A labour of love

I have had the best teachers. This is one of the huge blessings of my life, along with an incredible (far from perfect but incredible) family. 

I have not always learnt perfectly from my teachers. Sometimes, I have been less prepared coming into that year's curriculum and sometimes, less prepared for class. Sometimes, I have been distracted by the drama of life. Sometimes, I have just found the subject tedious (sorry, Econ, I really tried!). Sometimes, I have been slow to grasp. Sometimes, their pedagogy left something to be desired.

But when I say I have had the best teachers, I mean that I have learnt from some wonderful humans all my life. They came in to teach me a particular topic, in the formal classroom or as supervisors. But from each of them, I learnt how to be. Each one showed me a dimension of how to live. 

Sometimes these were concrete tips that I still use. How to construct evaluation in a course so you create a learning path. How to continue to work (especially on a paper) even when you are blocked. The importance of legible fonts in a submission (sorry, sorry, sorry!). How to hem so neatly you can barely see. Really, the sum total of whatever I know, I know because of my teachers. 

I treasure too the example of the professor would quote Moliere's Sganarelle in the middle of a discussion on realism in international relations. I treasure the professor whose week included a jazz gig. I treasure the school teacher who turned every poem into a song and the one who had an anthem for her maths class--which made us smile but also ready to learn. I treasure the brilliant mind of my dissertation advisor that would find PhD topics in the strangest places--the limitless imagination and the creative play. (We read a book on play in our epistemology class but sadly, we did not play at all.) I treasure the years in a teaching-first college that freed me of the need to control my class (age and experience also help).

Most of my teachers have had this in common--they have been good, caring people. They have not needed to control their students' choices. They have been content to free us to grow while being present during our journeys. They have been secure humans--this is so rare, so rare, in education! 

I have noticed that my favourite conversations now are about teaching. 

This is because I treasure the gift of being in a classroom more than I can express. 

I played 'school-school' all through childhood. In fact, you might say, I am notorious for having schooled many generations of visitors to our home. Greatgrandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, uncles, aunts, cousins--many, many are graduates of my school. My family will tell you that as my great-grandfather lay dying, I taught my great-uncle (his son) arithmetic on the lawns. I was four, he was a senior civil engineer. He was also my most difficult student. He got all his sums wrong (deliberately, indulgently). I was so concerned about his education that for months I sent him postcards with homework that he returned with mistakes! He may have been the student I have loved most in my life. 

As a teenager, I wrote the prospectus of a school I was going to start with all the elements I loved from schools in story-books (about schools). I made sure to bring in my other blessing--my cousins--by giving them all jobs and building rooms for them in campus plans I would love to draw up (in my next life, I will be an architect and in this, I enjoy admiring my architect friend's projects). 

I have tutored (badly) and I have run peace education projects on my own before I really knew the term. 

The linear path out of a PhD was to a teaching job. I taught through graduate school and four years after that but then for more than a decade, the teaching I got to do was repetitive training workshops and some mentoring of interns. 

The peace education programme at the NGO is for me the heart of my NGO--my heart too. We do other things and we are known for other things but this is the centre-point in my vision. In the years in which we imagined it as a classroom and school-centred programme, I got to talk teaching with my Montessori teacher cousin who is a classroom rockstar--sure-footed in what she wants to teach and secure enough to also become a student. I loved this. I still love talking teaching with her though she has moved on from our project (she is still a teacher).

The gift of being in a classroom has returned to my life in bits and pieces. I have come back to regular teaching, enriched by every life experience. I channel every good teacher I ever had into my work and hope to be somewhat as effective. 

Again and again, when I am preparing or when I am in the classroom, I think: This is what they mean by "labour of love." To do something you love. To do something you can do with love. To do something that fills your space with warmth and affection. That is something I have learned from my students who ultimately are the best teachers you will ever have. 

I started writing this post thinking that I love teaching and talking about teaching but I never blog about it. Then I thought of my wonderful teachers and this is where the post has meandered. It is guru dakshina and it is also gratitude that I get to be a lifelong learner in the satsang of my students. It is a prayer that the gift that has taken its time to reach me, stays with me for a while. 

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 7

The six preceding blog posts are my attempt to begin thinking through this challenge: of designing from scratch with no preconceived ideas about what we are doing a course that captures many of the issues that we are interested in as we reflect on contemporary South India.

Maybe a completely non-derivative way of doing this is impossible. But I am just trying to start as far away from where the course generally is at, in order to be able to approach it in a way that belongs here.

If you happen to read this posts and have suggestions, please do leave comments.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 6

What would I teach? Let me back up and describe the issues I think it would be interesting and fun to explore at this point, sitting in South India. In no particular order.

• This year, we were struck by urban renewal/conservation issues. Particularly because we were visiting heritage sites that were once an integral part of planned urban centres.
• I think models of 'development' are interesting. What do people do towards developing specific areas? Whether it is a school or propagating a particular kind of farming. These lend themselves to larger questions about 'development' and about globalization both.
• Although we decided not to rehearse the nationalism course, I think identity politics is still interesting, particularly in its interface with a rapidly changing political economy.
• I think that nature and direction of change is always interesting to think about.
• I remain very concerned about governance issues.
• And of course, gender.
• How could we be in Chennai and not think of the role of technology, particularly ICT?
  

If we did a course on all this, to me the common factor is change. How to change on purpose? How to imagine change and make that come true? What are the sources of such imagination? And also, how to cope with unintended change? What is the politics of change? What is the politics of making a particular change? And what is the politics of change that catches you unawares? How do you manage change politically?

To me, it is the debates surrounding particular choices that are interesting. But the teacher in me is conservative, wanting also to furnish information even as we teach students how to think about particular issues. As Professor Malapur would have put it, to come up with the right questions... because there are no answers.

So I want to design a course whose framework will set us all up to ask the right questions, and whose cases will give us a chance to debate the answers and the discourse itself.

What would I call such a course? "The Politics of Change"? "The Politics of Socio-Economic Change"?

I would lose the 'Third World,' 'Emerging Nations,' 'Development' tags for sure. 'Change' is more open-ended. And not necessarily linear.

And I think I would build the discussion in the course around what now seem to me to be false binaries, but that have been juxtaposed as critical binaries by different schools of thought:

• Growth versus Equity
• Small versus Big
• Liberty versus Equality
• Market versus State, Civil Society versus State
  
• Global versus National versus Regional versus Local
• Indigenous versus Foreign
• Modern versus Traditional
  and of course,
• Third World versus Advanced Industrial,
  to list just a few....
  

Or maybe not.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 5

So what is this course about?

As it is usually taught in the US, it is about everything. A little bit about colonialism, a little bit about nationalism, a little bit about development, a little bit about gender and a little bit about international relations.

In India, we do not teach politics as if it is special in a developmental context but as students in Bombay University a couple of decades ago, we did study Development Administration. In fact, when I think about it, there was a large development component to my own BA degree: Macro-development Economics, a course on Appropriate Technologies which had some other name as well, Planning and Development Strategies, Development Administration. The Political Science classes were classic topics in political thought, international relations, taught more as humanities than as social science.

I think the problem I am having is not WHAT I would teach as much as what the rubric is that I would give it.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 4

Courses in this area are usually some extension or variation of "Government and Politics of.." courses. By appending Third World, I think they aspire to capture something of the process of change. Once they do that, they cannot be just about politics.

'Third World' states were more or less the same as those states of Asia and Africa and on some issues, Latin America, that had once been colonized. Colonialism, by the definition of anti-colonial writers everywhere, was only partly about politics and administration. It was also ideological and cultural; and it had begun as economic exploitation. Therefore, studies of these places that were 'Third World' had to be also about other dimensions.

Especially, cultural. Since colonized peoples were somewhat backward and definitely traditional, the most useful variable to explain anything about them must be 'culture.' Not politics. Not economics. Nothing quite so rational and gentlemanly.

And then you look at the origins of the study of these states in American academia. It is rooted in 1950s anxieties about containing communism. What made states stable? What allowed democracies to develop? What would prevent revolutionary activity? These are the kinds of political questions that motivated that literature. It is a different matter that these questions inspired some really interesting empirical work and a useful vocabulary for describing politics. But Third World countries got frozen for a few decades in a certain taxonomy, defined not by them but for them.

The shift occurred when authoritarian governments started falling in Latin America and then in Eastern Europe. Democracy became a topic that could be associated with the 'Third World' suddenly, and there is still an industry of democratization experts, both academic and field, out there. Illustrated best by the Ukrainian expert sent by the National Democratic Institute in Washington DC to advise Sri Lankans on their election process. in 1980.

Then there was the course I taught in my last semester at graduate school: Emerging Nations. I taught it once as the politics of development and then chose to interpret it once narrowly and in keeping with my dissertation, as nationalism and decolonization and the politics of the same. Worked better as the last, but really, that was quite a departure from the intended purpose of the course. But from where were the 'Nations' emerging? Which 'Nations'? Were they also states? And into what were they emerging.

No idea at all.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 3

A linear view of history and the human experience makes it possible to place communities along a continuum and label them 'backward' and 'advanced'. All of us do it in the judgments we pass on each other on a daily basis. However, as an intellectual construct, it is hard to accept and harder still to teach.

One could place colonial-nationalist-postcolonial on some sort of a timeline, but what did they mean for the more practical details of everyday life.

• In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru called large multipurpose hydro-electrical projects the 'temples of modern India.' India did benefit from them. But over time, the problems with large projects have become evident as well, whether for their seismic effects as in Tehri or for the displacement of peoples as in Narmada. Are we now moving to the model the Cholas and their Sri Lankan counterparts used--large networks of smaller canals--for irrigation on the one hand and nuclear energy on the other? Is this forward, backwards or lateral movement?
• Allopathy is regarded as the modern system of medicine. So why are more and more people gravitating towards alternative systems that are older, such as ayurveda, yoga, yunani and siddha? Is this retrogressive motion?
• Thousands of young Indians work in high-paying but more or less dead-end jobs in the IT sector. Are they doing better or worse than the tradition artisan who earns less but at least has infinite scope for creativity?
• Or are this last question and others of this sort utterly inappropriate in that they romanticize the past at the expense of well-being today?
  
• What is today's well-being if it creates a less than liveable tomorrow?
  

Because questions like this come around again and again as we travel and discuss Indian history and politics, it seems appropriate to do a course that will ask them formally and systematically.

But that is not what traditional 'Third World Politics' do. The term 'Third World' ties us to development issues, and 'development' is imagined in linear terms. They posit a certain unidirectional journey, in which a large swathe of humanity is condemned to trail the front-runners, fighting neverending battles for unreachable goals. Rostow's four-stage model of growth is an example; as Busybee liked to joke in his Independence Day columns, India was perpetually stuck in the take-off stage.

Teaching "Third World Politics":Reflections 2

Let's start with this 'Third World' tag.

Forget the political correctness stuff. Dress the term any way you like and you still have no way of understanding what it means.

• poverty
• inequality
• tradition
• old technology
• unresolved political issues
• 'backwardness'

Where can you find these? Today, practically everywhere. Being 'Third World' is a condition not a location. Teaching in nice classrooms in the 'First World,' sometimes the 'Third World' was three streets away, sometimes a neighbourhood my student had left behind and sometimes a place far away.

Once you accepted that, what was your course about? Almost everything, every place and everybody.

What was the difference between teaching this course, teaching introductory political science or government and teaching American or Indian politics? Just a little value judgment, a little prejudice and a little historical accident.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections

One of the crosses one bears when one teaches politics in the West and is a lowly, non-Western person, is that one sometimes has to teach a course that is variously modeled as 'Politics of development,' 'Third World Politics' or in my alma mater, 'Emerging Nations.' I did not enjoy this course in any incarnation for the simple reason that it seemed to need to be about everything with only fourteen-sixteen weeks in hand, a student body with virtually no previous training in world history or geography and an underlying logic that across its incarnations, was rooted in a worldview to which it was hard to make reality conform.

My survival strategy while writing the syllabus was to include what was important to the department and what was important to me, overloading the course even further. My version of the course was an improbable combination of the way development economics was taught by our professors at Elphinstone College; my experience growing up in 1960s-70s India; the political development literature of the 1960s, and a grab-bag of emerging points of view from wherever I had wandered. If the original conception of the course covered, as I snidely put it, everyone but four white men, by the time I was done with it, it was un-teachable.

The worst classes I ever taught were in this course. And this, in spite of this being a subject of interest to me. (Maybe that is why?) Ten years after I was last forced to teach this couse, this summer as we planned a year ahead, I found myself saying very gingerly, perhaps we should offer THAT class. My colleague was shocked, having heard me complain bitterly on more than one occasion. A grab-bag of random reasons made me think this could be workable.

• The course is located in Chennai, India.
• We are constantly talking about change, about old and new, tradition and modernity.
• The interface between global and local, colonial and postcolonial are everywhere around us.
• So much of the politics we discuss is about social transformation.
  
• Governance challenges, heritage and identity come together in the places we visit.

My instinct is that the course can be made to work, but having said that, I am realizing that it can only be done if every assumption upon which the Western courses are based is examined critically. I have to go beyond, gosh, there is, there has to be a better way, and beyond, I will find that way, and I am sure this can work... to making it happen in a way that is worth taking a chance that teaching this course will once more be a miserable experience.

To this end, I am going to start a series of blog posts, where I think aloud and try to make something that I can live with.