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It
is difficult to talk about pedagogical methods in the abstract,
because whatever one says sounds banal and obvious. It’s in the
context of the classroom that these abstract ideas take life,
which means that the methods one uses are partly based on the
particular nature of the class one is teaching, and partly on the
general ideas one developed around pedagogy. In more than thirty
years of teaching, I’ve found that no group is ever the same.
Even if one is teaching the same text, the questions students ask
are different, their responses are different. So, over the years I
evolved a method by which I went to class with some broad outline
of what I wanted to cover, and left room for the questions and
discussions that would arise, and also ideas that came to me while
I was teaching. I’ve never kept notes. The teacher hopefully
grows over the years, and the next interpretation of a particular
text will not necessarily be identical to the one before.
Over the years I’ve found that what the students valued most was
the connections made with the life around them, or with their own
lives. Sometimes when they have repeated a particular remark that
seemed important to them, the remark itself seemed quite ordinary.
But when I look back at myself at their age, I realise how
unformed and uninformed my mind was. Our students appear to be
more sophisticated, and in some ways they are, but their minds are
almost as unformed as ours were at their age. For instance, among
the critical methods our students learn is the sociological method
of approaching a text. I often began such an exercise by trying to
place ourselves sociologically. Why are we speaking English and
studying English literature? What difference does it make if we
grew up in Chinchpokli or in Breach Candy? Why, when we say we are
going abroad do we take it for granted that the listener
understands we mean Britian or the US or Europe and not Nigeria?
It sounds pretty banal, but it is surprising how many of them have
never thought of their place in the world and the way it may or
may not affect their attitudes.
More specifically, problems arise because students have often read
next to nothing when they are in their First Year. They are
generally taught to look for the “central idea”. And literary
language is often regarded as a flowery way of saying something
that could be said in a simpler way. Then too, there is sometimes
the problem that a student disapproves of the world-view of a
particular writer and has to be taught that we go to literature
for what the writer is telling us, and not necessarily to find our
own views reflected there. All this takes much longer than the
literature-life equation.
If one can get students excited about reading and about ideas,
half one’s job is done. It helps, for instance, to have play
readings in class. In the process of rehearsing for the reading,
students become painlessly familiar with the text. At St
Xavier’s where I taught, there was a yearly journal for the more
academically inclined, and the main theme of the journal varied
each year according to the choice of the student editors. We also
had a literary festival called Ithaka. There was one major
play, which gave many students an opportunity to perform, do
backstage work and, in the last few years, direct the scripts.
There were seminars, book sales, talks, poetry workshops and
readings, films, and a number of “minor” theatre productions.
Once in a way one had brilliant students to whom one could teach
little or nothing. It has always been important to provide them
with opportunities to do what they enjoy the most. Certainly, one
or two productions, directed by such students are among the most
memorable I have ever seen in Bombay. But there were also shy,
uncertain students who suddenly shone in activities in which they
had never participated before. I remember in particular one boy
who was too shy to make friends. He gave a brilliant comic
performance in one of the plays and had hordes of admirers after
that. It quite literally changed his life.
I think changing or modifying or touching the lives of students is
what teaching is finally all about. But it can’t be done
consciously with a view to such change. That becomes preaching, a
practice to be avoided. If the teacher is open, grows and changes
herself, then teaching changes, modifies and touches her life too.
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