Introduction. Video 1. Awasthi: “Hello, I am Jai Raj Awasthi, currently working as a professor at Tribhuvan University.” Gautam: “Hello, my name is Ganga Ram Gautam. I am associate professor of English, teaching at Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tribhuvan University. Also I am President of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association..." Gita: ...joint family where I was brought up gave me an immense opportunity to be cared and to be taught by different members of my family." Bal: "Okay, I was born in a little village located in the western part of the country." Dhruba: "My name is Dhruba Neupane. Today, I am going to talk about my story of literacy." Prem: "Hello, good afternoon! My name is Prem Phyak. I teach at Tribhuvan University, Department of English Education."
Introduction. Video 2. Bal: “After graduating from high school my family (my grandmother, and my sister and brother) moved to Chitwan, which is the middle part of the country, while my parents were still in India. And I remember that was a developed part of the country and we had better classrooms, better teachers, and that was the first time when I had English teaching English in English, so I was very much surprised seeing that. Though I understood what, I hardly understood what the teacher was saying in the class. And the connotation of this is until then knowledge of the English language was good education for me. If I knew English well, then I had “quality education.”
Introduction. Video 3. Hem: “Uhm, I would say, my literacy began with learning alphabets from my father and it was long before I was put to school at the age of 6. Father taught me Nepali and English alphabets.” Awasthi: “When I was a small child, I had to go to school with my brother, elder brother. I did not know that I had to go to school also. We did not have school building then. We had to study under the trees, big trees, and the rainy days were always holidays for us.” Dhruba: “The village where I was born, and where my parents still live, was almost completely illiterate. But I was lucky to be raised and taught in my maternal home under the tutelage of my maternal uncle.” Gautam: “Looking back to my education, uhm, there was no school in my community when I was born. And it was my father who started school in my community.” Bal: “And talking about my education background, I first joined school there and started writing ka kha ga or a b c d in Nepali and English respectively and when I recall my first lessons of English, I remember that I was pretty much confused with…” Gita: “My grandparents made a special space for me to recognize the basic alphabets and common understanding of the words. They made me do some oral practice from some religious books and other religious chants or slokas.” Prem: “I was born in the community—so that is, my own community, which is the Limbu community—where there was no light of education when I started my formal education. But my community was rich in its indigenous knowledge and [cultural] heritage. I have to say that I learned how to speak Limbu at my home…”
The Third Eye. Video 1. Awasthi: “So, now, when I thought that English is a language that is sold all over the world and it is English through which people earn their bread and butter, and [that] there is a big motivation towards learning English. Basically it is because of the English, many Nepalese students go abroad and get education, and the best of the best education they can get from any country.”
The Third Eye . Video 2. Dhruba: “By perpetuating the western domination in construction and dissemination of knowledge … the institutions in Nepal are doing a disservice to, to, their own rich local, uh, they’re being complicit to the self-representative Eurocentric curriculum which was based and is based and modeled after western ideals of individualism. ... Instead of importing western contents which has little to do with the local knowledge, local epistemology…. This belief also relies on academic ability as the only ability ignoring the several ways in which a person’s intelligence can be measured, or defined” Bal: “There have been noticeable changes. There are more schools, more universities, and diversity in education. Also there is more craze for English and good skills in the English language equals good knowledge and quality education, and still it is there today—and I think that it’s there more than in the past.” Dhruba: “I feel that it is not necessary to forget your culture and language in order to learn English or to participate in the larger intellectual community of our globalized world today. English and the western model of education and literacy [based on them] may confer you the type of power that may often seem like the only important type of cultural capital. English is quite often the key to academic achievement and social mobility for people even in Nepal. However, as educators we would be extremely naïve and insensitive if we do not understand that English can be appropriated and contextualized so as to practice and promote our local epistemology in today’s globalized world…. Only the awareness of the value and respect for local knowledge and culture, which is possible through critical pedagogical engagement, only through that we can enable our students and the society at large to overcome the poverty in our country, both material and intellectual.” Gita: “If I look back, of course I did learn something, I do not say it was nothing but my previous academic knowledge in Nepal did not have direct bearing with the practice, understanding, way of thinking and for my whole life. The study was just for gaining the academic degree I would say. I doubt if the existing model of education system of our country is helpful for the practical purpose. Most of the times, these textbook and curricular materials and issues became just something to read, recite and write in the exam, nothing more than that. I do not know what kind of epistemology we developed and what kind of real output we want from our kids with that type of education system.” Hem: “Hmm, the school was not a very pleasant place for me.. ..” Prem: “I had some money to invest for my master’s degree education and I did well and I started teaching at the department where I was graduated from…. The most important moment in my academic life was, I have to say, when I was awarded the centenary scholarship from the institute of education at the University of London, UK, where I did MA TESOL in 2009. I learned not only the content of the subjects related to applied linguistics, English language teaching, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, but also developed a solid idea of academic writing and understanding literacy practices from critical perspectives.”
The Third Eye. Video 3. Gautam: “So, therefore, people realize that, uhm, everybody has to learn English, so even the adults are now learning English from their children in order to communicate through English on their mobile phones, in order to send messages through these mobile phones. So, English literacy has now become the kind of matter of survival so without which it is extremely difficult to get connect not only with people who speak English but also with the people who speak the same languages, because of this technology invention and other innovation in the fields of science of technology. And in Nepal, in the Nepalese education system English has, English now occupies in the most important places, place, because it is the language of education, the language of the medium of instruction in most of the colleges and even in schools and colleges where the medium of education is the Nepali language, they, some of them they have already switched over from Nepali medium to the English medium because they think that if they run in the English language then they would attract the best students in their institutes. So English has now become a very powerful instrument, powerful tool, uhm, for not only for personal development, professional development, but for also the business purposes.” Awasthi: “Of course, English might have got a kind of adverse effect on the mother tongue education in the country. However, people realize that it is English that gives bread and butter to them. Even the laborers send their children to the so-called English-medium schools in this country, in order to educate their children in the English medium. They feel proud that their children speak English. They feel proud that their children go normally to English private schools.” Gautam: Now, in terms of the political setting, uhm, Nepali language in Nepal is sometimes criticized as the language of certain communities, therefore I can see English being used in Nepal in the near future as the official language also, one of the official languages also. So there is a huge demand of English, there is a huge scope of English….”
The Third Eye. Video 4. Prem: “When I went to school, which was very closer to my home, I did not hear any piece of the [Limbu] language. No teachers used my mother tongue in school, nor did my friends use it. However, it was not was not difficult to learn through the Nepali language because it was equally used in my community. My parents, my, my sisters, my brothers used to speak Nepali language too.” Dhruba: “And, we would memorize the translations. Our teacher didn’t seem to care for the fact that a foreign language can be best taught when communicated, through content, through interaction and constant practice. The focus of that instruction was on ‘correct’ grammar rather than on communication and language as the substance and objective of learning. We were unable to even hold basic conversations, let alone discuss topics requiring specialized vocabulary, and that trend of failure, incapability, helplessness, and a kind of paralysis characterized our speech and writing, I remember, even up until undergraduate classes.”
One World per Story. Video 1. Bal Krishna, speaking in Nepalese: “Hello, Shyam, Namaste, The apartment has been extremely noisy, I’ve been trying all day today, and it’s not working at all. And I’ve also been “technologically conscious” [in English], so I don’t know what this is going to come out like. If you happen to like any segment, let me know and I will “re-narrate” if you want me to—if you want to ‘use’ any of it. Okay, let me start, alright?”
One World per Story. Video 1. Prem: “I had some money to invest for my master’s degree education and I did well and I started teaching at the department where I was graduated from…. The most important moment in my academic life was, I have to say, when I was awarded the centenary scholarship from the institute of education at the University of London, UK, where I did MA TESOL in 2009. I learned not only the content of the subjects related to applied linguistics, English language teaching, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, but also developed a solid idea of academic writing and understanding literacy practices from critical perspectives.” Dhruba: “By perpetuating the western domination in construction and dissemination of knowledge … the institutions in Nepal are doing a disservice to their own rich local, uh, they’re being complicit to the self-representative Eurocentric curriculum which was based and is based and modeled after western ideals of individualism and competition rather than considering collectivism as a competing and amenable preference. … Instead of importing western contents which has little to do with the local knowledge, …. This belief also relies on academic ability as the only ability ignoring the several ways in which a person’s intelligence can be measured.” Bal: “There have been noticeable changes. There are more schools, more universities, and diversity in education. Also there is more craze for English and good skills in the English language equals good knowledge and quality education, and still it is there today—and I think that it’s there more than in the past.” Dhruba: “as educators we would be extremely naïve and insensitive if we do not understand that English can be appropriated and contextualized so as to practice and promote our local epistemology in today’s globalized world.. . . Only the awareness of the value and respect for local knowledge and culture, which is possible through critical pedagogical engagement, only through that we can enable our students and the society at large to overcome the poverty in our country, both material and intellectual.” Gita: “of course I did learn something, I do not say it was nothing but my previous academic knowledge in Nepal did not have direct bearing with the practice, understanding, way of thinking and for my whole life. The study was just for gaining the academic degree I would say. I doubt if the existing model of education system of our country is helpful for the practical purpose. Most of the times, these textbook and curricular materials and issues became just something to read, recite and write in the exam, nothing more than that. I do not know what kind of epistemology we developed and what kind of real output we want from our kids with that type of education system.” Hem: “Hmm, the school was not a very pleasant place for me.. . .” Awasthi: “After I completed my grade 12 education, I realized that I had to educate the people of that very locality. At the age of 16, I opened a school and became its headmaster, and taught for two years, before I came back to Kathmandu again, to continue my education…. I trained teachers of far western Nepal, that was way back in 1975.” Hem: “Uhm, I would say, my literacy began with learning alphabets from my father and it was long before I was put to school at the age of 6. Father taught me Nepali and English alphabets.” Awasthi: “When I was a small child, I had to go to school with my brother, elder brother. I did not know that I had to go to school also. We did not have school building then. We had to study under the trees, big trees, and the rainy days would always be holidays for us.” Dhruba: “The village where I was born, and where my parents still live, was almost completely illiterate. But I was lucky to be raised and taught in my maternal home under the tutelage of my maternal uncle.” Gautam: “Looking back to my education, uhm, there was no school in my community when I was born. And it was my father who started school in my community.” Bal: “And talking about my education background, I first joined school there and started writing ka kha ga or a b c d in Nepali and English respectively and when I recall my first lessons of English, I remember that I was pretty much confused with…” Gita: “My grandparents made a special space for me to recognize the basic alphabets and common understanding of the words. They made me do some oral practice from some religious books and other religious chants or slokas.” Prem: “I was born in the community—my own community, which is the Limbu community—where there was no light of education when I started my formal education. But my community was rich in its indigenous knowledge and [cultural] heritage.”
Cardinal Directions . Video 1. Gita: "I still remember one verse that I used to recite when I was 2 and onwards. 'Sita pati shri raghunathalai, samjhera manle atibhaktilai, bhasa ma lekhchhu mana khub lagai, rakshya garun shri rama sada malai.'" Hem: “maybe when I was in class three, the children had to go to far off places to carry beams and planks of wood for making desks and benches and chairs. And not only that, we had to carry mud and cow dung from the neighboring village to scrub the floor, and yeah, after every summer break, we were asked to pluck the weeds on the school ground, and there was no choice but to work on the ground, because the teachers were quite strict and would go around with a stick in their hands, and that was a part of being educated early. And somehow…” Prem: “I remember that my mother used to sell locally brewed alcohol, called raksi, which is famous drink of alcohol in the indigenous community and she used to spend that money to buy stationary for me…”
Cardinal Directions. Video 2. Bal “So, in the exams, we were given the composition titles like ‘my aim in my life’, ‘death penalty’, ‘democracy’, ‘discipline’, etc. and we were supposed to compose an essay of approximately 200 words. And I tried my best to, to reproduce the text that I studied earlier, rather than composing of my own. And because I am in the US now, I realize that the education system in Nepal was quite different from what it is like in the United States. We rarely read journal articles because we do not have access to online resources and heavily depend on textbooks of applied linguistics and language teaching but unfortunately enough they were published in 1970 and 1980s and very few books that were published in the 1990s. so the knowledge that was outdated in the west was pretty much new for us. And that was what I was pursuing. Gita: “It was beyond the imagination of the person like me who never saw ocean before. So, I read English poems, essays and knew the lifestyle of western world from our textbook. And all that had very little to do in our practical settings.” Bal: “And again in my graduate studies [in Nepal] also, all I had to do was to sit in exams that lasted four hours and vomit everything that I had learned throughout the year…”
Cardinal Directions. Video 3. Hem: “I would say, my literacy began with learning alphabets from my father and it was long before I was put to school at the age of 6. Hm—father taught me Nepali and English alphabets in dust or dust smeared planks or plain piece of rock. Uhm, but the actual literacy, I think, should have begun with my ability to speak and to make sense of what people said. I remember the admission day.”
Awasthi. Video 1. Awasthi: “Hello, I am Jai Raj Awasthi, currently working as a professor at Tribhuvan University. Talking about literacy, I was born in a very remote part of Nepal, which is in the far western part of Nepal, bordering China and India. When I was a small child, I had to go to school with my brother, elder brother. I did not know that I had to go to school also. We did not have school building then. We had to study under the trees, big trees, and the rainy days would always be holidays for us. When I was in grade four, then the local community built a school, and then I realized that a school was a building. We had a feeling that this literacy, or going to school, was only for the male child. We did not have any female student going to school. So, literacy for the parents meant sending their male children to school.”
Awasthi. Video 2. Awasthi: “During that period I was sent to a newly set up teacher training college in the far western part of Nepal where I trained primary and lower secondary teachers for a year. Thereafter, I came back to Kathmandu to complete my education, that is, third and fourth semesters. During this period, I was taught by the British teachers and I was very much influence [by] the way they taught, so I completed my master’s and then I stood first class first in master’s degree. Then the university asked me to stay back in the graduate program to teach. Then I started training high school and tertiary level teachers.”
Awasthi. Video 3. Awasthi: “After I completed my grade 12 examination, I realized that I had to educate the people of that very locality. At the age of 16, I opened a school and became its headmaster, and taught for two years, before I came back to Kathmandu again, to continue my education… I trained the teachers of far western Nepal, that was way back in 1975…. After teaching for about 4 or 5 years I won a scholarship to go the University of Michigan where I did my master’s in linguistics and TESOL. In 2 years’ period, I completed my PhD courses as well, then after that I came back and started teaching at the same university. In 2005, I again won the postdoctoral Fulbright scholarship and went to university of—Michigan State University, East Lansing—for my post doc study in second language acquisition. My education in the United States mounded my aspirations to work for the country, to work more and more, and then help the people, in my locality, in my country.”
Gautam. Video 1. Gautam: “Hello, my name is Ganga Ram Gautam. I am associate professor of English, teaching at Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tribhuvan University. Also I am President of Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association, the professional association of English language teachers in Nepal. Uhm, looking back to my education, uhm, there was no school in my community when I was born. And it was my father who started school in my community. Uhm, my grandfather, he was a priest, and uhm, he had ten children, and my father was the second child of the parents. And when my father was fourteen years old, he suddenly wanted to educate himself, so he ran away from the community and he went to a place very close to India called Mattihani and he studied there for a while in a Sanskrit school.”
Gautam. Video 2. Gautam: “In the community there was some kind of awareness that education is the key for development, education is the key for personal development. Probably that was the reason they decided to put my father in my community. So I could see very well that the community was aware of the importance of education for whatever reason it might be, but there was a kind of growing concern to educate people.”
Gautam. Video 3. Gautam: “And since my father was from a Sanskrit background, he had a very big passion for Sanskrit education. So my father decided that he would drop me from high school and give me home education in the Sanskrit language so that I can also become a very big priest like, like my grandfather. So, uhm, we, my father hired a teacher, a Sanskrit teacher and then he also convinced some of my uncles in the community and we were five students assembled together and we were taught Sankrit education, including Panini’s grammar, which is called Koumudi in Nepali so that we started this Panini’s grammar and Sankrit literature like Amar Kosh. So we would study from four o’clock in the morning and continue it until ten o’clock in the evening. And during that time we would have three hours break, one hours break for lunch, one hour for tea and snacks in the after and one hour for dinner. Otherwise we would study all the time and mostly we used to get the lesson from our teacher and then learn the things by heart, all these slokas and mantras of Sanskrit and formulas of Panini’s grammar and we would recite the poems of Sanskrit literature. So, that’s how we were taught this Sanskrit for about one and a half year. After one and a half year, unfortunately, the Sanskrit teacher who was teaching us Sanskrit, he died of heart attack. So that brought a kind of disaster in our education, so we were not in a position to decide whether we should we should continue similar kind of Sanskrit education or we should join the school again. So my father, he was a primary school teacher and he had other colleagues who were educated in the other languages, including English, so they advised my father to put me in back to the high school again. So, he, my father took me to local high school, the same school where I finished my grade sixth education, and then he admitted me in grade seven.”
Gita. Video 1. Gita: “As I remember my conscious literacy practices, it is very hard for me to memorize how I started learning, but the joint family, where I was born and brought up, gave me an immense opportunity to be cared and to be taught by different members of my family. My grandparents made a special space for me to recognize the basic alphabets and common understanding of the words.”
Gita. Video 2. Gita: “My mom was a great source of inspiration for me in every step of my education life. As she herself could not get the education up to the level she wanted to due to her married life and household work, she wanted us to fulfill her thirst of education.”
Gita. Video 3. Gita: “Now I still remember the two events that stroke me a lot. One was my senior girls of school died. And at that time I could not believe how somebody could die without finishing her school. And the another event was one of the girls from our place dropped the school at 7th grade. That was again a big shock to me. I did not know until that time people could drop from the school if they wanted; I only knew they could fail in the class. It bothered me a lot how she could do that. I asked my mom about her but she scolded me back saying not to care the people who did not go to school and did not study well. She even warned me not to speak with that dropped out girl.”
Gita. Video 4. Gita: “My parents used to follow me whatever I did in school. They used to visit my school in frequently and tracked my progress. All was to do with whether I was doing the best in the class or not but not for how much I was learning. I had a great pressure that I had to do best in the exam anyway. My dad used to warn me saying that if you do not become, first, second or third or do not get this much mark, do not come back to home after school is over; just go wherever this highway leads you. He used to show the highway in front of our house. It stuck in my mind so deeply that before the result came out, I was very much worried about my result. I used to think that where is this road heading to? Whom I can talk and who will help me? Like this. Now I realized that all the education was based on the competition and the score rather than how much to know.”
Gita. Video 5. Gita: “I do not know how I realized that I had to go to school. Maybe because everybody used to go to school in our family, my father, my uncles and their sisters all were going school at that time. Then I thought that going to school was very mandatory like eating meal and I realized that I also needed to go to school. Then I insisted my mom that I wanted to go to school. But I was very small to go to school at that age. But I insisted a lot and I already knew the basic alphabets, my father went to school and talked there. Then I started going to school. In this process, it did not give me any unique or different thought about myself or about the way of developing literacy. I just took for granted. I just knew it as I knew other mundane activities.”
Hem. Video 1. No sound. Only the title screen as described by text.
Hem. Video 2. Hem: “Hmm, the school was not a very pleasant place for me—not a very pleasant place in the sense that we didn’t have desks and benches. There were more than 40 students, small kids of my age. We sat on dust, and sleepily, incessantly chanted the alphabets. Something like ka-puri-ka kharayo-kha, ek-ra-ek eghara ek-ra-dui bahra. I don't think I learned anything more than the alphabets that father had already taught me, but the chanting melodiously with the other children was the most important thing I remember from my first [grade].”
Hem. Video 3. Hem: “As for my orientation to English it was long after I became literate, and obviously for any kid of my time, studying in rural school, English would come much later, although father had taught some simple expressions. Earlier than joining school, he had taught me English alphabets and certain vocabulary and expressions long before I went to school. But he could not manage time to teach more than these. I could see my first English textbook only in grade four. Till grade six I was not able to write any sentence. In grade 8, I could write a letter at least. And it was then that a new English teacher came to school and he taught the rules of English grammar. In grade ten I wrote simple essays on simple topics. And we were never asked to speak in English. And speaking began only in the intermediate [college] level. So, English did not come in the phase of literacy, it came much later when I had grown up, and in the form of scholarship, it should have come only when I began to teach English in the school, and mainly when I joined the university for master’s degree. But I had a kind of obsession to learn English from my childhood because my father was educated by a teacher who was educated in Darjeeling in a British school. Even before I was put to school, I would go to find father’s books and notebooks, and I would really find his handwriting interesting. Yeah, they did not make any sense to except that they looked beautiful in the lines. So I would steal my brother’s pen and make it into some secrete place and try to imitate the type of English that father had written. And I would write anywhere, in the leaves, in pieces of paper, smooth rock, or smooth floor.
Bal. Video 1. Bal Krishna, speaking in Nepalese: “Hello, Shyam, Namaste, The apartment has been extremely noisy, I’ve been trying all day today, and it’s not working at all. And I’ve also been “technologically conscious” [in English], so I don’t know what this is going to come out like. If you happen to like any segment, let me know and I will “re-narrate” if you want me to—if you want to ‘use’ any of it. Okay, let me start, alright?”
Bal. Video 2. I used to pronounce the letters as I wrote them. So, and, if I mispronounced any of these letters, particularly the English, my English teacher used to punish me. You might be surprised how he used to punish me. If I didn’t know the meaning of any English word, or mispronounced the word, he wanted me to put my head under his chair, to insert my head under his chair, and then he would thrash me on my back with a stick, and then he would ask me, “Will you repeat the mistake again?” “No, sir. I will never,” I would reply. So, that was how I was treated in the school.
Bal. Video 3. Bal: “Because I am in the US now, I realize that the education system in Nepal was quite different from what it is like in the United States. We rarely read journal articles because we do not have access to online resources and heavily depend on textbooks of applied linguistics and language teaching but unfortunately enough they were published in 1970 and 1980s and very few books that were published in the 1990s. so the knowledge that was outdated in the west was pretty much new for us. And that was what I was pursuing. And again in my graduate studies [in Nepal] also, all I had to do was to sit in exams that lasted four hours and vomit everything that I had learned throughout the year, and expect the results after nine or ten months, or even after one year. So this is also the point where education and politics interact. You had your exams and you had your results after one year, so different political activities going on, on the one hand and the system itself is slow and doesn’t oblige the teachers to award students grades within two or three months. So that’s also one dissatisfying fact for me.”
Prem. Video 1. Prem: “Hello, good afternoon. My name is Prem Phyak. I teach at Tribhuvan University, Department of Education. To flash back my literacy practices in the past, so let me highlight how I learned in my community. I was born in my community, that is the Limbu community where there was no light of education when I started my formal education. But my community was rich in terms of indigenous knowledge and heritage. I have to say that I learned how to speak Limbu from my grandma, my grandpa, and my parents, father, mother were my tutors of the Limbu language. I was very good in using Limbu before I went to school.”
Prem. Video 2. Prem: “The most important moment in my academic life was, I have to say, when I was awarded the centenary scholarship from the institute of education at the University of London, UK, where I did MA TESOL in 2009. I learned not only the contents of the subjects related to applied linguistics, English language teaching, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, but also developed a solid idea of academic writing and understanding literacy practices from critical perspectives. So at this moment, what I am realizing myself is that I have the mixture of both, I have the exposure of both very taken-for-granted practice of, literacy practice that I, I was exposed while I was in Nepal, and very much critical literacy practices that I, I was exposed to when I was in the UK. Moreover, when I, in this course what I learned was I acquired the skills to carry out research in language education. The course in fact helped me expand the horizon of knowledge related to applied linguistics.”
Dhruba. Video 1. Dhruba: “My name is Dhruba Neupane. Today I am going to talk about my story of literacy. I grew up to cross a cultural border, and in a sense to see the dawn of a new worldview. The village where I was born, and where my parents still live, was almost completely illiterate. But I was lucky to be raised and taught in my maternal home under the tutelage of my maternal uncle, a seasoned high school English teacher. This was a nearby small town which boasted double the national rate of literacy, with a good chunk of its population holding college degrees and government or private jobs of high profile. In the village where my parents lived, however, few people believed in education.”
Dhruba. Video 2. Dhruba: “…a dialogic relation between the global and the local, construes that rather than being diametrically opposed to each other global and local both can enrich themselves from each other. I wish that our national education system was based on a fundamental respect for the legitimacy of native languages and dialects. If we can convince our students that spelling, punctuation and, and usage are less important than content, we have removed a major obstacle in their developing the ability to write, communicate, and create new knowledge. It is not necessary to forget your culture and language in order to learn English or to participate in the larger intellectual community of our globalized world today. Only the awareness of the value and respect for local knowledge and culture, which is possible through critical pedagogical engagement, only through that we can enable our students and the society at large to overcome the poverty in our country, both material and intellectual.” English and the western model of education and literacy may confer you the type power that may often seem like the only important type of cultural capital. Yes, English is quite often the key to academic achievement and social mobility for people even in Nepal. However, as educators we would be extremely naïve and insensitive if we do not understand that English can be appropriated and contextualized so as to practice and promote our local epistemology in today’s globalized world. If the disjunction between knowledge and learning, the confusion between the means and goals of education, and the irony of disregard for local knowledge continues, if the Nepalese society remains divided between the two worlds that I straddled, a few maternal uncles are not going to make much difference for this country.”
Dhruba. Video 3 . Dhruba: “English was a subject that every student feared, that our high school diploma, whether we passed or failed was entirely dependent on whether we passed or failed it. So, people feared because 80% about 80% of the public school students failed their high school diploma because of English. Thus, even though English was a liberating force for me, I know that it did and still does a dangerous level of gate-keeping for most other people. The need to even “pass” in English made higher education impossible for just too many people. Theoretically, the fact that the knowledge of English language substituted the very need for good education created a magnificent confusion in the entire society, and it has increasingly done so in the last two decades in particular. English helped to create and increase a distance between education and knowledge, between knowing and being considered to know something; literacy began to not only mean the ability to read and write and to communicate but to adopt a foreign language and the new modes of learning in school. I would wish that the two—literacy and English—were not perceived in opposition, or that the local knowledge and culture formed the foundation for the education system. English, then, could take its own important place as an international language, a language of opportunity in the world, and so on, but WITHOUT displacing anything that belonged more intimately and integrally to the local society and culture.”
Conclusion. Video 1 . Awasthi: “After I completed my grade 12 education, I went back to my village, and then, I realized that now I had to educate the people of that very locality. At the age of 16, I opened a school and became its headmaster….” Hem: “Hmm, the school was not a very pleasant place for me.. . .” Prem: “…idea of academic writing and understanding literacy practices from critical perspectives.” Gautam: “…a powerful tool for personal development, professional development, and for business purposes.” Bal: “we have been pretty much influenced by our oral culture, what is there in the tradition, how is the family socialization going, how is the religion, so even if people are not consciously aware of this, certainly these factors are at play.” Dhruba: “Only the awareness of the value and respect for local knowledge and culture, which is possible through critical pedagogical engagement, only through that we can enable our students and the society at large….”
Conclusion . Video 2. Gita: "I still remember one verse that I used to recite when I was 2 and onwards. 'Sita pati shri raghunathalai, samjhera manle atibhaktilai, bhasa ma lekhchhu mana khub lagai, rakshya garun shri rama sada malai.'" Hem: “maybe when I was in class three, the children had to go to far off places to carry beams and planks of wood for making desks and benches and chairs. And not only that, we had to carry mud and cow dung from the neighboring village to scrub the floor, and yeah, after every summer break, we were asked to pluck the weeds on the school ground, and there was no choice but to work on the ground, because the teachers were quite strict and would go around with a stick in their hands, and that was a part of being educated early. And somehow…” Prem: “I remember that my mother used to sell locally brewed alcohol, called raksi, which is famous drink of alcohol in the indigenous community and she used to spend that money to buy stationary for me…”