language as the scholar Wendy Martyna says, that is, the use of male terms to refer both to males in particular and to human beings in general designates men as the ‘unmarked’ and women as the ‘marked’ human category.  Experiments have shown that women feel excluded when they read texts with generic ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his.’

Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language which has marginalized women. Sexist language has been drawing the fire of feminists for several decades now, and a number of linguists and sociolinguists have turned their due attention to the issue. To reduce sexist usages and make the language more inclusionary, new gender-neutral terms have been suggested by feminists such as ‘tey’ to replace ‘she’ and ‘he’, or combining them as ‘s/he’; ‘Ms’ to replace ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’; ‘chairperson’ or ‘chair’ for ‘chairman’; ‘fire-fighter’ for ‘fireman’; ‘letter carrier’ for ‘postman’; ‘police officer’ for ‘policeman’; ‘prehistoric people’ for ‘prehistoric man’ and so on. Besides these,  the scholars Rebecca Freeman and Bonnie McElhinny mention the five guidelines or strategies suggested by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for avoiding the use of the generic masculine pronoun: First, drop the masculine pronoun (e.g. The average student is worried about grades.);  second, rewrite the sentence in the plural rather than the singular (e.g. Students can select their own topics.); third, substitute the pronouns ‘one’ or ‘one’s’ for ‘he’ or ‘his’ (e.g. One should do one’s best.); fourth, use ‘he’ or ‘she’, ‘his’ or ‘her’(in speech and writing) or s/he (in writing); and  fifth, use ‘their’ when the subject is an indefinite pronoun (e.g. Everybody should get their hat.). Feminists now think that as long as women must use a language which is not of their own making, change is impossible. As an output, some women refer to themselves as  ‘actors’ rather than  ‘actresses’, ‘poets’ rather than ‘poetesses’ and so on. The sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine writes that many women authors, now-a-days, deliberately use ‘she’ as the generic pronoun to shock their readers. She presents the idea of one feminist as ‘if there are men who feel uncomfortable about being excluded, they should think of how women feel within minutes of opening most books.’ If women feel being excluded, they will not be motivated to read the texts that impede their comprehension. Therefore, let’s create anxiety-free texts by using gender-neutral terms and expressions in order to create linguistic harmony in the linguistic world.

The author teaches at Sukuna and Pathari Multiple Campus, Morang and is a treasurer of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA), Morang branch.

If you had known me five years ago, you would have known me as a news reader in the national radio. You would have heard: This is Radio Nepal. I am Umes Shrestha and you’re listening to the news. First the headlines.

That was my daily routine. Translate the news. Edit them. And go live. I still remember the day I went on air for the first time. Inside this small square studio, I was literally shaking behind the microphone. Needless to say, it was a scary and entertaining job. Getting to speak to the whole nation through the prestigious national radio. It was a dream come true. That’s what I thought at that moment.

But as the years went by, my enthusiasm for the job started to wilt. Something started to bother me. May be it was the routine job. May be it was the same political news day in and day out. But definitely I needed a change.

So after sitting on the same chair for almost half a decade, working on the same PIII computer and going into the same old battered news studio of Radio Nepal – I decided to quit the job.

I went to see my news in-charge. And I told him: Sir, I’m leaving the job.

He turned his big baldhead towards me, stared into my eyes and said: But you are good at it. And I shocked him with this answer: Yes sir, and that’s the reason I want to quit this job.

You see, for almost half a decade, I lived in my comfort zone of that studio and embraced mediocrity. I was the best at being an average. I lost my drive because it was easy, it was patterned and it was getting boring. I had hit the rock bottom.

When I told about this to my mom – she got really worried and said: How can someone even think of leaving a sarkari jaagir? I told about this to my close friends. They reacted the way my mom did. I told this to my to-be-wife. With complete disbelief in her eyes, she told me: You’d better have a good plan – because we’re getting married soon.

But I did leave the job. And after a few months of soul searching, I started teaching in a school and a college. It was my calling. It was what I was meant to do.

And then, I got my hand on the book that changed my life. It was “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” by John Wood. I suppose, you have gone through this book. One thing I’ve learned from the book is – if you remain happy in your comfort zone, you will settle for that happiness and will eventually stop dreaming for something better.

I am in no way trying to compare myself with John Wood. He left Microsoft and his lucrative salary. He started an amazing organization Room to Read from the scratch. I – well, I left a minor job. But he and his book are always an inspiration to me. The book keeps me reminding to step out of my comfort zone and do something challenging.

I am a teacher, and I want to do something amazing, inspiring and even crazy. I want to be the guy who left Radio Nepal to change the world. Big dream, hai? I believe teaching is a very challenging job. At the same time, teaching is a very rewarding and inspiring job. And I also believe that – teaching can change the world for real.

Please read this book.. it might just change your life as well.