Newspaper Story

My students and I, along with Dr. Angel Lin from the University of Hong Kong, were featured today in a South China Morning Post newspaper article discussing the use of popular culture in teaching English to students from “less privileged backgrounds.” The writer does a good job of making our academic talk sound a little more intelligible to a wider audience.

The full article can be found here: http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1250689/pop-culture-helps-students-learn-english

Here are some of the bits that mention me and one of my students:

“My Form One students come to me with a huge range of English abilities, but we all study together as one class. The special challenge I have is not just building their ability to pass an exam, but developing their academic literacy, and their ability to use English as a communicative tool.”

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“Soto, who is also in the final stages of a PhD in education at HKU, confirms the need to reach out to students in areas that interest them and at their level. To do this, we try to build bridges between students’ family and youth cultures and the academic texts we want them to study,” he says.

“We don’t use textbooks, and instead study music, films and documentaries from around the world, read stories and poetry, play games, and do work online. We use Facebook groups to communicate and to do writing, and each student has their own blog. This year we joined quadblogging.net to collaborate on blogging with three classrooms around the world. I learn about the conflicts they face in their lives, and use English as a way for them to learn about themselves and learn to solve problems in their communities.”

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“Teachers often ask Soto what they can do to motivate students. His advice is to stop asking that question. Instead, educators should explore other questions such as: Who are our students, what is their place in society, and how can English become a tool to empower them? In what ways, besides exams, can we have them show their learning? How are their lives already multilingual and how can our teaching promote multilingualism?

Kiran Kaur, one of Soto’s Form Two students, agrees.

Throw away the textbooks and learn something which is not written in the books; that is how our class learns,” she says. “We do learn a bit from books but our class power is movies, which is almost everyone’s favourite. We learn new words from Mr C through some talk. We listen and think about others’ ideas. We learn in our English class by looking around the world.

“That’s all I can say: less words, more understanding.”

Sometimes I cant decide if I’m being too hard on my kids, or not hard enough. Do I need more Tiger mother or more Nikumbh Sir?

I will be doing a presentation at this symposium. A group of my secondary students will also present. Below are the abstracts for the sessions.

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Developing a Pedagogy Through Critical Ethnography: Generative Themes and Opportunities

Current academic and public discourse privileges problems with Cantonese language acquisition as a determining factor in the poor academic results of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong government aided schools. My own research, however, uncovered schools in which students became alienated from knowledge, did not receive appropriate support in gaining academic literacy in English medium subjects, and where their transnational identities were often not seen as a foundation for engaging learning.

This paper reports on three years of a critical ethnography at two Hong Kong schools serving ethnic minority youth; the first school where I had the opportunity to teach Liberal Studies while conducting participant observation, and a second school where I developed an integrated English and Liberal Studies curriculum for junior secondary.

The focus of this paper is the generative themes and popular culture texts I uncovered that became central to my pedagogy. Specifically, I discuss how Bollywood films such as “3 Idiots,” a popular romantic comedy about three friends in an engineering college, “Taare Zameen Par,” a movie about a boy with dyslexia, and Nepali films such as “Pooja”, a drama that explores the death of a girl during child birth, reveal students’ dilemmas while providing rich ground for intellectual and academic development.

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Towards Empowering Education: Student Voices

What problems do ethnic minority youth face in and out of schools?  What are they looking for in their education? What engages them outside of school? What visions do youth have for their schooling? What advice do they have for teachers?

Rather than rely on researchers for answers to these questions, ethnic minority youth who I teach will share their experiences and critiques.

Student participants will describe units of study that they found engaging, provide pedagogical advice to educators, and explain socio-cultural dynamics that create obstacles to learning.

Community, pedagogy, dialogue, love, trust, multiple intelligences, and multi-modal learning will be part of the discussion.

This session will be of interest to educators, researchers, and students with an interest in critical pedagogy and empowering youth.

Multiple Intelligences drawing by one of our form 1 students

Yes, sometimes I do ask myself if I am the problem. But this is part of the logic of oppressive schools; they shift responsibility away from the institution to individuals who show any kind of resistance.

This spring, I studied “birth” with my form 2 class. We read a book about how birth is celebrated by various religious traditions, then watched “Why Poverty: Welcome to the World” and “Birth in Nepal,” two documentaries exploring the problems of infant and maternal mortality. After these studies, a student recommend this short fictional Nepali movie, “Pooja.” 

The movie is described on Youtube as:

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“…a story about one of life’s biggest and riskiest endeavors: giving birth to a baby — being told from three different points of views.

Pooja Singh Thakuri Rai, 17, of Saune - Sunsari is dead. 

Pooja’s father, Gaj Bahadur Singh Thakuri, blames Pooja’s mother-in-law, Harkamaya Rai, for killing Pooja. Pooja’s husband, Rumihang, blames Pooja’s father Gaj Bahadur for contributing to Pooja’s death. Harkamaya blames the hospitals for killing Pooja. Ranju Yadav, one of Pooja’s best friends, thinks Pooja invited disaster because she was, at heart, an unhappy and lonely young woman.

Who is really responsible for Pooja’s death? How does Pooja died? 

The film Pooja is an attempt on exploring the answer, why does hundreds of mother dying every year? This is story about one of life’s biggest and riskiest endeavors: giving birth to a baby — being told from three different points of views. 
All improvised acting with no scripted dialogues!”

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Love is another important theme in the movie. As viewers, we wonder about what love is, and if Pooja has it in her life or not. In my doctoral research, I found “love” to be a generative theme in the lives of the Hong Kong South Asian with whom I worked. “Love” becomes a force that shapes students identities, aspirations, and life trajectories. So I pushed students to think about love by offering them a secular alternative to their ideas about love as a feeling; we read some quotes by bell hooks.

I want to expand this in the future by having students read a diverse set of views on the idea of love, so that they may consider their own views.

This is what I was talking about last week. This is the kind of obscuring truth that I mean. The problem goes way beyond this, and is not just about South Asian students. 

I think the only way to combat this dominant narrative is for me to become more visible, and to help my students become more visible in disseminating other narratives.

http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1231278/lost-words

“Local primary students have no problem reading and writing the Chinese characters for common words such as “mushroom”, “pumpkin” or even “universal suffrage”. Not so for Pakistani girl Igra Khan, who is in Form Three.

Although she followed her mother to Hong Kong when she was 10 months old, Khan is lagging behind her local peers in Chinese-language skills. She can speak the language fluently owing to her mingling with local children in school, but her reading and writing is weak. The importance of the language in Hong Kong means ethnic minority students like her have a bleak future, with little hope of getting into local universities.

A survey carried out by the Equal Opportunities Commission last year showed that students from South Asia, such as Pakistanis and Nepalis, accounted for 3.2 per cent of primary school pupils, but only 1.1 per cent of senior secondary students and 0.59 per cent of tertiary education students.

Their under-representation in local higher education has caught the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. At a meeting in March, it urged the Hong Kong government to implement the recommendation of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to “intensify its efforts to encourage the integration of students of ethnic minorities in public school education” and to report back within one year.

More than 10,000 ethnic minority pupils study at mainstream primary and secondary schools, and at schools that cater specifically to them. The 31 “designated” schools offer a much simpler Chinese curriculum than mainstream schools because of students’ diverse Chinese-language levels. Local families often shun these schools, worried that their children will be exposed to negative influences from, for example, perceived behavioural problems of children from ethnic minority families.

The large curricular gap, many believe, keeps South Asians at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

Khan’s 18-year-old sister, who moved to the territory at the age of 10, had so much trouble learning Chinese that she quit school altogether. She now works at a laundry.

Many believe in the necessity of a more advanced curriculum that offers systematic training in Chinese, backed by proper assessments and clear learning objectives, to help students like Igra and her sister come to grips with the language. But that requires support from the government, including the provision of teacher training.

“Many schools like ours want to see a curriculum that reaches the level of Form Three. That would allow students to understand newspapers and office documents. The standard of Chinese in the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination is too high for non-Chinese speakers,” says Ho Sau-yin, principal of Islamic Kasim Tuet Memorial College.

Her school prepares students for the British General Certificate of Education (GCE) examination in Chinese – the level of which is only equivalent to Primary Six to Form One in mainstream schools. Such a standard is hardly enough to get one into university or qualify for a job as a civil servant.

At present, the teaching of Chinese varies among designated schools owing to limited resources, adds Fermi Wong Wai-fun, the founder of rights organisation Unison. Some South Asian students, frustrated with their lack of competency, have dropped out of school.

“Many have come to us seeking help in finding jobs,” she says. “They have only finished Form One or Two but have lost interest in learning. They lacked support in learning Chinese even when they were in primary school. Some came to the conclusion that they are not fit to be educated, but that is not true. There is a problem with the system. Talent is being wasted. The provision of Chinese learning in some schools is illogical, sometimes giving K3 material to students at P4 level.”

Thas Mohamed – a second-year Indian student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who attended an international school and a local private primary school – had his recent application for internship at Microsoft rejected because of his lack of Chinese-language skills. At primary school, he took Chinese as a third language.

“There was not much reading to do,” he says. “I did not really think much about whether I needed it before, but now I’m at university, I am trying to learn Putonghua by taking courses.”

In Igra’s case, lacking support from her family, she failed at Chinese dictation at a mainstream primary school. At the end of Primary Six, she had the option of going to a Band Three government school (the poorest in academic standards in the government sector) but decided to attend a designated school instead as her mother was worried about discipline problems there.

Wong and others have warned about lingering inter-generational poverty among South Asians and resulting social problems if there is no remedy to the situation. Some Indian women dropouts, she says, get married at a young age and face an even heavier burden from their new families and, in some cases, abuse by their husbands.

Census statistics from 2011 show that among all working non-Chinese males, Pakistanis and Nepalis had the lowest median monthly income – of HK$10,000 and HK$12,000 respectively – against a median of HK$13,000 for the general Hong Kong working population.

Director-general of Oxfam Hong Kong, Stephen Fisher, says about one in seven South Asians are on social security. “Many of those who work are construction workers, security guards or goods deliverers. The girls work in restaurants.”

He echoes Wong’s call for the government to help ethnic minority students get equal footing in their pursuit of further education and, eventually, gainful employment. “Many of them can speak but not read or write the language. Since the handover, the government has upheld the bilingual language policy requiring all civil servants to be proficient in both Chinese and English. But the GCE A-level score obtained by ethnic minority students does not reach the standard required.”

He also lambasts the government for failing to acknowledge the need to help the students overcome their handicap. “In most cases they are concentrated in designated schools; occasionally there are one or two who make it to a Band One school. Overall, many in secondary schools drop out in Form Three. The current system is not just and is creating poverty,” he says, calling the existence of designated schools a form of discrimination.

Wong, the veteran rights campaigner, urges the EOC to investigate the problem. “What is lacking now is political will and an equal concern for all,” she says.

life@scmp.com”

My classes usually have visitors. We get students and teachers from other schools, student-teachers, researchers, community members, or friends. Recently we had visiting professors/researchers from the University of Sydney, the University of Hong, HK Baptist University, and  University of Madrid. So I decided I wanted some kind of souvenir to give our visitors, and I made this little booklet. I will have students in my form 2 class make one, and I just turned this one into an ibook also. I plan to make them available when my students do presentations outside our campus.