Reflections on teaching, and Srijanalaya

My internship with Srijanalaya ended just under a week ago. After over 50 hours (!) of traveling, I finally made it to my next stop: Hawai'i. It turns out that one delayed flight out of four flights total can kind of screw up the rest of you travel.

As I noted a few months ago, I didn’t really know what to expect from working with Srijanalaya. I knew sort of what they did and what they stood for, but what was my role going to be? How could I help them, and how could they help me? Sharareh Bajracharya, founder of Srijanalaya and an all-around amazing woman, urged me to do something that would really speak to me. What do you mean? I remember asking. By the end of this, she said, you should come away feeling like you’ve accomplished something.

It sounds so cheesy (and reeks of white privilege), yet it was the start of an incredibly freeing and creative opportunity to design my own role in the organization. Instead of restricting me to administrative work or webdesign (the latter of which I did some of, voluntarily, later on), I was urged to go out and design some lesson plans, and teach them!

The courtyard outside the Srijanalaya office

Initially, we thought I might be able to teach at several different schools, and so set up meeting with two of them. We soon discovered this was a bit too ambitious, and met with the vice-principal of Lalitpur Madhyamik Vidyalaya (LMV), who was overjoyed to have me come to the school. So overjoyed, in fact, that I was roped into teaching English phonics to a class of 3rd graders. Me? With no formal teaching experience or training? What was I getting myself into?

After a few initial visits spent observing other classes and getting to know the school, I quickly came to realize that my presence there was nothing out of the ordinary. The school, it seems, regularly has a few volunteers hanging around, teaching a class here and there in a subject of their choosing. Whereas I had a straightforward role to play in the school, these volunteers seem to bounce around to different classes, with little to no prior teaching experience. I guess it's enough for the volunteers (not excluding myself) to be foreign. Bonus points if white, as well.

What I lacked in training, however, I think I made up for in other areas. For the third grade phonics lessons, my ability to speak and pronounce English properly was a big advantage over their Nepali teachers, and even over the previous two volunteers who left just before I arrived. The school's teachers are wonderful, but they are similarly untrained, and have no great mastery of English. If the school was taught in Nepali, this would be much less of an issue. As it is, however, private schools like LMV have most classes taught in English. 

The fact that English is so heavily focused on brings to surface a whole host of issues associated with the Education System in Nepal. Public schools struggle with funding, resources, and teachers, so much so that anyone who can afford it usually sends their kids off to private school (such as LMV, a trust-fund school). At these schools, students have to speak and learn in a foreign language. The argument for doing so is that English will give them a leg up in life.

That is not to say that English is a useful language to learn in the age of globalization. But to have it take precedence over Nepali? It would be one thing for universities (and maybe high schools) to teach their classes in English, given that many textbooks and a great deal of research is published in English. But when you start teaching different subjects in a foreign language at a young age, you are also preventing students the opportunity to properly learn and develop Nepali. As a result, students are proficient in neither language.

Although I felt these issues most strongly with my class of third graders, whom I taught three times a week, English was also noticeably difficult for the sixth graders. Most of these students knew enough English by that point to be able to communicate (more or less), but their proficiency was less than what you would expect after years of a supposedly all-English curriculum. 

That said, these are just some of the things I noticed over the course of my two-month stay in Nepal, and the time spent at LMV. I understand that I'm coming to this from an incredibly different (and privileged) point of view, but I hope that it nevertheless touches on areas that deserve attention. 

Some of the cheeky third graders

And, of course, I must at least briefly reflect on the experience of teaching a five-week-long poetry workshop with three different 6th grade classes! I learned a lot, that's for sure. Teaching is no easy feat, and I wanted to do my best. Some moments were more frustrating than others, but that's to be expected. I had to start with the basics, given the students' limited exposure to poetry. Given our limited time frame, there was only so much we could cover, so I tried (with the help of the team at Srijanalaya as well as some others back home) to pick the areas that would be most comprehensible and allow the students to start writing with confidence.

It would be too much to go into each individual lesson now, but if you are interested in learning more about the workshop, or seeing the resources that I built over the course of these two months, feel free to check out the organization's website under the "resources" tab here. Each link represents a week in lessons (2), where the original lesson plans have been turned into tutorials for future use. Please feel free to contact either me or Srijanalaya for feedback! 


At the end of our five weeks at LMV, I organized a poetry recital for the three 6th grade classes, combined. It was a heartwarming and emotional experience, to say the least. I felt a little awkward for being so recognized by the principal and vice-principal at the end of it, but I do feel like I gave the students some inspiration that will hopefully fuel them into the future.




For more on the recital (as well as some other photos and a video, since I didn't want to clutter the blog), see here!