Reflection in the Teaching Life

I had begun the semester with the intention of breaking away from this endless cycle of catering to the quotidian and listening more intuitively to the whispers and silences that I am often too rushed to make full  sense of. In spite of having listed it as one of my top priorities for almost 3 weeks in a row, I had't blogged in several weeks. Like I have done in previous semesters, I have once again managed to fill up my time with hours of planning, teaching, responding, e-mailing, administering our university's writing center...but haven't added reflecting (alone or with others) to my list of "priorities."

Yesterday, I began reading Christine Pearson Casanave and Miguel Sosa's Respite for Teachers: Reflection and Renewal in the Teaching Life: "To many," write the authors, "get caught up in the routines prescribed by others--administrators, governments, textbooks--routines and prescriptions that presume to create a sense of community within the school. [...] The result is that we neglect to reflect on our own learning and to listen closely to our students or to look up from our learning occasionally and marvel at a new moon or become absorbed in a piece of music. Our lives, our teaching and learning, are diminished as a result."

What do we begin to miss out on in this rush to meet goals and check off items from our ever-expanding lists of to-dos? How does our working lives suffer when we do not allow the time to savor the moment, to listen to the silences, to tease out the inaudible whispers in our own classrooms?

I find myself going back to one of our class periods last week. Our cross-cultural composition class had just begun working on the literacy memoir assignment. We had finished discussing the assignment sheet and had watched Yusuf's literacy memoir, "Everyone Has a Gift" (http://daln.osu.edu/handle/2374.DALN/539). Before students came to class, they had blogged about Yusuf's literacy memoir and had posed questions about what they would have wanted Yusuf to have added to his narrative.

So many students wanted Yusuf to have spoken more about "Africa." Why didn't I ask my students how a 21-year old college kid who had migrated the United States when he was 12 years old speak for an entire continent? Why didn't we wonder about Yusuf's Somalia or even perhaps his native village? What difference would it have made if I had spent another five minutes in talking about the war that Yusuf referred to and how it may have impacted his literacy? 


   

Why Teach Global English?

David Crystal's distinction between comprehension in "Global English" and production in "Global English" is a crucial one and this video gave me ways of thinking about my translingual first-year classroom and what I should aim for. 

Which English Should We Teach?

In our ELL pilot group meetings, we have often wondered about why it is important for us to recognize and make our students aware that Standard American English is a dialect (albeit a privileged one). David Crystal's comments may be useful for those of us who continue to deliberate on why we should (not) teach Standard American English and how we can contextualize our classroom practices in a world where there is not one variety of English, but many Englishes. 

Translingualism in Language Classrooms

We are functioning in a world fundamentally characterized by objects in motion. These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques. This is a world of flows.

--Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large

The hubs: What are you eating? Bellum?

Me: Na. The gur is salty. I am actually having the last few peanuts...Tumi khaabe naaki?

Many of our conversations at home look like this. The hubs will occasionally intersperse his English with Telugu words and I will respond in Benglish. I am not sure when we began to communicate in this manner, but, after almost seven years of knowing each other, we have come to a point where we have begun to understand each other's languages without being formally trained in either. Many of my friends and colleagues are surprised by the ease with which I can move between English, Hindi, and Bengali (and a wee bit of Telugu), but the truth is that this kind of linguistic hybridity is rather unremarkable in a world where about half of the world's population is bilingual and shuttle between languages on a regular basis. 

However, in spite of the frequency of such translingual exchanges, composition teachers have shied away from importing dialogues about other languages into their "English" classrooms. As someone who has taught in multiple ESL and first-year composition programs before, I am familiar with the commonly (over)used piece of advice meted out to English Language Learners with striking passion and alacrity: If you want to learn English, you must stop thinking in/using your native language. To learn English, you must think in English. This kind of logic may have once proved useful, but the reality is that all speakers in today's diverse settings have to "mediate complex encounters among interlocutors with different language capacities and cultural imaginations, who have different social and political memories and who don't necessarily share a common understanding of the social reality they are living in" (Kramsch and Whiteside 646). To restrict a person's knowledge and use of other languages is to strip the speaker off of some of the tools of his/her trade and ask him/her to construct something out of nothing. 

If we are to see our classrooms as microcosms of a greatly altered (and altering) cultural landscape, we would need to think of ways of having conversations about language that will prepare our students (and us) for the "complex encounters" that will characterize many of their private and public lives in the not-so distant future. We will need to think about the kinds of reading and writing that must take place in our classrooms to enable all writers (whether monolingual, multidialectal, multilingual, or translingual) to learn and adapt to a variety of rhetorical situations. Not only that, but we will also need to think about faculty development opportunities that will allow instructors (and admins) to inch away from English-only practices to the conceptualization and development of translingual pedagogies that are relevant, authentic and that do the kind of "living English work" that Min-Zhan Lu and many others have made a case for. 

Ganesha Crosses Borders

The first day of class went well. I was nervous all morning. New faces. New voices. New expectations.

Would I be able to do what I had set out to do? 

I started class with a story, a story that had traveled across time and space in to my 21st-century first-year composition classroom with students from across the state, the country, and the world...

My story began with a picture of the little Ganesha statuette that sits right next to the composition textbooks in my new office. But my Ganesha is not the familiar "elephant God" known in this part of the world. Neither is he the Ganesha worshipped in Hindu homes across the world. Buddhidaata. Siddhidaata. The bestower of wisdom. The master of perfection. 

The image I shared is that of Ganesha the writer, the fastest writer in Hindu mythology. In the image, Ganesha sits cross-legged on the floor with a peacock feather quill in his right hand. His left finger is on his forehead as if he is thinking hard, concentrating, contemplating, waiting for some magic to happen. In front of him is an old Indian desk, the kind you could write on while sitting on the floor. He is transcribing the Mahabharata, one of the oldest primary epics in the world.

According to an old Indian story that many Indian folks tell their grand kids when the little ones are still little and still love stories told by their grannies, Ved Vyasa approached Ganesha so that the latter would write down the story of Bharata (yup, that is the ancient name of "India," the latter being a British construct). Vyasa would combine all the oral stories, legends, myths, mores, morals, local histories of kings and their kingdoms into a grand narrative of ancient India and would dictate these to Ganesha.

Ganesha had other things on his mind, but it is always hard to refuse a wise man. So he tells Vyasa that he would write down what Vyasa dictated, but the latter would have no time to think and revise his thoughts once they had been penned by Ganesha. Vyasa had a condition too: Ganesha would not write down anything till he had completely understood what was being said to him. If Ganesha did not understand something, he would have to stop to ask. He would have to question, inquire, reflect, rewrite, and revise...

A deal was finally struck and Vyasa and Ganesha journeyed together to compose the Mahabharata, one of the oldest known epics of the ancient world...

Thus ended my story, a story that had crossed many borders (time, language, culture, place). We paused to unravel it and examine it layer by layer. We talked about different notions of composition, the social and collaborative nature of  knowledge-making processes and human endeavor, and what happens to stories, languages, cultures, and peoples when they cross borders and find new audiences. What is gained in these acts of border crossing? What gets lost in translation? 

We also read Alfred Lubrano's "The Bricklayer's Boy," another narrative about border crossing and place-making.

We then journaled about the various "borders" (both physical and metaphoric) that each one of us have had to cross to get to our FYW class and how these border-crossings have constrained and/or enabled us. I briefly introduced the concepts of code-meshing and translanguaging as strategies for writing and we finished class by discussing the course, major assignments, and policies.

The last part felt so rushed. There were so many unfinished thoughts and questions...I can only hope that the next class period is better paced...