Editorial

Choutari Editors

It is said that five years is a century in internet time! But this is not always true in every country and context. Due to never-ending political gridlock, our society is not making the type of progress that the discourse of the internet assumes. We have slightly better bandwidth for internet access itself today than we had five years ago; but we don’t have better environments for academic and professional progress today than we did when monarchy was replaced by an interim constitution toward the transition to full democracy.

However–and this is a big however–we are also defined by who we envision we can be, who we strive to be, where we want to reach in another five or ten years. In spite of the hurdles in our social, political, and economic lives, we should do what we can to connect more members of our community, to engage them, and to provide opportunities for professional development. Accordingly, at Choutari, we are trying our best to engage our community in professional discourse here at home and around the world. We believe that if we desire, we can turn our conversations into useful resource for our professional work and our professional development.

Those of us who are running NeltaChoutari are optimistic. We believe that in spite of all the challenges in our society, we can and should give back our best to our profession and community. We want to serve as a bridge between a generation of scholars and teachers who have built our professional community from scratch. We also want to be a vehicle of transformation by creating a venue where the ideas and experiences of our professional colleagues across the country can be shared. We are dedicated to the idea that small acts for helping to transmit knowledge, skills and resources between scholarship and classrooms, trainings and publications, and conversations offline and online can make a huge impact in our field.

Our readers don’t need to be told that blogging is a powerful means of professional development. We believe that Choutari is perhaps the first and the most popular blog in the country; but our mission is to promote blogging and other emerging modes of professional conversations among individuals and groups who are seeking to share their voices. We are also eager to help promote the professional activities–training and conferences, local events and conversations, and other professional updates–across the country. We encourage our colleagues to share any professional updates through Choutari.

Choutari is also a place for mentorship. We do not just accept and reject submissions when our colleagues want to share their ideas through Choutari; we try to provide resources/guidelines (please see “join the conversation” tab), and we try our best to help the writers on a one-to-one basis through a review process as best as we can.

With the expansion of our team, we are truly excited and eager to serve the community even better than we have done so far. But for our efforts to be most fruitful, we need your support through promotion, contribution, and feedback.

Let us start another wonderful year together. Happy New Year, 2014 to all our readers, contributors, and well-wishers!!!

Here is a list of this special issue’s khuraks:

• More Than Status Updates: Choutari Chat with Some ELT Professionals by Uttam Gaulee in support of the team
• Shifting Focus: Building ELT Practices and Scholarship from the Ground Up by Prem Phyak, Shyam Sharma, and Bal Krishna Sharma
• A Journey from Information to Transformation in ELT Professionalism by Bal Ram Adhikari
• Quick Survey with Choutari Audience by Ushakiran Wagle and Lal Bahadur Rana
• Impact of NeltaChoutari on Nepalese ELT by Ashok Raj Khati
• 2013: A Reflection about Choutari by Praveen Kumar Yadav
• Welcoming new colleagues to Choutari by Choutari Editors

We urge you to join us again by sharing your responses as comments under any posts, by liking and sharing them, by contributing your own posts for future issues, and by encouraging other colleagues to do the same. 

Happy New Year 2014!