Bloomington, Indiana. I attended a workshop this weekend on ‘Assessment’ organized by the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center.
The place is packed with instructors who teach Slavic, Inner Asian, East Asian (mostly Korean) and African Languages. Also present are coordinators of language programs, mostly from Indiana University, a species rarely seen in the South Asian world. However, Indiana University, for instance, has, as part of the same department, Hungarian, Mongolian, Tibetan and everything in between. Surely, the instructors (many of whom are native speakers) require someone to interface with administrators as well as numerous pedagogy experts.
I am the only south Asian around but I have no language teaching experience and even my learning experience is limited. Still, that comes in handy, as I could pretend to ask questions on classical languages, which none of the modern language instructors would have considered. A university education has many uses but flummoxing your friends and foes is the foremost. I pass off myself as someone who works on pedagogy and technology, hiding the fact that I know neither. My brown skin immediately labels me as a computer expert and not wanting to disappoint my new friends, (all fifty of them), I open up my Powerbook, use the guest password offered kindly by the Indiana Memorial Union (where I was also staying) and get connected to the world.
The workshop went off very nicely. I was there to listen to my friend Ursula Lentz, with whom I am working to organize a similar workshop this summer. I was really impressed by not only how well organized she was and all the pertinent questions she raised but more importantly by her capacity to get the instructors, all of whom teach Less Commonly Taught Languages, buy into her approach and theory. My south Asian friends aren’t usually so well disposed towards anyone who wants to offer instruction on their languages of expertise. Yet Ursula has this non-threatening, friendly presence and the activities at the workshop produced a fabulous atmosphere. I made some notes on what we should do for June, both prior to the workshop and during the workshop itself. My brown self also made me consider more about what can be done through a blog and workshop website, in the months prior to the workshop. Overall a pleasant and educative trip.
Actually, I want to write about a new conversation that we initiated this past week in Chicago on language instruction and technology. I am officially the organizer of a colloquium and well, I have already confessed my ignorance in both fields. Even as we are assailed by our own doubts and some skepticism in the air about the usefulness of such exercises, we are also gratified by the good response from our elders and fellow students. We console ourselves by saying we are as knowledgeable or ignorant as anyone else, which is qualification enough to undertake this daunting task. But as we begin our teaching careers in earnest, we do want to ask in the context of this colloquium: what is the purpose of thinking about pedagogy in the digital age? Does pedagogy (itself) or do pedagogical goals change in this era?
As part of a teacher centric analysis, I could ask myself how will I teach what I want to teach. I could conceivably have a career teaching a language (Kannada) or Humanities or Social Sciences. Same is true of most of my colleagues, here in Chicago and elsewhere. Regardless of what we teach, our pedagogical goals and strategies are what we want to think about seriously. How should we use what is available to us (from holdings in large research libraries, audio and visual archives, learning management systems, digital archives or a combination of all these) to be effective teachers?
Once when I taught for a year in the Mysore University history department, my students read a single 2400 (yes, twenty four hundred pages, written by a human being that I have met) page text book on Indian history for seven of the ten courses they were required to do. They refused to read anything else. In fact, they read this book only for the final exams and not for any of the lectures, where the instructor was expected to lecture ‘at’ unresponsive faces staring at him for an hour each weekday. Here obviously the notion of class, curriculum and even library are very different. The history department library, for instance, would be open for a couple of hours on a random day of the week, when the in charge librarian decided to show up to sign the attendance register.
Sure, the greatest teachers in human history – the Upanisadic sages or Socrates, for instance – never needed text books or libraries and could do with a Socratic method. Their only requirement: sitting near the teacher.
Online courses and podcasting make even that requirement obsolete. But before we hail the podcasters and offer them contracts to be the Upanisadic sages of our ages, let us also ask ourselves: how vastly different is our context and the purpose of education? This question makes me consider ‘who I teach’, in addition to how and what I teach. What are the expectations of a generation that has grown up on cell phones, PDA, Wireless, laptop and chat? How could our modes (old or new) be made more interesting, effective ways to open up intellectual inquiries?
We hope to spend the quarter assessing our learning, in the hope that it might prepare us to be better teachers.
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