Reading, Relating, and Reinvigorating Teaching through Translating

[guest_blogger]

by Sonakshi Srivastava, Ashoka University

This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Sona was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

In July of 2023, I made my debut as a teacher in a classroom. Up until then, I had been comfortable with my position as a writing tutor—looking at students’ scripts, working with them on polishing their drafts, completing their essays and the like but the summer of 2023 warmed me up to a different experience and experiment in my tutor life.

My duty as a teacher, then, included teaching English to a cohort of some twenty students as a part of my university’s pedagogical programme, the Academic Bridge Programme (at Ashoka University). As the name suggests, the programme is intended to help students transition smoothly from school to college and places particular emphasis on English writing and speaking skills. With this particular intent in mind, I curated a curriculum that sought to invite the young minds to a world of curiosity and critical thinking. And, as a scholar of reading and attention, I dedicated a whole module to this specific strand with readings taken from the works of Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) and Sandra Cisneros. In total honesty, I was supremely proud of my curation—the naïve thrill of a first-time curriculum designer was hard to contain, so much so that I had already pictured my students smitten with the select excerpts, awed by the creative spill of words on paper. I was so read-y for this!

However, as much as I was prepared to teach, I was also anxious about the reception and to some extent, my fear was founded. I had misread the class.

In their seminal pedagogical work How to Read a Book, pivoted around critical reading, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler regard the reader as important as the writer. They compare this relational importance through the analogy of a pitch, a ball and the players. They compare the pitcher to the writer, the fielder to the reader, and the ball to the text. In that, the text as the ball is passive, and it is the sum total of the activity between the pitcher and the fielder that gives meaning to the receiving or the missing of the ball. What is implied here then is that the ball may be missed or received – the onus of this acceptance or rejection depends heavily on the reader as the fielder. And this is what the act of reading eventually condenses to. The text is a complex object set forth in action by the writer. It is the task of the reader to “catch” the writer’s intentions.

What if Adler and Doren’s intention, set for the reader-writer relationship, were to manifest in a classroom? What if the writer exchanged places with a teacher in this analogy? These ifs found an answer through me. I, the teacher, had the ball rolling by prescribing the readings. My students, the readers, had failed to catch them—and this fault here was mine to claim. It was not them who had misunderstood or misread the texts. It was I, who had failed them and the texts in a classroom by misreading them. I can talk about this failure of mine because my being as a teacher stood challenged that particular day. This challenge is further fuelled by my reflection on Adler and Doren’s analogy which gracefully saves the writers from the act of reading or misreading the text by their readers. What possibilities would emerge if a teacher recognizes their shortcomings in a classroom? What if it is not the fielder’s error but an error by the pitcher?

Since time was limited, and the course set, I had to come up with an alternative approach to the text. Over the course of a week, we worked together in different languages—switching between Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Khari, and English. We workshopped Cisneros’ story in our native tongues and connected it to stories that we had grown up listening or reading.

Interestingly enough, the idea that the students are less “fluent” in English was also circumvented, prompting me to think if the assumption about their “fluency” was typecasted because of certain attributes (hailing from Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities, educated in state board schools etc.) that they had failed. The students were proficient in English—and where the vernaculars failed, English—no matter how “broken”, how “unpolished” brought our ideas and us together.

Everyday, then, was a navigation through translation in that class, and that made all the difference. An initial challenge that channeled into a lesson for me not only as a teacher but also a translator. This was praxis. As I transition in my tutor role, from one ABP cohort to another, I cannot help but reflect how being in and reading with the classroom has influenced my perspective(s) on teaching. I think of it through the triad of the Cs—connect, correspond, and collaborate. To not think less of the students but to think with them and through them. A classroom is the most fertile field where a critical mind may flourish. And to think of it, perhaps this is what the pitcher and the fielder should do with the ball – approach it in the spirit of collaboration—one where we are not playing against one another but with one another.

References

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster, 2011.

The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November.