A lETTER BY HUNTER KING
When I first received my placement, teaching Academic Reading and Writing to first year students in the English Literature department at the University of Sri Jayawardenapura, I was both thrilled to be teaching students with advanced English skills and absolutely horrified. I had engaged in an intense internal debate over questions of linguistic imperialism when applying for an English teaching Fulbright, and had finally convinced myself that English could be taught, and that I could teach English, in ways that were intentionally counter hegemonic. Could I accomplish the same while teaching something as value laden as English literature?
Fortunately, after a brief survey of social protest literature, it became clear that while my class was technically in the English Literature department, my only real directive was to work on my students’ writing skills. I’ve tried to accomplish this by facilitating a reciprocal learning environment where my students are exposed to, work within and critique conventions of academic writing. We’ve read radical writers like Gloria Anzaldua and Bell Hooks, critiqued the supremacy of Standard British and American English, and analyzed our own educational experiences and relationships to linguistic identity. Through a combination of trust and sometimes-painful degrees of flexibility, I’ve been able to give my students a high degree of control over classroom dynamics and the content of their writing assignments. They've learned to engage with texts and to formulate their own arguments by exploring social justice issues of their own choosing and by debating both sides of controversial issues from within Sri Lankan society. By remaining involved in the different steps in their writing process, I’ve tried to help them articulate themselves but I’ve also been able to emphasize that I'm there to help them think critically and not to tell them what to think about their own lives. Within a highly conservative university, my classroom has become a safe space where my students have felt free to discuss gender-binaries within religious discourses, solutions to gender-based violence, Islamophobia, and the criminalization of sex workers and LGBT people in Sri Lanka.