While I have previously invited higher education professionals active in a number of different fields on to this blog and will do so again, I thought this time around readers might be interested in a firsthand account of English language teaching in India.

Over the last four weeks, I have had the great pleasure of being invited to conduct English language and theatre workshops at Union Chapel School in Calcutta. I was and am truly delighted to be able to do this, as it enables me to draw on not only my language teaching experience but also my background in theatre.

I teach two groups of students in the fifteen to sixteen year age group, all of whom have a first language background in either Hindi or Bengali (Hindi is the national language of India, and Bengali is the language of the state of West Bengal). When I asked my students how they related to English – and if they felt that they were dealing with a foreign language, I got some interesting answers. Most felt that in fact they were simply dealing with another “Indian” language, in the same way that they might try and deal with one of the many languages of the country, except that in the case of English they could see an immediate “use” for their knowledge.

As a teacher, I think getting this kind of reaction from a student is pure gold. Affinity is half the battle. The idea that when one starts thinking in another language one has come close to native-speaker/first language speaker status is compelling. But what about when one starts feeling in another language? It’s for this reason that using theatre exercises and the support of a Shakespearean play (“As You Like It”) in these workshops, I think is particularly useful. Functional English can never be discounted, but enabling students to tap into their imagination through the medium of a new language allows them to develop a full or active presence in it. Active language, I think, has to go beyond the somewhat limited idea we have of what constitutes a language “skill,” and become a language capacity. By capacity I mean the nuanced ability to maintain your speaking position in the face of changing circumstances (or, as some would call it outside the world of the assessment rubric – life).

The logistical pressures of moving countries and cities – from London to Calcutta – and a nasty bout of flu meant that it was sensible to stay offline for a while.

Over the next few blogs I will seek to provide an overview of the educational climate in India, and the extent to which international alliances are changing or are likely to change the university experience .

Why are British universities seeking to find a presence in India?

The Indian government has plans to increase the number of university goers from a current 12 per cent of the population to 30 per cent. In plain terms this works out to a present university student population of 12 million, and a projected increase to 30 million. This is clearly a very ambitious plan and opinions are mixed as to whether it can or should be achieved.

In this first piece though I want to present a side to the global impact of the ongoing changes in the Indian university system that is seldom seen in the media.

That is, what is the university experience in India from the point of view of the student and the lecturer?

I went to school in Calcutta and also did my first undergraduate degree in the city. When I went to the UK to do my second undergraduate degree it wasn’t the differences in the educational culture that I noticed but rather the continuities. This was probably because both the school and university I attended were established in the nineteenth century when Calcutta was the capital of British India, and at the heart of a close engagement between the cultures of India and of Britain.

What I experienced in India was a meticulousness of detail and depth of approach which I am truly grateful for. Somewhere along the way I also became firmly imbued with the idea that the big picture matters. So valuing the humanities was important because it helped one to link the puzzle pieces of the world together.

A common expectation and hope amongst the educational community in India is, I think, that alliances with British or other overseas universities will mean more flexibility for students and teaching staff. By which I mean exposure to the arts, sciences and perhaps even technical knowledges together. It seems rather harsh to expect an eighteen year old to choose a “stream” and stand by it life-long.

A simple scan-through of the weekly educational supplement to the Kolkata edition of The Times of India gives a thumbnail picture of the kinds of degrees and career pathways being offered to current undergraduates. Management and science degrees predominate but there’s a wide range of IT -related and engineering courses, along with intriguingly specialist courses in things like wine-making, chocolate making and magicianship (though not at Hogwarts).

What I wonder as a global citizen and a teacher is this – how are we going to help students join the dots? Will the view that learning has value in and of itself because it nurtures creative and critical thinking hold in the new university environment being fashioned?

This wider view of the meaning and value of education already has a space both in India and in the UK. But I have also experienced the piece meal view – in both countries – that being educated in order to find and keep a job is all that’s needed.

It’s an interesting time to be in education – and I hope in succeeding pieces to chronicle more of the changes taking place. The future – not just for the UK and India but for the world – looks an utterly different place than most would have imagined it a mere ten years ago.

Also – a very happy women’s day to everybody from both Ritu and I.

Priyali: I know you’ve been travelling internationally to complete work contracts. How do you go about finding openings? Do you use an agency or is it down to your own research, and how do you decide who is a good employer?

Ritu: I maintain an extensive professional network through writing, reading and research. I make prospective employers aware of my work and establish a continuing dialogue to contribute significantly towards health, social research and policy. This also helps me to find and select the kinds of projects I am keen to work on.

Priyali: You are someone who grew up in India but now lives in the UK, and has spent some of her most formative years within it. Do you feel you have access to more than one culture, and does this make you attractive to prospective employers?

Ritu: When people ask I often say I was brought up in England. I have certainly established “belongingness” here in Britain. I feel very much part of its society and environment. I think the experience of working in two different nations and understanding how things get done, certainly benefits in maintaining contacts and sustaining networks. I have access to wide networks here and in India. We live in a globalized world and also an extremely competitive one. With people now having access to specific geographical locations they didn’t have before, they are presented with new challenges and dynamics. These present difficulties but can be dealt with successfully.

Priyali: This is your free space – go ahead and send a message out to other researchers, practitioners and readers of this blog as to what most engages you at this point in your life and career.

Ritu: I feel that universities should prepare PhD students, who often live an isolated life, for the outside world. They should encourage them to publish and provide continued support even after they graduate. Most PhD students feel misplaced and choose different career paths, due to little or no guidance or support from their universities. It’s even more difficult for migrants who would like to establish their careers outside their home country.

Also, I would like to add that Britain needs to rethink its position on international development. I feel that Britain’s capacity to make a difference in the developing world is huge. This needs to be planned carefully by considering intersections of race, gender and social inclusion.

People belonging to diverse backgrounds should be given opportunities to contribute to the international development sector through an equitable manner and process. This will help deal with issues of social exclusion within the UK that give rise to inequalities in the work environment.

I think he meant by this that there is a craft and a science to producing that finished piece of work, whatever the discipline.  When the moment comes that you submit, defend and are finally awarded a doctorate by your examiners, you are being recognized as a worthy peer by the academy.

What is it then in your hands to do with the piece of work you have invested several years of your life in?

Publication – yes, but in what form and with whom? I was approached shortly after being awarded my doctorate by a company that wanted to publish my thesis. However, they did not have a peer review process. A friend of mine was similarly approached, and accepted. But she is a communications professional. The value of having her work out in book form supercedes the necessity of peer review. For someone like me who is building a career in scholarship, peer review makes the difference between work that will stand me in good stead when being considered for a lectureship, and work that may not carry so much weight.

How do you find the right publisher and the right audience for your work? Who will hold the copyright and for how long? How long will it take to appear in print?

To all researchers – please consider this an open call to write in with publication questions and answers. The greater our knowledge, the better our decisions.

As an Indian citizen who spends significant time living and working in the UK, I have been able to witness at first hand the changes taking place in the education sectors of both countries.

The Indian economy like the Chinese economy is expanding. India, like China, is investing heavily in education. New schools and universities are being founded at a steady rate.

British universities are looking to these two countries for expansion. The universities of Liverpool and Nottingham have already set up joint programmes and campuses in Xi’an Jiatong and Ningbo respectively.

I recently attended a meeting at which a reputed British university presented plans for a joint doctoral programme, to a group of senior faculty representing a number of established Indian universities. If the plan goes ahead, students will be able to show joint accreditation for their doctorates. Since a large part of the programme would be based in India, where both living expenses and tuition fees are significantly lower than in Britain, the overall cost of the doctorate would be reduced. A senior figure at the meeting remarked on the possibility that this could work not only in favour of Indian students seeking a UK degree – but also in favour of UK students wanting to cut down on university expenses.

I should mention of course that faculty at wellknown universities in India as with their counterparts in Britain, are highly distinguished. Students from both countries who are able to enroll  on such a programme should it go ahead, would also have that advantage on their side.

Are we going to see British students no longer simply taking a gap year in India but living and studying there in significant numbers? What will this mean for teaching methods, curricula and  – that impossible-to-define, mythical beast – global consciousness?

Is your department or university considering a move East?  If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts and expectations with reference to that?

It may seem strange to link the two things but I hope it will become clear why I am.

As reported in The Guardian last Saturday Mr. Schmidt said, “Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together.”

My deepest sense of where we are – as a scholar and a human being – is that we need to renew our ability to make connections.

I write this blog to make connections with people I would never have the chance to communicate with otherwise.

Maybe the riots would not have happened if we had been better at talking to each other.

Maybe this is our chance to stop them from happening again.

Art and science. The working and the not working. The very educated and the less educated.

I don’t know when the idea that life and the world can best be described in binaries took such strong hold of us.

Can we soften and expand and shape our categories – instead of allowing them to control us?

How else can we make our work – and play – relevant and enduring?

What are the binary ideas you would like to change? Are you going to let your inner polymath out?

In this post I want to talk about the relationship between your research and your teaching.

Researchers may feel that they walk a lonely path – and they do. Research by its nature is an individual and personal activity. It is probably one of few professional career paths in which you are positively encouraged to act on the world around you according to highly personal ideas.

And yet – speaking anecdotally even and only from my own experience of the research world as I know it through departments I have taught at, conferences and impromptu debates around coffee machines (!) – most researchers aren’t by nature disengaged from other people. On the contrary, we seem to be insatiably curious about and interested in other people, or we would not spend large chunks of our lives seeking to add a tiny, original drop to the vast ocean of knowledges man and woman have created together over the centuries.

The good news is that our chosen line of work offers its own way out of the loneliness I think many of us have felt, in our hours and years spent following a research trail.

As teachers, we automatically find a social dimension to our work.

In our classrooms we come up against fresh faces and minds to whom we seek to make our ideas both clear and relevant.

We also find a whole new social dynamic in bringing our research selves into the light of day and into the classroom.

I am presently working on a university language and study skill teaching assignment where it is the meta-skills – to use a word any self respecting dictionary would probably reject on sight – of being a learner (and a teacher) which count. Life in the classroom isn’t about ideas right now – its about ideas about ideas. How to frame, present and deal with an argument. What to do when the Harvard style guide won’t tell you how to cite a completely new kind of source which wasn’t around when it was last revised.

I hope I’ll also have a chance to teach the literary periods I specialized in – but stretching to teach language and study skills is gifting me an important kind of knowledge. The knowledge of social contact – where the work I produced over years spent largely in the company of my own mind is being translated into something immediately and socially valuable.

Be flexible and be open to the opportunities around you – don’t shy away because you think it’s not what you trained to do. Let your research self breathe and your teaching self too – they need to not be frozen into one place and one time in an infinite universe.

To coin a metaphor, it’s rather like preparing a one course meal from the grand banquet you prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime festival. What to put in? More importantly – what to leave out? Most ironically, it is becoming clear to me that this whole process is in a sense the opposite of what it took to produce the thesis itself.

Let me explain with reference to the actual context. As a scholarly writer my great struggle has always been – to find the right design and the right connecting axes for my argument. Structure, structure, structure. Words and ideas rushed in on me  – but the simple and absolute necessity of putting each one in the right place occupied my days and nights.

However that story doesn’t concern us for the purposes of this post – somehow, like other survivors of this marathon, I found a way through this terrain and at an unsuspecting moment reached my destination. Aspects of this journey have been discussed elsewhere on this site by Heather http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/phd-student/2011/06/15/what-makes-a-phd/ and Kat http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/language-and-literature/2011/05/30/world-building-with-mind-mapping/. My own work now is to scale down – to sift through the first chapter of the thesis and produce a unified miniature – something which will tell the reader what I feel it is important for them to know about the forty two year poetic career of my subject:  D.L. Richardson. A British-born poet and teacher who, like many of that generation of Anglo-Indians, lived between nineteenth-century Calcutta and London. The first time around it took me 20,000 words.

Hm.

Well…the FIRST thing I’m doing is to follow my supervisor’s advice to “write what you need to write.” I mean that I’m following the mysterious, rational and more than rational shaping instinct which allowed me to form a view of Richardson’s life in the first place – I’m combing through the chapter and cutting and pasting the sentences and passages which form an outline of his poetic life into a new document. It’s amazing how your focus changes with your word count –like packing a smaller suitcase.

The SECOND thing – is that I’m making space for change. Putting in the final full stop was definitely not the end of my thinking about Richardson, the nineteenth century or the Romantic movement. It was a stage in the development of that thinking, and I would like the finished chapter to reflect that ongoing growth.  Nothing complicated about this – I’m simply adding in new thoughts and ideas as I go along in brackets containing both short, haiku-like questions and long, rambling ones (nothing like the bracket for relieving the military precision of linear sentences, eh?).

The THIRD thing is– carving out and creating time to deal with the copyright permissions I’m going to need to get and the formatting of the chapter in accordance with a new (to me) set of style rules.  

And – finally – given the hours, energy and patience this takes, I make time to remember why I’m doing this. The joy of work can seem very far away after hours at a stretch on my laptop – so I need to remember that ,in fact, I’m recovering – or rather helping to recover – the life and hopes  of a real person. And presenting him to an audience that probably would never otherwise come across his work or feel any relationship to it.

A wider view of Adrian’s teaching, research and publication profile can be found on his homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/adrianholliday42/

Could you very briefly comment on what the humanities bring to public life in your opinion?

They bring a complexity of perception which helps us all to put aside our prejudices – a  complexity which cannot easily be put into ‘straight’ words or images. I would like to expand this concept to creative aspects of the media, particularly to satire and comedy. It is not an accident that many of our intellectuals are comedians. The problem is that we may not be aware that we are putting aside our prejudices when we encounter this complexity; so that when we come back to ‘thinking logically’ about things, the prejudices come running back and it is as if we have learnt nothing.

What kinds of research do you hope to see early career scholars in the humanities undertake?

This is hard for me because I don’t consider my own discipline to be in the humanities, but in social science, which is a very different matter. There are however hard decisions, especially in Britain, where academic institutions want one to publish in the journals and to get funding which will tick the right boxes in government research assessment exercises. Here one must ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, distinguish one’s job from one’s work, and try also to work on areas which will make one’s academic community rock and inspire one’s students. I suppose it is important to remember that we are getting paid to do our jobs, but that this enables us to have the immensely privileged life of being free academics. 

Career planning and decision making hold many challenges. Would you like to share a very positive decision you made and its outcome?

I began my academic career in very different times; but I remember I worked hard to get research students from the very beginning – to go to conferences, to write and publish, and to get myself known for being critical and adventurous in my thinking, mainly outside my university I must say. This attracted students I think.  In publishing I never ever gave up, and bore all the criticisms sent back by reviewers, and felt that my teaching would never be sound unless it was based on my own published research. I had the conviction that I would not be able to change things until I submitted to the academic community first.

Are there decisions and career moves you would like to advise early career academics  to be cautious of?

There is never a better time to do things than the present. Life will never get less busy. One must carry one’s writing project with one absolutely everywhere and squeeze it into the smallest spaces between meetings and administrative duties. Being an academic is not a 9-5 job.

What has helped you the most in defining and achieving your career goals?

Never being bitter or defensive, at least not for long, and never publicly. At the same time, never submitting to established thought. Having a trajectory of investigation which can be traced back to my undergraduate days – a personal project – but which has never ceased to develop into new thinking.

I have taken advantage of the unique nature of the internet to look for a collegial space we can all come to in our own time. My memory of the final stage of my doctoral research is a blur of classes, supervisions, library visits and – yes : ) – grocery shopping. From what I could see of more senior academics around me, life only gets busier after this. But yet to listen, to find a voice with which to contribute: these surely are the quiet staples of the path we have chosen to follow. Without them our work risks becoming a round of task completion alone, I think?

In practical terms the need to publish seems to me the most pressing issue for scholars who, like me, have recently completed their doctoral work. In both the United Kingdom where I lived and worked for more than a decade and in India where I presently live, an academic gains in credibility through getting their work published. Putting together at least a basic publishing plan and considering relevant points such as: identifying scholarly journals and possible monograph publishers, ways of approaching them and factoring in the time it will take from the acceptance of a proposal to the final publication (fingers crossed : )) is practical research activity that is just as important as the work it takes to develop and write your doctoral thesis.  

Of course it’s not just how to publish that’s a practical issue. The “why” is just as important.  My own answer to this is a simple one: to be engaged and to engage.  Dialogue and human contact are what make being a learner and a teacher worthwhile. How else can we make sure that the humanities remain fresh, alive and …well, human?