The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Education’s Relevance

Sitting in his university apartment at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Bal Sharma begins his literacy narrative by describing the material condition in the village where he grew up, suggesting how that shaped his literacy experiences. The original, unedited version of his video on his DALN account begins with Bal’s direct address to me (Shyam) as the “interviewer” and solicitor:

The apartment has been extremely noisy, I’ve been trying all day today, and it’s not working at all. I’ve also been “technologically conscious”

Hello, Shyam, Namaste, The apartment has been extremely noisy, I’ve been trying all day today, and it’s not working at all. I’ve also been “technologically conscious” [in English], so I don’t know what this is going to sound 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? (full video in the DALN)

Then he starts the narrative itself, in English, with a description of the geographical and social setting of where he first went to school. His story has two almost even halves, in the first of which he focuses on a set of specific experiences of formal education, and he moves on to critically assess the nature of that education in the second half. In fact, the specific events that he describes in the first half are chosen to reflect an intellectually critical attitude towards school learning. For instance, one of the early and typical experiences that he uses to describe formal schooling is that of being severely punished by his English teacher for mispronouncing the name of letters:

…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.

His grandmother used to tell him that he would become a “big person” by studying well, and he was convinced that going to school was the only way to achieve that dream. However, he was confused and possibly lost his motivation due to small things like why the letters of the English alphabet were written like they were: “when I recall my first lessons of English [which was first taught in the fourth grade], I remember that I was pretty much confused with the letters that go up like k and l, b, d . . . and letters that go down like g, y, p.”

But it is not only English that gave Bal a hard time during school days: he also suggests that the local educational tradition of learning by memorization was a burden with little contribution in his learning. He used to hear the dictum that “good learning comes from memorization, like good harvest comes from working on the farm every day.” Evidently, that did not make much sense when he grew up to become a scholar. Similarly, he finds it absurd that students had to pay more attention to the mechanics of writing rather than its content. As a result of the excessive focus on form and little regard to content that he was taught in school, he still doesn’t “believe how I graduated from high school”; he says that he “rarely studied at home and hardly prepared for class.” His experience with English was nothing more than “confusing.” Even in college, where English was now taught in English, Bal hardly understood what was being taught. He was impressed to see that the knowledge of English made students more respected, but the process of gaining the knowledge of English only involved “vomiting” what was learned throughout the year in the exams at the end of the year.

As a graduate student in an American university who also teaches courses in academic writing to ESL students, he compares the education systems of Nepal and the US, which makes him remember that the education in Nepal was usually based on outdated materials, students did not actively participate in the learning process, and the political crisis in the country made education ineffective. The extremely slow system of publishing results, in as much as a whole year, seems shocking when he compares that to education systems in the US. In particular, Bal finds the growing interest in English language for its own sake in the Nepalese society quite problematic: “knowledge of English language was good education” so “if I know English well, then I had quality education”; even though he is also aware that “There have been positive changes in Nepal, he seems critical about the fact that “good skills in English [still means] good quality education.”

Bal critiques the confusion between English language proficiency and “quality education” as a social problem: “good skills in the English language equals good knowledge and quality education, and still it is there today.” His narrative makes an implicit argument that seems to draw on recent scholarships on local epistemologies. For example, in Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice, Canagarajah (2005) suggests that as knowledge-workers in a globalized world we need to “stand globalization on its head, conducting inquiry from the standpoint of local communities” (xxix). In Canagarajah’s view, the idea that globalization has brought about “a new life of border-free, unrestricted, fluid relationship between communities” or that “discourses of globalization make us assume a pluralistic model of world where all communities enjoy relative autonomy, with empowered local identities, values and knowledge” is misleading because “knowledge itself is narrowly constructed, splintered along different communities, [and] devoid of effective attempts at developing an intercultural understanding or a fair exchange of ideas” (xiv). As Canagarajah further suggests, knowledge as power can be a one-sided imposition and domination of the epistemological traditions and achievements of the dominant on the powerless. As a result, the local is “getting shortchanged by the social processes and intellectual discourses of contemporary globalization” (ibid.). The solution that Canagarajah suggests is that local knowledge be treated as a primary body of material in education, that both local and the so-called global knowledge be critically studied and not taken for granted, and that in general globalization be treated “from below” (xiv). Bal makes a similar point when he says that proficiency in English should not be considered as “quality education.”

Studies in the use of English as a medium of instruction—and the confusion between medium and objective of learning—have shown that “when the numerous variables and viewpoints [about whether or not English should be used as a medium where it is not the language of the community] are considered, usefulness [or relevance] emerges as the most important factor in predicting whether a choice of medium of literacy instruction will be successful.” In the introduction to the edited collection Literacy Development in Multilingual Contexts: Cross Cultural Perspectives, Durganoglu and Verhoeven (1998) further argue that “for minority-language speakers to judge literacy in the native tongue is truly useful . . . [even though] this is a big order and a slow process. But so was the move from Latin as the literate language in the 16th century to widespread use of the diverse vernaculars” (p. 34).

Bal’s literacy story tells us that while it may seem that there is more to gain by giving up on the national as well as local languages in favor of becoming “global citizens” who participate in the destruction of local languages and epistemologies, the fact remains that it is possible to both be proficient in English and be global citizens by also utilizing and promoting local linguistic and epistemological resources. Instead of the typical celebration of learning per se, literacy narratives like this provide intellectual and cultural perspectives that make such stories significant resources for research and scholarship. As multimodal and academically significant texts, stories like this defy the conventional understanding that multimodal work is only suitable for personal, informal, and non-serious discourse.

The fact that Bal started recording the video with an address to me, and perhaps continued to tell the story with a colleague as an immediate audience in his mind, makes this spoken narrative more likely to capture the elements of oral storytelling. That is, instead of an “audience as invoked . . . [or] a construction of the writer” (Ede & Lundsford, 1984, p. 82), we can see Bal as speaking more specifically to an “audience as addressed . . . [that is] influenced by the strong tradition of audience analysis in speech communication” (p. 79).