March 05, 2008
The problem with language
Partway through Arundhati Roy’s essay, “Power Politics”, she makes a memorable observation about the use of language in the development world:
“In March 2000, I lived through a writer’s bad dream [the World Water Forum at the Hague]. I witnessed the ritualistic slaughter of language as I know and understand it….As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. ‘Language is the skin on my thought,’ I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me. At The Hague I stumbled on a denomination, a sub-world, whose life’s endeavor was to mask intent. They earn their abundant livings by converting bar graphs that plot their companies’ profits into consummately written, politically exemplary, socially just policy documents that are impossible to implement and designed to remain forever on paper, secret even (especially) from the people they’re written for. They breed and prosper in the space that lies between what they say and what they sell.”
(You can accuse Arundhati Roy of a lot of things, but you can’t argue that that her language masks her thought. Her anger is raw on the page, and she does not pretend to be neutral.)
I, too, have noticed myself breaking writing rules when I write for Akshara. Use passive voice instead of active because it’s not worth explaining who is responsible for an action. Avoid describing aspects of data that are too controversial or too unreliable to depend on. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the ritualistic slaughter of language, but I would say that people with different goals can speak radically different languages in response to the same set of bar graphs.
The politics of energy and dams is a bit outside my realm, but it leads me to think about the way language is used in Akshara’s work. There are many types of language barriers I’ve seen play out in my seven months here. To be very specific: during my research on the Karnataka Learning Partnership, I found that nearly 30% of children in Bangalore’s government schools had mother tongues that differed from the language of instruction in their schools, usually Kannada. I’ve met such children – their teachers often know they are struggling to learn Kannada, but continue in Kannada because they feel they must. The children pretend to understand and rarely ask for clarification; the only indication of their struggle is their relatively low achievement on tests. Public discussion about language of instruction focuses on issues of identity (“People in Karnataka should speak Kannada”) rather than issues of learning (“Children learn best in their mother tongues”). Within Akshara there are also language barriers. An Akshara volunteer once asked me (in Kannada) if I worked in the “office where they speak English.” The language barriers between people at different levels and from different communities – which in some ways relate to class background – are always somehow overcome, but are never really talked about.
But there are other language barriers I’ve observed that are even more complex. One is the contrast between the language of research and the language of politics. By now, I’ve seen several government meetings in which language is a means of filling the air rather than a way of creating understanding or clarifying ideas. Documents are political safeguards rather than a way of transferring knowledge. Often teachers we interview tell us programmes are “good” with such uniform insistence that I begin to wonder if “good” really means “I am too busy to talk to you.” When collecting data at Akshara, I’ve often encountered the problem of staff following a policy of “no news is good news,” choosing to speak when something good has happened and to disappear rather than explaining when something goes wrong.
When a researcher uses language, she tries to be neutral and comprehensive about it. When I was home in Massachusetts for a couple of weeks in December, I met with K, a professor at Harvard. “How do you present data in such a way that it makes an impact?” I asked him. “Stick to your methodology, he replied. Focus on what you’ve done and make it so good that no one can argue with it. Keep it simple. And keep it neutral. An academic isn’t a policymaker. People may not know who I am, but they know the numbers I’ve revealed in my research. I just share everything I’ve done; it’s their job to interpret it.”
Yes, I thought, but it takes a newspaper or an activist to interpret data in such a way that people know your numbers. Most people don’t want to poke around the methodology sections of research papers. They tend to believe the statistics they like and question the ones they don’t. Most people are the opposite of academics: they build the argument, and then look for the numbers to back it up.
After all, who can afford to play with neutrality like an academic? It involves risking your beliefs. It also involves, at times, being self-indulgent and impractical. A few days ago, I was looking through literacy journals and discovered an article titled something like “Innovative Models for Assessing Literacy.” Convinced that it would be helpful, I downloaded it to discover that it offered the sage conclusion that (to paraphrase) “Literacy assessment tools that are smaller, quicker, and cheaper need to be developed.” What practitioner wouldn’t know that? Often the mandates of research – that it be neutral and general – make it so broad as to become useless. Maybe this is the reason another professor I spoke to, a literacy expert, responded to my question of “Can you recommend any other research for me to read to learn about literacy?” by saying “No. Just focus on what your context tells you.”
On the other end of the spectrum, I admire the work of ASER (Annual Survey of Education Report) in presenting research in a neutral way that brings forward useful, accessible knowledge. Even here, however, language barriers become an issue. Karnataka government officials were the only ones in the country to invite ASER designers to discuss their findings. As I watched the presentation, I noticed the disconnect in approach. The presenters were neutral, sharing their learning in a non-judgmental way. Specifically, their presentation indicated that learning levels in Karnataka were relatively low and increasing only slowly (not a particularly surprising finding). The listeners seemed to go on the defensive, assuming that the presentation meant that a) they, as government officials, were responsible for poor learning levels or b) ASER was a better assessment than any other assessment that government had done. They interpreted ASER as a political or personal indictment and responded by filling the discussion with marginal arguments, claiming their own assessments were better than ASER, or referring to the efforts they had made to improve education in their state. The presenters, meanwhile, had not made any accusations: they were simply sharing information.
If one side is presenting information as neutrally as possible – particularly if, as in many research papers, the language is technical and inaccessible – and the other is looking for practical – or politically expedient -- interpretations, there are bound to be miscommunications. Unfortunately, eventually the two worlds end up existing in isolation from one another.
When I attended a conference last month on development in Karnataka, I saw another language barrier play out within the field of NGO education practitioners. This time it was between what I’ve begun to think of as the Big and the Small. These do not necessarily correspond to size. The Big thinks of education strategically, like an epidemiologist. If we want to eradicate this disease in two years, what should we do and whom should we target? If we want to improve learning across the state in two years, how should we operate? The Small thinks either about how to perfect models or how to serve local needs. Children in our town have nowhere to go after school, so we will build an excellent after-school center. There’s a lack of good creative learning, so we will start a school that promotes it. Mid-day meals are bad in schools, so we will provide better ones.
I attended something called an Education Roundtable, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a discussion in which the participants were more wrapped up in their own contexts. People were essentially talking to themselves, or to the people who spoke their language. I categorize Akshara as a Big organization. At one point in the discussion, the issue of testing came up. “Tests are stressful and hamper creativity, and we should try to eliminate them,” was the consensus among some people, who were probably thinking of private educational institutions they run themselves. “Tests are necessary to ensure children are getting their basic rights from the system,” I said, obviously thinking about the government system. This contrast was not discussed.). One person talked about her organization’s efforts to empower people to demand quality education from the government. Another dropped nonchalantly that it was impossible to work with the government system because it was so corrupt, so the only solution was to build powerful models and hope the government would notice. Opposite views, but again, the difference was not discussed. Like a classroom of linguistically diverse children, the Roundtable assumed an imaginary common approach and never acknowledged its basic philosophical differences.
Without acknowledging how complex communication can be, no one can ever move past it.
Posted by gowriv at 09:21 AM | Comments (1)