Led by Sai Bhatawadekar, CSAS faculty members have received a grant from the US Department of Education Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language program, for the project Hindi, Urdu Language Learning and South Asian Studies: Innovating an Interdisciplinary Curriculum with Digital Storytelling (2023-2025).
Project Director Sai Bhatawadekar is Professor of Hindi and Urdu in the Department of Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, as well as Cooperating Graduate Faculty in Theatre and Dance, Philosophy, and Asian Studies, and a former Director of the Center for South Asian Studies. Sai will be leading the creation of Hindi/Urdu videos in her Hindi/Urdu classes, as part of her award-winning creative language teaching pedagogy. Anna Stirr will be leading the collection of faculty-produced videos on South Asian Studies topics, in Hindi/Urdu as well as other South Asian languages, designed for use in advanced Hindi/Urdu classes, South Asian Studies classes, and disciplinary classes addressing the topics these videos cover. Azeema Faizunissa is an assessment specialist for the project, and a valued overall authority on Urdu. We look forward to working with students and faculty on this project over the next few years!
Project Summary
University of Hawai‘i is a unique and diverse institution that is committed to the Asia-Pacific region. Within Asia, Hindi, Urdu, and South Asian Studies create their own educational setting in an international, interdisciplinary, and intercultural context. We have a Center but not a Department of South Asian Studies, and students who come to study Hindi and Urdu come from various disciplines, departments, and research interests: Religion, Philosophy, Urban and Regional Planning, Sociology, Interdisciplinary Studies, Theatre and Dance, Music, Geography, Indian Ocean history, Travel Industry Management, Anthropology, Botany, Chemistry, Mathematics, to name a few. Students are also from diverse and mixed backgrounds including South Asian heritage, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and so on. Their personal interests vary too from exploring cultural heritage, religion, spirituality, and food, to poetry, film, dance, and creative self-expression. Our experience shows that if these students learn through personalized and creative language projects that are directly related to their disciplines and interests, it is transformative both for their language proficiency and its relevant and immediate use in their own research. Additionally, in the last three years, COVID has necessitated new modes of pedagogical delivery and learning. Teaching now has to integrate technology in unprecedented ways in order to facilitate in-person and online, synchronous and asynchronous learning, and this has to be done meaningfully, so students do not feel isolated and distant, but personally and creatively invested in their learning. With these motivations – interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural studies, project-based, person-invested, and social emotional learning, and technology-assisted, multimedia, and creative learning – our project has been developing.
Our objectives and plan are the following:
1. To revise, strengthen, and innovate the Hindi and Urdu language curriculum and South Asian Studies by creating specialized multimedia instructional material, that is project-based, creative, and interdisciplinary. This will include digital storytelling, lyrical short films, video interviews, narratives, and other material for elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, designed flexibly for face-to-face as well as online teaching. These projects will be collaboratively created, evaluated, and revised with currently enrolled students themselves, and with faculty, community, as well as South Asia scholars and artists worldwide.
2. To infuse and integrate this material and methodology into language curriculum as well as South Asia Area Studies courses. Additionally to disseminate these multimedia projects free and online with subtitled videos, transcribed texts, project- and lesson plans, step-by-step action plans, and other language structure and scaffolding resources, so teachers and students worldwide can use and implement them in their classrooms. This is especially important, as even if teaching material may be available in the market, how it is implemented in the classroom and how (far) it succeeds in actual student work is not always documented and made clear to instructors, especially in Less Commonly Taught Languages. The online dissemination of these materials will be done through the Center for South Asian Studies website and also through the well-established website and network of the National Foreign Language Resource Center at UH Mānoa.
3. To develop additional faculty and student expertise in digital storytelling and multimedia project-based pedagogy that will empower them to create authentic material (not just consume) in their own fields that will have meaningful impact. This will be done by offering workshops through the Office of Faculty Development and Academic Support, Center for the Study of Human Language, Interdisciplinary Studies Program, and Center for South Asian Studies