From Academic Literacy to Critical Literacy: Re-imagining English Language Pedagogy in Indian Higher Education

Abstract

In 2007, a committee headed by Sukhadeo Thorat was set up by the central government to enquire into the allegation of differential treatment of SC/ST students in AIIMS, following widespread allegation of discrimination and harassment of socially disadvantaged students, particularly students belonging to SC and ST communities, in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Thorat et al. 1). During my PhD fieldwork, as I talked to various faculty members and students across a few metropolitan central universities in the country to enquire into teaching-learning experiences within English departments, I heard numerous accounts of discrimination, harassment, and exclusion-students being verbally humiliated for their poor English, feeling that the grading system was unfairly stacked against them if they did not possess the requisite linguistic skills, and suffering from invisibility and social isolation in the classroom and on campus.1 These accounts were not merely recounted by Dalit and Adivasi students, but occasionally by dominant caste students from non-metropolitan, rural backgrounds. A prominent student-activist on campus showed me how a survey had been carried out to confirm the experience of discrimination within classrooms/departments, but she felt while some faculty members might have become more conscious or wary, there was inadequate conversation on what could be concretely changed in teaching-learning processes and institutional practices within the campus (Jaya). In the light of this insight, I want to put forth an axiomatic proposition: that in order to seriously address the political demand for the inclusion, mobility, and empowerment of disadvantaged communities, language pedagogy in higher education, ranging from academic literacy programs to discipline-specific uses of English, has to be necessarily allied to a project of social and economic justice.