The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

One World per Story: Analyzing Literacy Narratives

“What does this narrative or story reveal about the person and world from which it came? How can this narrative be interpreted so that it provides an understanding of and illuminates the life and culture that created it?” (p. 115).
--Michael Quinn Patton, Qualitative research and evaluation methods (2002)

Below the two physical eyes, directly under the divine third eye of the Buddha, is another sign that looks somewhat like a synthesis of the modern Nepalese, local Newari, and ancient Pali character for the number 1; to those who do not recognize the local numerals, this symbol even looks like a question mark. Like the third eye, this sign is also differently interpreted within local traditions, but this sign is generally understood as symbolizing the spiritual unity beyond physical diversity, the wholeness of divine knowledge beyond the conflicts in rational understanding, and the synthesis that the third eye can bring about from the many visions of truth in the physical world. I evoke this trope of synthesis through dialectics in order to suggest that while every storyteller draws on the diversity of experiential and intellectual materials of the world, he or she constructs his or her story about the idea and experience of literacy within a particular thematic framework, a particular understanding and vision about the subject. As Selfe (2010) states, narrators choose to include “specific events that form an inferential trail between [what Gergen and Gergen (1988) call] the ‘beginning point’ and ‘value end point’, creating—through the selection of these details—the plot line or the desired trajectory of the teller’s life (web). They give a meaning that is, for the purpose of the particular story at least, unified and complete.

In this section, I will discuss a few methodological issues that will help me explain how the narrators of the stories I am presenting here create logical and rhetorical frameworks to contain the materials of their stories. I will start by briefly sharing the approaches that I adopted for soliciting, collecting and analyzing the literacy narratives, including some technical and ethical challenges that I faced in that process. Then, drawing on the scholarship on narrative, I will further discuss a few analytical issues in order to account for the disparate elements that are embodied in the literacy narratives of the Nepalese scholars. In subsequent chapters, I will use the methodological and analytical issues for discussing these literacy narratives and illustrating how they present the narrators' personal visions about what it means to be literate and for interpreting the narrators' personal and social experiences of learning within their own personal visions—whether they adopt positive or critical views about literacy in general and English education in particular. As someone who had contributed literacy narratives (in both audio and video forms) to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, in the Spring of 2010, I started requesting fellow Nepalese scholars and teachers of literacy education to also contribute their stories to this archive. As I solicited the narratives, I was afraid that providing all the seven scholars a similar set of questions (or "directives," to borrow Bloome's term from the Preface) as prompts for recording their narratives could result in similar views and focuses in the narratives. But that did not happen. While a few patterns emerged within the stories of the younger and more experienced scholars—for instance, while the former embraced the view that literacy is ideologically shaped, the latter adopted a more autonomous view of literacy—the particularities of each individual narrator's story were dominant. As a result, I did not organize the stories into groups, themes, or perspectives. Instead, I use separate sections to independently discuss and highlight some of the theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues that readers might find worth considering before, while, or after reading the section where the stories are discussed. I wanted to use the theoretical discussions due to the theoretical nature of the content of the narratives and also because the narrators shared definitions, perspectives, and in some cases critical lenses themselves. But in the end their unique personal experiences and the unique details in their stories defy framing on my part as the exhibitor of their stories.

Knowing that the rapid increase in the rate of literacy in Nepal in recent times has produced fascinating personal narratives that capture social progress—some of which I had heard from the older generation of Nepalese scholars—I had been trying to convince these scholars that their stories are worth sharing with the larger audience of literacy educators and researchers in the world. (The literacy rate in Nepal has increased from less than 5% in 1951, when formal education first became available for the general public with the establishment of democratic monarchy, to almost 50% at present). At first, there was almost no response (research note 1): for instance, in response to emails to nearly two dozen people, I received only two responses that indicated willingness to contribute. Technological challenges and the anxiety that those challenges produce were evidently one of the main reasons of that rate of response, but, perhaps more importantly, the individuals that I solicited were unfamiliar with the idea of “literacy narrative” as an academic genre or discourse. The “literacy narratives” I had heard in Nepal, and the narratives that were eventually contributed to the DALN, are more often stories of struggle and success in the pursuit of formal education than reflections of personal literacy experiences.

A few months later, when the curators of the DALN invited proposals for curated exhibits of small subsets of literacy narratives, I had a stronger reason and motivation to solicit contributions from Nepal. Based on my previous experience, I now solicited contributions from fellow members (research note 2) of the Nepalese English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA) with whom I have been engaged in professional discussions about educational policies and practices in Nepal for several years. This time, I also started by offering to provide technical support (research note 3) if necessary, providing links to sample literacy narratives in the DALN, and including a description of the curated exhibit project that I wanted to present. I received seven positive responses (research note 4) out of eight solicitations, so I went on to make necessary support available for the scholars in Nepal for recording and uploading the videos to the archive, with the exception of a colleague who had a high level of expertise in digital multimodal composition. Those who were studying or working in US universities at the time needed much less technical support and explanation of the genre or the project; they created individual accounts and uploaded the videos on their own. Most of the contributions from Nepal were initially uploaded to the DALN into one shared account due to challenges related to internet bandwidth (research note 5) and expertise needed for uploading them; they were later archived into separate accounts, using the information and permission provided by the contributors, with help from DALN (research note 6).

The above research process is in some ways common to any qualitative research. However, the solicitation of personal stories in a genre that is unfamiliar to most participants and the degree of cultural difference between the participants and primary audience of this work made the research more challenging than other conventional research studies that I have done. Similarly, as I will discuss in more detail later, the use of the multimodal research material made it impossible for me to keep the participants anonymous. In particular, it was difficult for me to adopt a disinterested stance while analyzing the stories.

To address the above challenges, I have drawn on the analytical framework presented by Bamberg (1997) in an article titled “Positioning between structure and performance.” Bamberg offers a set of questions that a researcher must ask in order to effectively analyze how narrators position themselves vis-à-vis other characters, their audience and their social world, and themselves:

1. How are the characters positioned in relation to one another within the reported events? …. Analyze how characters within the story world are constructed in terms of, for example, protagonists and antagonists or as perpetrators and victims….
2. How does the speaker position him- or herself to the audience? …. Analyze the linguistic means that are characteristic for the particular discourse mode that is being employed….
3. How do narrators position themselves to themselves? How is language employed to make claims that the narrator holds to be true and relevant above and beyond the local conversational situation? (p. 337)

Asking these questions will help us consider whether and how issues of relationship, status, and power have shaped or determined the content and structure of the narratives. For instance, the more established scholars in this group seem to be speaking from the position of experience and authority with regard to how education fuels and sustains progress for the individual and society. By comparison, the younger scholars use more critical language and perspectives, perhaps not only because of their current scholarly engagement with critical theories of literacy and education but also because they define their identity differently in relation to the educational establishment and the traditional society.

The narrators also conceptualize the idea of literacy narrative differently. In the Nepalese society in general, the fundamental notion of knowledge as something that an individual owns, creates, or will have a personal perspective about is, conceptually speaking, alien. Thus, while progress narratives based on education are common in the Nepalese narrative tradition, the epistemological worldview underlying the genre of “literacy narrative” has no simple equivalent in the Nepalese academic discourse. As a result, one group of scholars use the language of classical Enlightenment with regard to education as the foundation for social progress. Another group draws on recent critical scholarship of applied linguistics and the politics of language in order to add theoretical discussions about their literacy experiences. In spite of this difference, however, all the scholars in this group have been partly educated in Europe or America, so in many ways they can be called “transnational” intellectuals (Hawisher et al., 2010). Drawing on Lam (2004), Hawisher et al. define the term “transnational identities” as: “…those of us who are at home in more than one culture and whose identities . . . spread over multiple geographic territories” (web). Thus, it is necessary to remember that their stories do not represent the Nepalese society or academic experience in general.

When analyzing such narratives, it is also necessary to be sensitive to rhetorical and linguistic choices that narrators make, as it is necessary to move away from the traditional structuralist analysis of plot and character. As a result, I position myself within what Selfe (2010) calls the “third wave of narrative studies.” In the words of Selfe:

[T]his new landscape of narrative studies shifts our focus from what used to be a fascination with the structure and the analysis of personal stories to a focus on how such accounts are tied in fundamental ways to culture, meaning, knowledge, identity formation and transformation in all human beings (web).

I believe that only such a focus and perspective will allow us to understand “personal narratives as an effective way of exploring the social, cultural, political, ideological, and historical formations that have shaped the literacy practices and values of people and groups” (ibid.).