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| With educators at the Viveka School of Excellence in Sargur. |
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| At the summit of the Jain temple at Shravanabelagola. |
The FTI program supports aspiring teachers who have already earned degrees in various fields of study. They will engage in a 9 month course to learn about various educator skills, with one of the most important ones being English language education. Since many of these teachers aim to work in English-medium schools or government schools, it is important for them to be able to converse in English freely and confidently to their interviewers, coworkers, and future students. My job was to create a supplemental educational tool for the FTI participants to be able to consult in their free time that would give them the resources they need to successfully speak conversational English.
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| The Hoysala Temple at Belur. |
Along with the English guide, I created a computer literacy guide to supplement the Information and Communications Technology aspect of the FTI program. This guide covers a variety of information, from the basic hardware of a desktop computer to walkthroughs on commonly used Microsoft Office features.
I decided to create a website for the conversational English resource, as I believed it would be the easiest to navigate and consult for students with digital devices such as a mobile phone. This decision stems from the first important lesson I learned from community engagement, and that was the startling realization that I was just one part of a larger cause. Acknowledging that I would have a limited view and understanding of what was necessary for these modules, I believed a website format could allow teachers of the FTI program to customize the content to fit their needs. I also formatted all of the website's content into a document that could be accessed statically. This way, students without mobile devices or an internet connection would have the option to access the same resource in a different format. To look past myself and think about usability of my work in the future was the most vital thing I learned during my experience in India.
Conducting research for the project and putting it all together was the most challenging part of my work. I drew from a variety of resources and experiences to complete my final product. I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Viveka School of Excellence in Sargur, Karnataka, where I sat in on a day at school. I observed teachers in the English-medium classrooms and their interactions with young students. I noticed the setbacks that the pandemic had caused in terms of students' English language education. I also spoke to current students in the FTI program and came to understand their needs. I explicitly remember one student telling me that while she could understand the questions I was asking, she lacked the ability and confidence to reply to me in English. As an Indian American, I had my own assumptions about the education system in India and especially English language fluency in private selective schools, but through this visitation, I realized how much more nuance was present in teaching. I found that time and resources were spread thin and had to consider my project from the point of view of human capital. I was making a supplemental resource, not one that would require another individual to teach it and take hours out of their day to become familiar with it. I needed to make my website intuitive, reasonable, and thorough.
Another resource I took advantage of was contacting ESL (English as a Second Language) professors from my school. I consulted them about the website and different resources that would be of use for Indian students to learn and utilize English. Through this, I could narrow down specific books, techniques, and focus areas that would be helpful for English learners.
And finally, I drew upon my personal experience with language learning and my pre-existing knowledge of conversational English and computer usage. Being a language learner myself, I tried to include as many resources that I personally found helpful on the website and in the modules, such as language learning mobile apps and a plethora of audiovisual content.
I faced many challenges while working on this project. I am not knowledgeable about teaching English as a second language, especially to Indian students in Karnataka state. My lack of experience with English education and methods of how to best teach conversational English in an understandable manner caused great difficulty when trying to think of original content for the modules. Because of the sheer number of resources online, narrowing down what was helpful and doing my best to support a decent variety of content proved difficult. The field work (speaking to current FTI students) was difficult because I could not speak Kannada. The questions I asked were met with short English responses and I was unable to follow up in communication.
The actual website was also a concern for me. While I valued the format that allowed for future editing, I still believe that a website completely in English may be intimidating for English learners to utilize. Kannada-language supplementary modules or notes may have been helpful in this respect, but that isn't something that I was capable of implementing with my very limited Kannada knowledge. This may affect the website's future usability and overall effectiveness, which was a worry for me.
Overall, however, I overcame many of these challenges by pushing forward and have learned a lot in the process. One of my major takeaways from community engaged learning is the ability to think from a human-centric perspective. Thinking about the backgrounds of users and their comfort levels with the topics being introduced is necessary to create a product that will actually be used. I also learned how to admit that there were certain things that I couldn't do with perfection given the time constraints and my current knowledge. Still, this allowed me to reach outside my own expertise and rely on others'. Interacting face-to-face with the community members I was trying to serve was undoubtedly the best part of engaging in person, and my experience building these modules over the summer is one I will never forget. My website is currently published on the internet at this link.
