Art: Abstract in Blue, Yellow, Green by John Timothy Robinson
This article is an excerpt from Nyla Ali Khan’s new book:
Education that Heals and Facilitates Evolution
by Nyla Ali Khan
Education, whether at the grassroots level or in institutions on higher education, ideally,enables greater participation in decision-making processes that impact the larger community. I recalled Martha Nussbaum’s anecdote about a “program in rural Bihar run by the Patna-centered NGO Adithi,” which, despite the lack of infrastructure, encouraged “creative education.” Nussbaum, on her visit to that NGO, noted that the women who were enrolled in the adult literacy program were stimulated by the assignment of delineating the “power structure of their village,” because they recognized that the ability to “read and write” gave them the tools to criticize “entrenched structures of power” (282). They celebrate “education as an antidote to fear and oppression” (ibid., 283). I would argue that students in rural as well as urban areas require teachers that are passionately invested in and involved with the educational process. If educators and students are focused merely on rote learning, their imaginations become impoverished, further conscripting their intellectual and emotional capabilities. Such students lack the tools to effectively question the authority or will of others. They also lack insight the forms, wielding, and distribution of civic power. In several parts of the world, including India, “the status quo ante was a deadening education that imposed learning from outside, with little attention to the growing mind of the child.” (ibid., 284).
Were students in academic institutions in Jammu and Kashmir being treated like automatons? Was enough being done to enable these students to articulate their own stories while developing curricula and applied research? Did they have the vocabulary to delineate their experiences and understanding? Students majoring in various disciplines/ professions require the support of faculty. Faculty members can play an incomparable role in enabling students to build confidence, develop holistically, and cultivate skills that would enable them to attain academic success. On July 15, 2019, I was invited to the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, to make a presentation on “Effective teaching-learning process, and my experience of teaching in the United States” as part of the 83 rd General Orientation Course. The objective of these courses as delineated in the newsletter of the University Grants Commission (UGC)-Human Resource Development Center of the University of Kashmir is to “provide adequate opportunities for the professional, personality and career development of teachers in higher education system within the framework of knowledge society and to inculcate values, motivation, and skills required in their art of teaching” [sic]. The audience at my presentation comprised 42 newly appointed teachers/ lecturers of various colleges and universities across Jammu and Kashmir.
Keeping the mission underlined above in mind, I decided it would be best to forge dialogue with my audience by discussing strategies that worked best in the classroom for each one of us. In order to generate discussion and not deliver a monologue, it was necessary for me to establish a rapport with them and acknowledge their cultural emphasis on deference to authority figures, which made them rely on their students’ ability to learn by rote instead of encouraging them to “unveil the ‘truth’ of human existence and experience” (Zhan 98). Nussbaum takes note of the “deeper flaws in India’s system (or systems, in the various states) of public education.” She notes “an excessive emphasis on rote learning and ‘teaching to the test’” as major deficiencies that hinder the intellectual growth of students (265). More pertinently, she observes that while science and technology are two growing areas of interest in India, the virtues of critical thinking and freedom to broaden intellectual horizons, which are “so crucial to the health of a democracy, are sorely neglected” (265).
I recognized that presenting myself as a know-it-all Western-trained academic would be anathema to the people I was addressing and would end up alienating them. I also took cognizance of the diversity of the group I was addressing. Although all the young academics in the audience had come of age in the conflictual years of Jammu and Kashmir, it was not a homogeneous group. They varied in terms of quality of education, ethnicity, primary language, and socioeconomic status. They also varied in terms of their research skills, understanding of heterogeneity, facility with the English language, acculturation to an urban environment or lack thereof, and ability to generate a creative exchange of ideas in the classroom. There were very few female teachers/ lecturers in the group, a couple of whom wore burqas and did not remove their face coverings during my interactions with them. Although I was sensitive to the additional pressures on female academics to conform to gender norms, particularly in a conservative society, it was a bit of an adjustment for me to address people whose facial expressions were not visible. While it wasn’t my intention to touch anyone’s raw nerve, I pointed out, with as much subtlety as I could muster, that none of us was above her/ his “own conflicts, ambivalences, rage, helplessness, losses, feelings of revenge, guilt, hope, and other internal processes resulting from large-group conflicts—or simply due to some events in our personal environments” (Volkan, “Enemies”). Were we, as responsible educators, inclined to weave “the influence of external events and traumas associated with those events” into our pedagogy and practice without detracting from our students’ sense of agential capacities and ability to exert control? (Volkan, Nazi Legacy 9).
In order to set the stage for an exchange of ideas, I began by examining my own subjectivity, biases, and perceptions. It has been my persistent endeavor, particularly at the public talks that I give, to encourage students/ researchers/ faculty to examine the purported notion of “objectivity” in research and teaching. “The complexity” of human subjectivities “presents a special challenge to researchers when they interpret and reflect on how personal values influence those interpretations” (Zhan 98). I then went on to assess how the pedagogical methods, which I employ in my classes, are suffused with ideologies and discourses that had impacted my identity formation. I believed then, as I do now, that in order to empower our students with a sense of agency as well as a sense of responsibility to themselves and the larger community, it was incumbent upon us to analyze our motives. Was I guilty of imposing my own values and biases on the texts and materials I discussed in my classes? Or did I successfully encourage my students to challenge the dominant culture’s stereotypical interpretations? Did I give my students the tools to observe, with clarity, the role that “historical events and traumas play . . . in structuring individuals’ personal psychology throughout generations” (Volkan 13)? Could they appreciate nuanced opinions and articulate their own positions effectively?
Educators that are sensitized to political, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender differences assess and evaluate how their perspectives impact their pedagogy. It is my firm conviction that a holistic education is not merely about the memorization of “facts,” data, and statistics, but is “personally meaningful, socially relevant, culturally accurate, pedagogically sound, and politically responsible” (Zhan 102). I have found that an educator cannot fulfill her/ his responsibility of positively molding young minds unless she/ he examines and analyzes the “dangerous prejudices” to which she/ he might be susceptible. Educators who have not worked with diverse cultural and social groups might lack the self-reflexivity to evaluate their “sentiments about the Other” and how to avoid transmitting those unexamined and prejudicial notions “to the generations” after theirs (Volkan, Enemies). In order to delve into the labyrinthine worlds of human emotions, ideologies, hegemonies, and the creation of a conducive cultural environment, I described the learning needs of my students in Oklahoma, and my constant endeavors to improve their learning needs of by assigning critical thinking tasks to them, which enhanced their sense of autonomy.
I thought the most effective way of bridging the divide between my experience with American students and their experiences with Kashmiri students would be by relating an anecdote about teaching Kashmir in an Oklahoma classroom, which I had written about for a couple of publications. In spring 2010, I taught translations of Kashmiri short stories in my Senior Seminar on World Literature at the University of Oklahoma. Efficacious teaching, for me, intertwines critical thinking with civic engagement and activism. The students asked several insightful questions during the discussion, some of which were, “What is the political status of Kashmir?” “Are any women in positions of decision making in that part of the world?” “Is the exotic description of Kashmir in novels, poems, and travelogues an attempt to dehistoricize and decontextualize the region and its people?” “How is the reductive portrayal of Kashmir as a romantic and exotic locale going to make the primarily Western readership of, for example, some short stories on Kashmir and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories aware of the political upheaval in the region?” “Why are we talking about political allegory?” “Is there an inextricable link between pedagogy and politics?” “Why can’t the intelligentsia in Kashmir and diasporic Kashmiri intellectuals forge a coalition to come up with feasible solutions to the conundrum?”
My students had been unaware of the political swamp in Kashmir prior to our discussion. It was, therefore, encouraging to hear them make intelligent comments about worldviews other than Western-centric ones. I recounted that my students had discerningly debated issues of sovereignty; representative nature of democracy or lack thereof; discourse of human rights and the duty of international powers to protect fundamental rights in politically conflictual environments, pluralism as an antidote to the orthodoxy of ethnocentric politics, the construction of identity politics, and the implosion of the boundary between state and religion. My attempt was to provide instantiations of how analogous reasoning can be employed to process unfamiliar information and debate problem-solving ideas.
As I’ve said on other forums, the perpetuation of a politics that creates and emphasizes cultural myopia and monocultural identities in diverse societies would be the bane of our existence (“Extremism is the Bane of Our Existence”). In order to keep bigotry, which is manifesting itself in various shapes and forms all over the world, younger generations need to be exposed to the multiplicity in their societies and polities in respectful, inquisitive, self-reflexive, and critical atmosphere (See also Nussbaum 301).
Those of us who seek to empower the youth through our roles as educators must have the foresight to pay attention to whether the legislation and execution of political, economic, and social policies and programs in contemporary South Asia is successfully addressing women’s as well as men’s experiences and concerns. While focusing on reforms within institutions of higher learning is important, it is just as important, if not more, to envision new ways of healing traumas caused by conflict and power relations within a hierarchic patriarchal structure. I consider it necessary to envision fresh strategic interventions that would take cognizance of people’s experiential knowledge as well as lived experiences vis-à-vis displacement, social disruptions, and political political disenfranchisement.
Works Cited
Khan, Nyla Ali. “Extremism is the Bane of Our Existence.” counterpunch.org, CounterPunch, 22 April 2016,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/22/extremism-is-the-bane-of-our-existence/.
Accessed 20 June 2020.
Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Volkan, Vamik. Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey through War and Peace.
North Carolina: PitchStone Publishing, 2013. EBSCOhost,
file:///C:/Users/Nyla/AppData/Local/Temp/ebscohost.pdf
—. A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and
Remembering Through Action. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Zhan, Lin. “Diversity Research Initiatives: Reflection and Thoughts.” In Asian American Voices:
Engaging, Empowering, Enabling. Edited by Lin Zhan. New York: National League for Nursing,
2009: 91-106.
In the author’s words:
Nyla Ali Khan is the author of Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones: Transforming, Not Transmitting Trauma, Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan has also served as an guest editor working on articles from the Jammu and Kashmir region for Oxford University Press (New York), helping to identify, commission, and review articles. She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com.
“The oracle neither explains nor conceals, but shows by a sign.” –Heraclitus
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030662257
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415803083/
http://us.macmillan.com/islamwomenandviolenceinkashmirhttp://us.macmillan.com/theparchmentofkashmir/NylaAliKhanhttp://worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/march/parchment-kashmir-history-society-and-polity#.USz3n-3TnIU
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/edinjnNGsEYJyhfiUvrv/full#.UmsrtRDVvIU
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref:oiso/9780199764464.001.0001/acref-9780199764464-e-0016?rskey=WPv3N6&result=171
http://wgs.publishpath.com/interview-with-nyla-ali-khan-from-oxford-islamic-studies-onlinehttp://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-life-of-a-kashmiri-woman-nyla-ali-khan/?K=9781137465634
About the artist:
John Timothy Robinson is a traditional, mainstream citizen and holds a Regent’s Degree. He minored in Studio Art: Printmaking. John is also a ten-year educator for Mason County Schools in Mason County, WV. He is a published poet with seventy-six literary works appearing in fifty-nine journals and websites since August 2016 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In Printmaking, his primary medium is Monotype and Monoprint process with interest in collagraph, lithography, etching and nature prints. John also has an interest in photography and collage art.
Published work;
“A Grotesque” appears in The Diagram Issue 16.6 2016.
“Red Triumph with Daffodils” was published in The Tishman Review 2017.
“Gold Fusion” first appeared in New England Review 2017.
“Golden Bridge 1,” “The Cook,” “Crying Woman” (block image), “Religious Figure 1,” “Orchard Keeper,” “War Face,” “Candle,” “Iris” (after Ayres Magenta 1), “Pioneer Cabin” (photo) and “Old Car; Mt. Carmel Ridge” (photo) first appeared in New Plains Review print and online 2017. “Blue Abstract” first appeared at Inscape Journal of Brigham Young University 2017.
“Leaf Image” was published in Twyckenham Notes 2018.
“Synapse Tree” first appeared in Mud Season Review 2018.
“Coral I” first appeared in Packingtown Review, Issue 11, winter 2018.
“Latent Heart,” “Color Abstract in Pastel Tones,” “Color Field,” “Violet Field Action Painting” and “Golden Bridge” were first published in Empty Mirror in 2018.
“Cups Design,” “Golden Bridge 4,” “Still Life; Objects on Table plate photo,” “Pool at the Edge of the Mountain,” “Sphere and Rectangle,” “The Magic Circle” and “Transforming” first appeared in aamora: An International blog for artists, photographers and writers in 2018.
“Golden Bridge (red sky 1-5 10-4-2011” was first published at Wise Review 2018.
“Still life; Objects on Table” (blue chair, orange wall) first appeared in Duende 2018.
“Brick Image” and “The Outhouse” (photos) were first published at Reservoir Journal 2018.
“Transform to Lesser Fade” and “Crying Woman” (b/w) first appeared online at Thirteenth Nerve 2018.
“Bruce Chapel” (photo) first appeared at River River Writers Circle 2018.
Essays on Printmaking;
“An Aesthetic for Printmaking” was accepted at Empty Mirror in 2018.
Artist Statement for Printmaking;
For me, the only valid printmaking today is the process-oriented, research approach. I have an interest in the concept of the painterly print. Sometimes my work in this technique resembles Impressionist or Expressionist painting. Approaching printmaking as a student consistently renews itself and often incorporates much of what we presently know through study of the larger, international historical context. Knowing past techniques and methods has also enabled us to come to greater awareness of their varied cultural origins as well as a greater sense of the nature of art and life for the given individual. This is only possible to know through careful study of past printmakers and artists, their methods and techniques, their innovations and thoughtful insights on art and process. I see no difference between printmaking and any other medium in terms of artistic goals. Printmaking can be executed as a single medium or can incorporate multiple mediums at once. I am always researching, trying to emulate various techniques, learning from them ways to improve my own awareness. Art should arrest human attention, make the viewer question, inspire people and even initiate the learning process beyond the context of the work. “An Aesthetic for Printmaking” sets forth my beliefs as a practicing printmaker today.
Contact:
John Timothy Robinson
8869 Five Mile Road
Gallipolis Ferry, WV 25515