In this exhibit of seven literacy narratives by scholars of language and literacy from Nepal, I have tried to reflect upon the stories both as scholarly resources and as mediated and cultural artifacts at the same time. This convergence of serious intellectual discourse with less formal modes of discourse in new media has not only made it possible for us to see, hear, and understand more of the meaning in the works of people from around the world, it has also brought about new challenges to us as readers and researchers of such works.
Scholars of literacy have rightly argued that “[g]rasping what literacy ‘is’ inevitably involves social analysis: What activities are carried out with written symbols? What significance is attached to them, and what status is conferred on those who engage in them? Is literacy a social right or a private power?” (Scribner, 1984, p. 8). The literacy narratives that I have presented here as well as my analysis of them have highlighted the necessity of viewing literacy as a social phenomenon as well as a matter of personal experience. In their book Studies in Social Identity, Kenneth and Mary Gergen state that “[a]lthough self-narratives are possessed by individuals, their genesis and sustenance may be viewed as fundamentally social” (p. 256). As Pandey has stated, a “broad generalization based on individual cases fails to see the specific circumstances working in favor of the person(s) in question as opposed to those of the less ‘fortunate’ masses” (p. 254). As suggested by wide gap of perception that we saw among individual narrators in this group from the same society, it is necessary to remember that the study of a few cases like that can never represent the perception about literacy in any society. Even though narrators “tell themselves into being” through identity positions that are available for them to draw on—because “a major source for narrative form resides in the social sphere and particularly within the requirements for adequate social functioning” (Gergen & Gergen, 1997, p. 265)—it is necessary to remember that these positions are actually available to very few other citizens in the country.
This exhibit is also an attempt to present a socio-political analysis based on an understanding of literacy and formal education in Nepal. I have suggested that the stories belong to at least two roughly distinctive generations, and I have also suggested that there are differences in geographical and social backgrounds, class and gender, ethnicity, professional status, and educational experience. Even though all of the literacy narratives in this group are also based on the same premise that literacy and learning were only possible for the narrators through a system of education that had already displaced the local content and culture of learning, the narrators who are critical about the current literacy practices and education system express the desire for a culture of learning that should or could embrace local languages and epistemologies while also helping the society participate in an increasingly globalized world. Awasthi and Gautam seem to position themselves as established professional teachers, and their stories should be situated in the context of the extensive contributions that they have made to Nepal's education both through their professional positions in the only public university of the nation and through their establishment of the English language teachers' organization. The rest of the scholars choose to look at the mode and medium of learning in school more critically, and they do so because they generally seem to hold the current system of education accountable for ignoring and/or suppressing local epistemologies.
The differences in perspective influence how each narrator looks at similar personal experiences or social phenomena; by the same token, I might have understood the stories differently than viewers/readers and the narrators themselves would. So, to a certain extent the exhibit at best represents my own reading of the stories. That being said, it does seem that these stories together hint at how the Nepalese society is in general undergoing a kind of “epistemological schizophrenia,” or a divided consciousness about the happy and undeniable benefits of modern education and especially the medium of English on the one hand, and on the other hand an often painful consciousness that the new system of learning has also destroyed or displaced the local modes and resources of learning.
This exhibit has also hopefully shown the challenge of objectivity and ethical responsibility that increases due to the difficulties that I discussed in the theoretical sections. With the scholarship and research involving such work, it becomes much harder to adopt the pose of scholarly objectivity and neutrality that traditional social science research has for a long time encouraged scholars to assume. Doing this work made me aware that because a researcher’s interpretation of others’ texts and ideas is bound to be motivated by his or her own intellectual and ideological positions, he or she must be careful and sensitive while representing them. In “Ethnography and the Problem of the ‘Other,’” Sullivan (1996) states that critical postmodern research practices, which are “key to the development of knowledge,” must necessarily depend on theoretical frameworks that are able to account for and appreciate the culture and contexts of the participants; such postmodernist methods of research must be “local, contingent, [and] malleable” in their own design,” and they should be open to being “a form of political and ethical action” rather than simply claiming to mirror reality as it is. She also argues that
enacting critical research practices requires a doubling action: an interplay of tensions and tactics not only at the level of overarching concerns but also in terms of specific critical moves. Tactics such as advocacy charting are offered for exploring the tensions between researchers and participants…. (p. 104)
Sullivan suggests that only an admittedly “[p]ostmodern mapping serves as an analytic tool for critical framing.” With particular reference to multimodal research and scholarship, she tells us that “mapping relationships and positions visually and spatially helps to achieve methodological reflectiveness and epistemological vigilance” (p. 106).
Stories like these that are at once intensely personal and intensely social gain their full rhetorical force and semiotic richness when presented in multimodal forms. By the same token, the study and scholarship of these artifacts can account for those characteristics when the scholar/researcher is able to present his or her own work in multimodal form. Obviously, the study of such artifacts has become both viable and necessary as serious scholarly work. Since personal and professional communication, academic and occupational work, field work and archival study, and other kinds of knowledge work are taking place through and with new media, much more theoretical and methodological scholarship on how to read, write, and work with multimodal texts like these needs to be developed. And as new media increasingly occupy scholarly space, the unruliness of the materials for our scholarship will also increase. We may need to attend to the ways in which theories better fit into stories than the other way around as well as how the media that stories use influence storytelling and our reception and scholarship about stories.