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Space for Dialogue

 “I don’t know. What do you think?”

 “Can someone comment on that?”

 “Let’s have a discussion!”

The moment my consciousness is being evoked and the moment my perspective is validated within what I learn, had never sounded as liberating, empowering or validating to me, and my existence as a student suffering from what I call passive-learner’s-syndrome, before I entered the Department of English. In fact, it sounded threatening to my whole existence as a student educated in the banking system of education. The first time I was asked to give my opinion in front of the whole classroom, it was a moment of silence, wandering where to find the perfect answer the teacher expected, or the answer the teacher would later fill your brain with, or, the answer I was supposed to remember to repeat when asked. A moment of unease and terror.

As a first year student at the Department of English, this was my initial reaction to being exposed into a circle where my opinion as a student was needed and valued and validated in conversation with the teacher, about the reality of what we were learning. The department of English is a place where we no longer learn, it is a place where we make knowledge through conversation with each other through which teaching and learning are carried out. Even though it is challenging to evoke the critical consciousness of the students who have been silenced, disciplined and molded into passive listeners with an empty vessel of a brain, for the teacher to fill, the department has taken up on the challenge. A departure from the traditional method of university education with the professor-at-the-podium-doing-most-of-the-talk, has resulted in a community which poses problems to the reality of what and within which they learn and are taught. As a result, my exposure to the method of teaching in the department of English ceased my binary thinking of the world in black and white. Rather, I began to look at the world in its multiplicity, complexity and beauty. 

Department’s approach to education quite differs from the traditional methods of “lecturing", when the teacher student relationship in its traditional meaning ceases to exit. A space where you can sit in a circle with the teacher without being afraid of disagreeing with her for the mere sake of respecting the teacher (which was instilled in us from a very young age), was quite refreshing for me. The teacher and the students as partners in making knowledge which is the practice in the Department,  gives us students more authority and responsibility over what we learn, how we learn and why we learn. Being educated in the Department’s approach to liberal and critical pedagogy, I realized by experience that the meaning of education is consciously and critically engaging in making knowledge. Moreover, it is a liberal space and more like a “safe haven" for us to share our experiences in the classroom and feel solidarity with what we learn, which would have been, in a more traditional sense, more distant, alienated and separated from our individual reality.

The Department of English as a space for dialogue enables the student to actively and critically engage in the on-going social, political and pedagogic discourses. In fact, the department thrives on their mission to, “not only teach literature as a passive reflector, but as an active agent in the molding of culture, values, ethics and personalities” with their approach to education as a process of inquiry which is liberating as well as empowering for the student.

-Devindani Devage-


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