All posts by Shyam Sharma

Teaching in Nepal: Choice, Chance, and Being the Change in the World

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, Teacher Education

By Praveen Yadav, Kathmandu, Nepal

Teaching, especially in schools, in Nepal is considered an easy profession. In fact, people in many other professions use teaching as a convenient start to their careers. Due to limited job opportunities, teaching is an easy way to fund higher education for young people.

So, when I was invited by a colleague at EdConteXts to share my personal and professional stories about teaching in Nepal, I did a quick survey with 72 teachers in a business college where I am working. My key question was: “Is teaching your choice or did you pick it by chance?” I wanted to know what factors affected the “choice” to become teachers.

Seventy percent of responders said that they chose teaching by chance. While those who chose teaching deliberately had studied “education” as their academic stream, those who picked this profession by chance said they did so because this was their only choice. A few colleagues chose it as hobby first and then developed an interest or even passion later on.

My Own Story of Becoming a Teacher
My own story of becoming a teacher started by chance at first.

Born and brought up in a poor family in remote rural district of Saptari, I could sense my parents struggling to send me to school as early as middle school. As pragmatic and simple village folks, they decided not to send me for further studies when I somehow finished high school. They wanted me to support my younger siblings to get a high school education.

Photo Local ContextFortunately, there was teaching! I could teach in a private school and earn my way into college. The only obstacle was that it was not easy to physically move to a place where I could receive my own further education.

But somehow, my parents allowed me to let me move ahead, even though they did not see why I needed education beyond high school. I started at the primary level and moved up to high school as I advanced in my own education. Continue reading Teaching in Nepal: Choice, Chance, and Being the Change in the World →

Bring Your Own Context: Where We Are Matters

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts

by EdConteXts Facilitators*

Emerging academic technologies and how they allow learning and teaching across borders are all the rage. Strangely, discourses about such phenomena as open online learning/teaching usually ignore the fundamental fact that those phenomena are cross-border, cross-context, cross-cultural. It is not just the hype in the media and the grand and often false promises in the marketing of emerging modes of cross-border education that disregard the complexity of cross-border education. Even the most informed educators (in their own contexts) seem to often forget that the many different contexts from which participants and stakeholders come are not just different from each other but also diverse from within, that contextual differences and complexities need to temper our ambitions, that effective teaching and learning cannot be defined in universal terms.

In response, an increasing number of educators, scholars/writers, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies around the world are contributing their experiences, ideas, and perspectives from the ground up. Within a short period of time, the conversation that was once dominated by one-way traffic of ideas–as by the idea of education as a supply of “content”–from the few global centers to the rest of the world is quickly becoming multilateral, diverse, and rich as it spreads across the social media. The network of scholars that we are looking to create will hopefully bring together the voices of scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies from across the world. Our objective is to make visible to broader audiences what we have been writing, researching, and working on–and what we will continue to do. Continue reading Bring Your Own Context: Where We Are Matters →