Transcending Monolingual Worldviews: Magnifying the Impact of Knowledge in Academe and Society

This is a post to simply share a public talk I gave at Cornell University in March 2022, titled “Transcending Monolingual Worldviews: Magnifying the Impact of Knowledge in Academe and Society.”

BLURB: All societies, and especially diverse ones like the US, are multilingual; translingual
communication mediates life and professions and makes knowledge grow and work. Yet, myths
about language set up barriers, inhibiting free exchange and application of knowledge. These
myths include the ideas that knowledge must only be produced, can only be exchanged, and is
applied best through dominant languages—damaging assumptions that adversely affect many
domains, but particularly knowledge work by academics across the disciplines. Harm caused by
this suppression of languages has been long documented in the literature in language, writing,
and communication studies. Drawing on the research and his own efforts to counter language
ideologies, Dr. Shyam Sharma will present a framework and share practical strategies, showing
how transcending monolingual worldviews (and mobilizing all languages) helps academe and its
scholars to magnify the impact of the knowledge they produce, both transnationally and within
US academe and society.


Incidentally, I also facilitated a workshop for graduate students at Cornell, titled “Working Across Languages and Genres: Strategies for Magnifying the Impact of
Scholarship”
BLURB: Even in culturally and linguistically diverse societies, myths and ideologies narrow down the
number of languages and genres of knowledge sharing often to just one. But, as society and
technology both advance, beyond the journal article, and beyond English-only venues lie a vast
world of knowledge that circulates in many languages and many genres. Graduate students,
whatever number of languages they speak, have access to that vast network, which needs and
rewards their knowledge, offering them the opportunity to grow while giving back to
society/world. How can you harness the power of all your languages? How can you overcome
the barriers of perceptions and policies? A scholar who researches and teaches research and
writing across disciplines and countries, Dr. Shyam Sharma will engage graduate students in
hands-on activities and share practical strategies, helping graduate students explore how they
can harness the full power of different languages, genres, and mediums of communication. This
workshop will help them develop diverse ways to multiply the impact of the scholarship they
produce.

International illusions [Republica Repost]

 

Published On:  November 29, 2017

One can only hope that Nepali scholars and policymakers will come back to their senses and start informing the public that English-only instruction is dangerous.

Thousands of Londoners kept dying every year during the early 1800s after the city started draining sewage into the Thames River. This happened because a “scientific orthodoxy” that cholera was caused by “vapor” from the dead, rather than being a waterborne disease, prevented the city from fixing the real problem for decades.

One can hope that Nepali scholars and policymakers will similarly come to their senses and start informing the public that English-only instruction (EOI) is a dangerous social experiment that needs changing. Note the emphasis is on “only”, the culprit in this case.
In the past two essays here, I wrote about the historical and political backdrop and then the dangers plus alternatives of EOI. In this one, I argue that Nepali education must teach other “international” languages as well, if we are sincere about English as a language of international communication and economic opportunities, and not international illusions.

As a bonus, that sincerity could help open gates of new opportunities for our educational institutions and for society. Continue reading

Multilingual Monday [Republica Repost]

Published in Republica on February 21, 2019

Whether they start a Multilingual Tuesday program or one called Matribhasha Mangalbar, it is high time that private schools advanced multilingual competence among their students

A colleague who is the principal of a prestigious private school in Kathmandu called me recently to share good news. “We have now implemented a one-day-a-week multilingual policy in our school,” he said. “Our students are very excited, and so are we.” Another colleague, also a principal, said that he has convinced management and started communicating with parents about implementing what he prefers to call “Matribhasha Mangalbar”—or mother-tongue Tuesday.

It is high time that our private schools provided the resources, or at least began by creating the environment to honor the fundamental reality of our multilingual, multicultural society, to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and, most importantly, to prepare future generations for greater success in life and society. Deliberately promoting, if not systematically teaching, multiple languages has many benefits, as I will discuss in this essay.

Troubled roots

Private schools have historically viewed English (only) as a means of advancing “modern” education, creating “access” to knowledge of science and technology, contributing to Nepal’s entry into “global” economy, delivering “quality” education of or for the “elite” and so on. The idea of defining private schools by using English “only” for instruction in all subjects was, unfortunately, outdated in educational scholarship by the 1990s, exactly when Nepal’s private schools exploded in quantity, with a good number of them improving their quality as well and many others helping to increase access for the broader population.

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English Dreams — [Republica Repost]

Published in The Republica on Oct. 11, 2017

English, most of us believe, is an “international language,” one that offers greatest economic opportunity for everyone, as well as tremendous cultural capital and connection to the “whole world.” Facts related to these claims are a little more complicated, as I will follow up in the next essay; in this one, let me describe a few historical and geopolitical dynamics behind the above assumptions.

English has an interesting political history in Nepal. Although English speakers had reached the region in late 1700s, the rulers of a nation that was being established started learning “Angreji” as they developed a love-hate relationship with British colonizers in India in the mid-1800s. So, English facilitated geopolitical power struggles in the region, especially when Nepal’s rulers supported British colonizers during the 1857 Indian Mutiny, in exchange for favors related to national sovereignty and suppression of democratic forces at home. Similarly, while a permanent residence for a British envoy was established in Kathmandu in 1792, the language entered formal education when the first “modern” and also English-medium school, Durbar School, was established in 1853. The school was only meant for children of the ruling class, since the Shah-Rana regime (1846-1951) wanted to keep the country politically isolated from the world outside. But more and more people around the autocratic rulers kept learning it as a means of privilege and power.

In a striking case of politicization of English, the ultra-nationalist Panchayat regime tried and failed to make it inaccessible to the public. King Mahendra’s national education policies attempted to enforce a Nepali-only language policy, seeking to ban English while also destroying other local languages rather callously: “If the younger generation is taught to use Nepali as the basic language,” said the Nepal National Education Planning Commission of 1956, “then other languages [of ethnic minorities] will gradually disappear, the greater the national strength and unity will result. . . Local dialects and tongues other than Nepali should be vanished [banished?] from the playground as early as possible in the life of the child.” In fact, the regime used the national census to show the number of languages in Nepal declining from 44 in 1952 to 17 in 1971 (as we know, there are more than ten dozen languages now). Continue reading

Translingual Benefits — [Republica Repost]

Published in The Republica on October 24, 2017

“Throw fast na”, said a teenager to another at the school I first started teaching, back in the mid 90s. “You ta what-like, what-like playing, yaar.” After listening to students in the playground for a while, I realized that they were actually speaking a certain type of English (teachers had to police and punish if they didn’t). I later learned that linguists call such language “pidgin”, a rudimentary means of communication developed by enslaved or colonized people, especially when they are isolated from other speakers or are prohibited against speaking their native language with each other.

The current educational condition in Nepal, where more and more children are forced to use pidgins like the above, is a dangerous social experiment. Just to be clear, English is an extremely important world language; but how we realize our “English dreams” is just as important.

In the last piece here, I described the historical/political dynamics behind the widespread belief that English is a global language that promises everyone greater economic opportunity and social advantage. Continue reading

Part I: Translingual, Transcultural, Transnational — From Buzzwords to Teaching Strategies

Reposted from Transnational Writing blog

When reading the increasingly rich scholarship on translingual, transnational, and transcultural issues in the teaching of writing, I can’t help thinking that these terms, too, will soon be replaced by newer ones—criticized as insufficient, rejected as counterproductive, avoided as too political or impractical. As scholars have started emphasizing (at conferences, calls for proposals, and publications), if our discourse aboutteaching translingual skills, promoting transcultural/cross-cultural communicative competence, and incorporating transnational/global issues into the curriculum remains too abstract for too long, I think that it will backfire. We must complement the necessary theory-building with concrete pedagogies, practical applications, and accessible language if we want to engage fellow writing teachers, members of other disciplines, and administrators in conversations about curriculum and higher education at large.

Fortunately, in the last few years, it also seems that when we return from conferences to classrooms, we have started testing, adapting, and developing more concrete strategies for teaching the above skills and knowledge. In this post, I would like to share a few activities, assignments, and teaching ideas that were inspired by professional conversations in our field. Taken from two specific courses I teach, one in the Writing Program and one in a different department, these are works in progress and I would appreciate your comments and feedback on them. Continue reading

Part II: Translingual, Transcultural, Transnational — From Buzzwords to Teaching Strategies

Reposted from Transnatioanl Writing blog

In part 1 of this post, I shared assignments and activities that I use for teaching and promoting translingual skills, incorporating transnational issues, and fostering cross-cultural communicative competence in an undergraduate special-topic seminar titled “Global Citizenship.” In part 2, I would like to share how I try to do the same in a more more conventional first-year writing course, titled “Intermediate Writing Workshop,” one that is required of all students across the university. The lack of curricular space makes it relatively harder to achieve the same goals in mainstream writing courses, but I have been inspired by how well students have responded so far. Continue reading

Beauty and Power of Multilingualism

 During the past year, I came across a lot of news items (including some based on scientific studies) about the benefits of multilingualism. There was so much on this issue that I sometimes wondered if the scientific and sociological studies were essentially a part of rather political responses to the ongoing redistribution of economic and geopolitical power around the world …. Living in the US, a society where monolingual policies and assumptions are (understandably) prevalent in most walks of life, I was pleased to see the emerging appreciation of multilingualism because I think this will only have positive outcomes on local and global levels.

Full post here

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I Wish it Was Just the Dentist

No, it is not just the dentist. Just too many people seem to define “writing”–even after I specify it as the teaching/learning of basic to advanced academic writing in the university–in ways that make me sad.

As she was about to start her work on my teeth last week, my dentist, a wonderful professional who works at a service provider two blocks away from where I live, asked me where I work.

“Stony Brook University.”

“Oh, you are a teacher? What do you teach?” Continue reading