“Every class and every topic is an opportunity to connect and learn from one another, explore and express who we are and what moves us, what makes us laugh out loud and cry and jump with joy”

Table of Contents

• Teaching Philosophy
• Teaching Practice
• Impact
  

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy and practice is creative, cross-disciplinary, and genuinely caring for individuals and community. I teach Hindi language, Indian dances, Bollywood film analysis and history, and my research in cross-cultural philosophy permeates my pedagogy. In my classes my students and I engage with South Asian culture(s) critically, creatively, and joyously, while at the same time understanding ourselves, our complex cultures and times, and our global journeys and responsibilities.

Every class and every topic is an opportunity to connect and learn from one another, explore and express who we are and what moves us, what makes us laugh out loud and cry and jump with joy, what ignites our curiosity, self-discovery, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, and cross-cultural adventures, how we can cultivate an empowered sense of self and yet transformative flexibility, how we can be empathetic and ethical in our interactions, and how we can build safe spaces and supportive communities.

Teaching Practice

I base my teaching on my core values of creativity, care, and community, unified into one integrated pedagogical practice, which guides me in shaping my course content and techniques. My language students build a solid grammatical and communicative competence and critically engage with South Asian culture(s). With and in order to build that competence, my students also write beautiful original poetry, make lyrical short films, write children’s books, make news reports, create deeply introspective pieces, sing and dance, write and perform absolutely hilarious skits and reels, and do many such creative projects. What fundamentally motivates our creativity is my genuine care and investment in their well-being and joy. Rather than a top-down approach, I recognize that every class is different; each student has irreplaceable value as an individual and a human being, and each one brings unique life experiences, interests, and expertise to share. Every semester, we create topics and projects that are deeply meaningful to us. One of the most heartwarming, poetic, and introspective pieces that I do at all levels of language instruction is “Who am I” – an original poetry writing project. Students individually write very different but equally soul-searching poems. Whether it’s philosophically questioning one’s place in the universe or letting go of your sense of self; whether it’s looking back at simple moments of your childhood or diving into the ocean that one’s ancestors once crossed, whether it’s exploring the metaphors of another culture or conscientiously inhabiting another language-world, a project like this allows them to leverage their strengths and experiences while creating an equitable and multidisciplinary poetic playing field. For another project titled “Coping with COVID” that we did during the pandemic, we interviewed each other in Hindi about our struggles and lessons of isolation, community, and well-being. It is part of my practice to combine language learning with students’ own academic and personal pursuits. To give an example or two: A few years ago, my beginning Hindi students co-wrote, directed, and performed hilarious parodies of blockbuster Bollywood movies. Recently, a project titled “Dancing Behind the Scenes” was created by an advanced Hindi student who was also a dancer in my Kennedy Mainstage choreography which won national recognition. Last semester, an Asian Studies graduate student and an opera singer performed at the Honolulu Museum of Art; she sang with me a Hindi verse translation of the Sanskrit Hymn of Creation from the oldest of Vedic scriptures; she is currently writing in Urdu about Muslim mourning rituals and literature. Projects like these not only bring tremendous joy to our lives, but also inspire us to create safe spaces, and push us to take positive action for diversity and inclusion. The examples are many, ongoing, and revised and repeated in subsequent semesters, and they “intentionally, explicitly, and substantially” address the Student Learning Objectives at various tiers – from language proficiency to the famous 5 Cs of language learning (and 6th C of creativity), from respectfully understanding (South) Asian cultures to cultivating a critical self-awareness in global perspectives. Through these language projects, we have also been able to flow organically among disciplines and topics: colonialism (and post and decolonial discourses), physical and mental health, embodied knowledge, gender and sexuality, social justice and peace, diaspora and identity, comparative and historical linguistics, religious beliefs and practices, mythology, food, travel, art, history, politics, and the pan(aca)demic crises, and these creative projects can themselves be adapted across other academic disciplines. Creative Project-, Performance-, and Person-Based Pedagogy has now become my core practice that has made us better learners, compassionate colleagues, and happier people.

I design and revise these projects to cater them systematically to the learning levels and needs of individual students as well as of the group as a whole. I provide authentic models, templates, or examples that we first study as reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing material; we extract and learn the necessary vocabulary and language structures, devise plans, scaffolding, and storyboards for our own projects, develop our concepts and our written and recorded drafts, which we revise several times; we practice pronunciation, flow, and musicality of our dialogues or poems or voice-over texts; and bring it all together in cohesive, high-quality works and stories. At the same time, we document our process from concept to product, so others can implement such creativity in any classroom for any language.

It’s my privilege that I get to teach the two most existentially fundamental modes of our being – language and movement. For me, teaching is the most joyous and meaningful aspect of this profession. I have never thought of it as a unidirectional, hierarchical flow of information and skill from expert to novice or a reward/punishment based assessment process. Neither have I thought of language or dance as tools to make students into future consumers of a culture. It is worth restating my teaching philosophy here, that whatever I teach, the subject or the topic becomes the medium and mode through which we can connect and learn from one another, explore who we are and what moves us, what makes us laugh out loud and cry and jump, what ignites our curiosity, self-discovery, creativity, and cross-cultural adventures, how we can cultivate an empowered sense of self and yet transformative flexibility, how we can be empathetic and ethical in our interactions, and how we can build safe spaces and supportive communities. Community building and community engagement is a powerful impact of this creative practice, which I will discuss in the next section.

Impact

The impact of creative projects on student learning is tremendous and palpable. In the “Who am I” project, for example, students write absolutely brilliant and high-quality publishable poetry in Hindi; their pronunciation, fluency, and recitational musicality improves considerably. Their assessment of all skills is a continuous process, with several one-on-one sessions to ensure clarity, transparency, quality, and agreement. The process anticipates and proactively helps individual students where they need most help and also revise and improve their work until their final product and performance is of A+ quality and makes both the students and me happy and proud of our creative and linguistic choices. In post-project activities, students prove that they successfully retain the language structures, vocabulary, usage, etc, and can apply them to real life authentic conversations.

But much beyond that, throughout the process, through the semesters, and even after several years, we still convey to one another how impactful our creative pedagogy has been. Students state in their evaluations similar sentiments such as this: “[h]er teaching methods…make for a more fulfilling experience…I am…a better student, a better fan of all things India and an overall better person.” Some students have continued to learn Hindi and Urdu beyond their language requirement; others have gone on to do Masters and PhDs in South Asian fields. My creative pedagogies are not only informing my teaching; they are contributing to innovating the existing teaching practices in the field with break-through methods and models that should be adapted in other classrooms. To that end, I have just received a Department of Education grant through the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program for my project titled “Hindi, Urdu Language Learning and South Asian Studies: Innovating an Interdisciplinary Curriculum with Digital Storytelling.” I have also been invited to publish scholarly work on my pedagogy or care, creativity, and community.

Beyond language learning, these practices have gone a long way in building self-awareness, empathy, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary connections and communities. It is interesting to trace how my Hindi classes initiated dance practice and community engagement, which then resulted in creating a dance course for university credit. In the Hindi classroom, I would teach vocabulary kinesthetically with interpretive movements; the joy of that learning led us to meet weekly for free dance classes. We claimed visible, public spaces to dance, invited experts and novices alike to join us; people from all ages and walks of life came to learn and teach. This soon blossomed into creating choreographies, learning various regional folk dances from India, understanding dance as interpretation of words and poetry, enjoying yet critically discussing Bollywood films. Viewers and we dancers shared with one another how this community initiative was bringing joy in people’s lives; how it was helping us overcome anxiety, trauma, depression; how it was creating spaces not just to survive but to thrive, building confidence, positive body awareness, and self-esteem, creating an artistic and supportive community who helped and encouraged us to take on adventures we never thought we would. Honolulu Museum of Art opened its doors for us to perform and teach, especially in conjunction with the Bollywood Film Festival; other local institutions, community groups welcomed us too, and this led to inter-Asian artistic exchange and collaboration. With this joyous presence in the community, the university then asked me to create a dance and film history course for credit, which would add to the Asian course spectrum in various departments. The dance classes then led to major theater productions, further concerts, critically engaging with underrepresented regional South Asian traditions, art forms, and practices of spirituality. Such organically growing and flowing channels between academia and community, between language and the arts, between art and critical thinking, between cultures, and simply between people are indeed what is at the heart of my work in Public Humanities.