Vaidehi Ramanathan

CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION: GLOBAL AND LOCAL PERSPECTIVES

Increasingly aware of the “critical” turn in our disciplines, we offer a partial survey of scholarship in two key realms—English for academic purposes (EAP) and globalization—where the term “critical literacy” has particular relevance. We begin by addressing some key concepts and ideological tensions latent beneath the term “critical.” We then address the pedagogical priorities that arise from this conceptualization, in particular, the use of texts to distance individual and group identities from powerful discourses. Next, we review studies that demonstrate how different teachers and researchers have engaged in unraveling and cross-questioning the rhetorical influences of various texts types, including multimodal ones. In the final section, we discuss the intertwined processes of homogenization and diversification arising from the economic, cultural, and political strains of globalization with particular emphasis on their implications for critical literacies and language education.

Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from the Ground Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities and Human Lives

At a time when connections between English and globalisation seem stronger than ever, and at a time when the ‘dominant’ status of English vis-à-vis other languages is very prominent, it seems imperative for the LPP scholarship to make room for grounded explorations regarding English and its relationship to vernacular languages in non-Western educational contexts. Drawing on an eight-year ethnographic study of English-and-vernacular-medium education in Gujarat, India, this paper argues that it may be time for language planning and policy studies to adopt a situated approach that begins addressing issues around language planning- and policy-related inequities by first focusing on what is on the ground.1 By gaining insight into how divides between English and other languages are perpetuated by the enforcement of particular policies and by understanding how institutions and humans refashion and re-plan theirs and others lives by countering language policies, such an orientation opens up a way for us to go beyond thinking of language policies as entities that ‘happen to’ humans by allowing us to view language policies as hybrid entities that draw their force and movement from the lives of real peoples and their motivations. Such an approach is partially intended toward countering the top-down tendency of much LPP scholarship.

Written Textual Production and Consumption (WTPC) in Vernacular and English-Medium Settings in Gujarat, India.

Abstract This paper attempts a relatively comprehensive sketch of some of the key facets in the larger socioeducational machinery that shapes the written textual production and consumption (WTPC) of “English-medium” (EM) and “vernacular-medium” (VM) students in Gujarat, India. It lays out some ways in which particular macro-structures align together to produce and shape conditions that privilege the WTPC of EM students over their VM counterparts. The paper also addresses some small ways in which institutions and individual faculty work are mitigating the gulf between students socialized in the different mediums of instruction by working indirectly on their WTPC.

Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Who Belongs? Who Is a Guest? Who Is Deported?

This Forum brings together some scholars writing in areas relating to language policies, language ideologies, and citizenship. While each of these domains is well researched, only recently has scholarship begun to address them in relational terms, where implications of investigations in one domain spill over to and have consequences for the others. My primary aim with bringing these scholars together under the auspices of a Forum is to probe the borders of our current collective understandings about citizenship. Seeking to go beyond viewing “citizenship” in terms of the passport one holds or one’s immigration or visa status, this Forum posits that this concept needs to be understood in terms of “being able to participate fully.” The fuller implications of this phrase, needless to say, depend on local conditions—policies, pedagogic engagements, and borders—that create equitable conditions in some circumstances, and in other circumstances do not. In this sense, then, citizenship needs to be understood in very much more broadly than in the usual teleological terms—where it is a goal to be attained (to “be” a citizen)—to where it is viewed as a process amidst tensions, fluid contexts, and diverse meanings. Doing so means turning our gaze to spaces where everyday instances of everyday engagements, teaching practices, institutionalized discourses, and rights awareness become more salient, and where our conjoined sense of civic citizenship gets attired differently. It also means becoming acutely alert to the contexts of dis-citizenship (Pothier & Devlin, 2007), a term I am trying to bring into our debates since it has remained underexplored. Under what local conditions does “dis-citizenship” happen? What role do language policies and pedagogic practices play? What are the more subtle forms of dis-citizenship that we are blind to?

Seepages, Contact Zones, and Amalgam: Internationalizing TESOL

TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, the editor asked a teacher educator the following question: How has your experience as a global citizen informed your work in local contexts?

Silencing and Languaging in the Assembling of the Indian Nation-State: British Public Citizens, the Epistolary Form, and Historiography

Taking the case of postcolonial India, this paper explores ways in which present temporal junctures permit a probing of historical boundaries to speak of voices largely silenced from Indian historiography, namely those of British (Indian) public citizens who were committed to the assembling of “an India.” In particular, the paper discusses ways in which letters to and by Charles Andrews, Edward Thompson and John Amery debated ideas about carving an India out of the Empire and how this epistolary form in all its incompleteness mirrors the ongoing suspension of a collective assembly such as that of a nation. Heeding Radhakrishnans cautions (2003) about turning history pages in other ways, the paper meditates on the dangers of the hardening borders of (postcolonial) nations—particularly India—and brings to the center silenced minor histories that at an earlier juncture escaped the historians archive (Chakrabarty, 1998). Threaded through the exploration are also metaphysical ruminations on the relations of the silenced and languaged, silencing and languaging, and more general, silence and language. The paper also raises issues about the discursive construction of (postcolonial) nations through language and policies (Ricento, 2003; Wiley, 2004; Wodak, 2001).

Poverty, TESOL’s Narratives and “Other Languages”: Hermeneutic Tensions in Texting-Researching Practices

This brief response addresses concerns raised by Ruanni Tupas in his reading of my book, The English-Vernacular Divide. It provides some background about my study, and attempts to uncover some researching and texting tensions I experienced when writing the book. Straddling as I am different geographic spaces—India and the US—with different discourses regarding English language learning and teaching in each space, the response details how my focus on the local and everyday became a way of showing how some discourses about English (its being a democratizing force, or the language of empowerment) run the risk of turning a blind eye to issues of poverty, access and “other languages, issues that are crucial for TESOL to address.”

Overcoming Colonial Policies of Divide and Rule Postcolonialism’s Harnessing of the Vernaculars

T chapter1 offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial scholarship in disciplines such as cultural studies and English literature has alerted us to the extent to which colonial rule partially created and reproduced negative images regarding “natives” so as to be better able to govern. Within applied linguistics, this awareness provides a necessary sociohistorical background against which to understand current grounded realities around language teaching and learning. Colonial policies in South Asian education— especially the policy of Divide and Rule—created schisms between the English medium (EM) and vernacular medium (VM) of education (Phillipson, 1992). This breakdown assumes neocolonial hues and dovetails directly with local societal stratifications (of caste and class) that exacerbate unequal conditions between those who are educated in the two tracks. Situated in ongoing endeavors in a variety of local contexts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, where I was raised and schooled, this chapter calls attention to some key educational sites through which these policy-related inequities are reproduced, and some ways in which individual teachers and institutions assume the responsibility to make conditions more just and equal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a postcolonial research framework allows us to understand not only grounded inequities around language policies in terms of historical colonial pasts but also how fellow humans draw on particular rationalizations to harness the veranaculars and work toward moving us all to more equal footings (Canagarajah, 1997). Increasing discussions around English being a “world” language (Brutt-Griffler, 2002) and the instrumental role it plays in globalization force us now to take stock of the “dominating” role that English seems to be assuming. Scholarship in this realm ranges from researchers questioning mediums-of-instruction policies, to ways in

SCRIPTING SELVES, STALLING LAST SHADOWS: (AUTO) BIOGRAPHICAL WRITING OF ALZHEIMER PATIENTS AND THEIR CAREGIVERS

This article offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in the diaries kept by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores ways in which diary writing becomes simultaneously an agentive way by which a sense of ‘self’ gets scripted since memory is fast slipping away, while also pointing to the fluid nature of identities as patients struggle with diminishing language and remembering skills. Specifically, the article explores how two themes, 1) repetition and (sure) signs and 2) traces and intentions, crucially inform their need to text their elusive hold on language and memories into place. The entries make us take note of how in contexts of disabilities and chronic ailments texting, and to some extent, fixing, a sense of self may be a critical way of surviving and coping and stalling last shadows.