Re-imagining the teaching of English
2nd November, 2019: On developing pedagogies and how English is taught.
Developing Pedagogies: Learning the Teaching of English by Shari Sternberg and Amy Lee: The essay provides a critique of the discursive emphasis in the framing of English Studies and instead suggests a pedagogic framing instead, where ‘teaching’ itself is read as a critical text in relation to the teaching of content.
1. The way departments are demarcated/organised according to disciplines prompted one of the first questions for this meeting: what is English, how is it taught, and what can we learn from the teaching of English? We were primarily discussing the teaching of English within literature departments, which is the dominant imagining within Indian higher education contexts.
2. The way we imagine professors is also implicated in how teaching practices play out in a classroom. As students, we find it hard to imagine teachers as a work-in-progress. The way students imagine teachers impact how they engage with the syllabus, or even how they respond in class. Our own thinking of professors is complicated, too. Instead of necessarily keeping the dynamics of teaching in mind, we tend to think of the professors as specialists/experts. However, the teacher or professor in question is never really a specialist. A constant reorientation takes place within the classroom as interactions unfold, which does not always have space for imparting ‘specialised’ knowledge.
4. Here, even the vocabulary of specialisation can be called into question. This language of specialisation seeps into every aspect of academic work, and begins to show very early. In interviews for teaching positions, the questions revolve around what topic would the teacher in question teach rather than how it is to be taught. The understanding that each batch of students is different from the others is not a part of the interview process. Even the question of how anything is to be taught is frequently decontextualized: it becomes more about the techniques through which a text is to be taught rather than paying attention to the social and institutional conditions within which it is taught.
5. The idea of discipline in itself needs to be changed: not to merely see it as a body of discourse, but also as a set of pedagogic practices. Where pedagogy is in itself radically reimagined. However, this entails a conversation on institutional contexts and infrastructure too, since usually this kind of reimagination is always discussed in abstract and theoretical terms instead of practical changes. Additionally, one of the challenges in this kind of reimagination is the existing ideological structuring of the students themselves.
6. Usually, teaching takes place within a community and through a broader social engagement. Yet the dominant perceptions of teaching reinforce the idea of individualised teaching. In such a scenario, even the role of the critical pedagogue as the one who has a critical view of the system, seems to create something of an “exceptional teacher” identity.
7. Teaching is rarely discussed as a skill, and teachers do not seem to discuss their pedagogic practices. How can we focus on teaching aids, how can we learn teaching as a method? When we speak of teachers, we tend to approach them in terms of their “areas,” sanitising the process of academic work into one dimension. We ignore the other, very important half of academic work which isn’t ever the focus of training: how do you teach? What makes you a more effective teacher? Not only is no training provided for any of these aspects of academia, it is also assumed that proficiency in research is the goal to work towards.
8. Do demonstration classes for new professors and new hires really help? Both the students and the teachers might feel that this isn’t how the classroom would operate in the absence of an external observer. How can classroom observation be assessed, taking into account the spectator’s influence on the participants?
9. Additionally, the particularities of the discipline need to kept in mind, whether it is language teaching or something else. How can we think of pedagogic adaptation and reflection while keeping in mind the constraints of each discipline?
10. How does a teacher put student writing in focus rather than the source text itself? Our understandings of student performance does not institutionally take into account student experiences and perspectives.
11. The essay, however, does not provide examples of a real life classroom experience. While we don’t need prescriptive models, experiential narratives would be a good starting point to learn from, or to orient teachers with.
12. We have to build conversations with texts, and more importantly, our assessment of students have to change. Designing assignments that present the process through which teaching takes place is one of the ways in which this can happen. We have to critique the existing measurement systems itself – since the examination questions don’t produce adequate qualitative enquiry.
13. Students are structured and imagined as passive learners, and not as producers of knowledge and meaning. Thinking of creative ways to respond to texts while also providing direction (to help navigate the normative contours of the discipline) would be one of the ways in which we can shift the way we qualitatively analyse texts: writing a poem; translation exercises; editing; reimagining a scene in the text are some of the ways in which we can shift the way disciplinary understanding is assessed.
14. Interestingly, where digital literacy is concerned, there is a sizeable community of English-language speakers who engage with texts within online communities. They analyse and edit their thoughts based on their understandings, respond to each other and build discourses together—we can learn from how such communities operate.
15. In central universities, where the curriculum is already decided – and generally much larger than the semester allows, how do you select portions from the text and learn how to emphasise pedagogic interests while also achieving the normative demands of syllabus completion? This might require an intuitive understanding of what the students would respond to while teaching or talking. The experiential anecdotes of the students in different departments would also help hone this understanding.
16. Affective responses to texts are generally presented as a given, and not necessarily as the kind of thing that has a lot of cognitive work that goes behind it. The critical distance with which is supposed to be used while analysing an English text does not always leave room for the emotional response that it generates.
17. There is a communication gap in both expectation and understanding, on the part of students as well as teachers. The expectation of mastery over the text makes them indict teachers. At the same time, teachers are frequently covering up their own anxieties in the classroom.
18. How do we make students become aware of and part of the teaching community? Reading groups and online platforms might provide some models: where readers and writers engage in rebuilding the way the text is read and thought about. How can we reshape study groups to accommodate these models? How can we teach the process of analysis and teaching itself to students, so that they understand concepts that give them the tools of analysis?
19. How can we rethink building a curriculum? How do we push for TA models in India, and how do we make the student a mediator? What are the limits of this collaboration, particularly if the present limitations of teaching are so structurally ingrained in the imagination? The normative understanding of authority needs to be displaced to begin with, and the professional+interpersonal codes of conduct have to become a part of the conversation on teaching.
