Rajiva Wijesinha and English Education in Sri Lanka

Rajiva Wijesinha: As a radical who strived to ‘revolutionize’ English education in Sri Lanka

Colombo Telegraph

English, in the present global context, has descended from its colonial prestigious position to a highly utilitarian level where it (English), according to Mr. Tony Reilly, the Country Director of the British Council, ‘has become the passport to wealth and opportunity’. Hence the role of English today should be understood not by means of its colonial terms but in terms of its modern   usefulness. The use of English expands from the global world of work to academic arenas, where new knowledge is produced. Today, rather than being understood as a demarcation of belongingness, English functions as a tool of social mobilization. In a context where English was a class signifier and was termed ‘kaduwa’, very few people in Sri Lanka understood this potential global metamorphosis at least two decades back. When Sri Lanka decided to broaden its horizons to the globalized economy, there was a burning need to change the conventional approach towards language learning policy. To materialize the country’s need to expand English language education, certain radical approaches were a terrible requirement at the time. Rajiva Wijesinha belonged to one of those who not only could foresee the need of English for the country’s younger generation to move forward in the global sphere of work and education but could also produce an implementable mechanism that would pragmatically enhance the English language literacy of especially those who emerge from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Prof. Wijesinha identified two significant steps to radicalize English education in the country. The first was to broaden English language learning from Colombo based elites (and some other middle class contexts) to non-English speaking environments, where thousands of students do not get an opportunity to learn the language. To facilitate this, the second step was to produce a sufficient number of teachers who could work in those areas. When Prof. Wijesinha undertook to co-ordinate English in the Affiliated University Colleges in the early 1990s, he found good ground to experiment his initial conceptualization. It must also be mentioned here that the Affiliated Universities were also an experimental remedy to give skill oriented education to A/L passed students who were not absorbed into higher education. On the other hand, even those who entered universities could not find satisfactory jobs for the education that they received there. There was always a mismatch in the kind of education offered in the post-colonial universities and the requirements in the employments. Prof. Wijesinha explored this valuable opportunity as the Co-ordinator in English in Affiliated Universities to prepare students for future demands of employability. After two revolutions in the post independent context, the country actually felt the need to address the controversial issue of the future place of its youth. Dr. Wijesinha as a radical intellectual himself at that time, used to write on the subjects of politics and youth and the nature of politics that excluded youth from mainstream politics. It is a historical demand that was bestowed upon Prof. Wijesinha who unhesitantly took up the challenge to modernize English language teaching in the existing university curriculum.

His approach was simple. His want was to change the prevalent literature-based curriculum in the English departments. Literature was considered (and still is) prestigious and contemporary English Departments did not take part in teaching general English, and it was mostly assigned to English Language Teaching Units (ELTUs). Under this circumstance, however, ELTUs were doing the most important job in catering to the basic English language requirement of the undergraduates. Numerically, when English Departments absorb even less than ten students annually, ELTUs taught an entire batch of thousands of students at a time.  Prof. Wijesinha did not separate these essential components in language learning but craftily amalgamated the two without harming their inherent essence. Very simply, he used literature as a tool of basic language learning, which challenged the ‘hegemonic approach’ to literature. Literature then was not taught for the sake of literature itself and many people who had a ‘puritan’ approach to literature in the conventional English Departments did not tolerate this.

In the universities, literature (as well as philosophy) has always been an isolated entity of non-reference. Everybody seemed to have an unwritten agreement about its unquestioning existence. No one wanted to find out what was actually going on these departments and their contribution to the country’s development.  Literature gained its prestigious position after 1920 when it was considered as a discipline of higher, literate and superior beings.  It was believed to have characteristics that could enlighten individuals and bring them to a higher level of enlightenment and being.  As a discipline which had the potential to increase individuals’ critical ability and humanistic thoughts, it evolved into a higher academic position from an evening reader over a cup of coffee.  This thinking about literature was the exact ideological foundation for many English Departments in post-independent Sri Lanka. Under this environment, the amalgamation that Prof. Wijesinha brought forth challenged the very ideological foundation of English teaching in the Universities and the symbol of this hybridist child is the present English Language Teaching Department (ELTD) in the Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka.

His Affiliated University experiment was able to produce a considerable number of Diploma holders in English and later graduates who mostly received teaching opportunities in the school system island-wide. Their service is of tremendous significance to poor school children who struggle with lack of qualified teachers in the government schools in distant areas. Some of them are senior teachers with more than ten years of service.  Similarly, some those contemporary students were absorbed into university teaching, while there are also few leading journalists working in popular newspapers. These products exemplify the legacy that Prof. Wijesinha carries along with his university academic career.

Though originally from Colombo, Prof. Wijesinha never hesitated to come and join Sabaragamuwa University which was located 160 kilometers away from the capital city.  As the Co-ordinator for English during the Affiliated days, he went to all the Affiliated University Colleges around the country and sometimes undertook teaching other than co-ordinating and supervising. Rather than simply lecturing, he always insisted on careful reading for the accurate comprehension of a literary text. In the meanwhile, he used to teach grammar lessons which he thought useful within a literary text.  He, for the first time, introduced the ‘spot text method’ of evaluation to the classroom, where students had to write a brief account on something within a limited time.  For this kind of test, note reading or by-hearting never helped and everything depended on how you handle the task effectively and creatively with least amount of mistakes. This method was challenging to those who re-produced their own undergraduate notes to students. Though it was initially difficult for us, this helped immensely to improve our comprehension and self-study. In this regard, for us, he was novel and challenging in testing and evaluation too. One important thing to mention here is that he never took more than one week to mark an assignment however big the number was. While travelling too, as another example of his dedication as a teacher, I have experienced that he used to mark assignment scripts when he used to run the undergraduate course for the officer cadets in the Military Academy- Diyathalawa. This was exactly the same when he was the English Co-ordinator for the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, Oluvil. Since I here mentioned the South Eastern University, one must remember that during the heydays of ethnic tension in the Eastern Sri Lanka, Prof. Wijesinha used to visit both Addalachchena and Oluvil complexes of the South Eastern University located nearly 400 kilometers away from Colombo to assist the teaching and evaluation process there, where I started my university career.

Some of his students (today senior academics in prestigious local universities) pointed me out that, however, some of these experimental initiatives had begun even during his Sri Jayawardanapura University career right before he joined Sabaragamuwa. While he was attached to the Department of Language and Culture at Jayawardanapura and he used to encourage students who did not have English as an A/L qualification to do English at an undergraduate level. Apart from this, English medium education and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) were also his prime objectives at an early stage like 1990s. When he was the advisor to the Ministry of Education somewhere in the mid 2000s, when Dr. Tara de Mel was the Secretary to the Ministry of Education, he especially facilitated English medium education and, as a result, many government schools can now conduct classes in English medium. He was also brave to promote many undergraduate programmes to be conducted in English medium only.

I have never come across an academic who could travel like Prof. Wijesinha for academic purposes. For example, he starts his journey from Colombo with his beloved driver Kithsiri and would come direct to Sabaragamuwa University at Belihuloya, then moving to Diyathalawa and then to Oluvil in the same week catering to approximately both thousand literature and general English students island wide. To facilitate this massive venture, he printed few grammar and reading texts, which simplified the task of teaching English grammar for beginners, while it contributed massively to the development of the ‘Sri Lankan Writing in English’ genre.

Another wonderful life lesson that we learnt from him was simplicity (which many of us have forgotten in the fetish commodity market) as a university academics. Born to a wealthy middle class family in Colombo and having obtained a doctorate from Oxford, he never wanted a luxurious life. I could still remember the old yellow colored Fiat he used nearly ten years to go around the country during his university teaching career. He scarified the most energetic days of his life for students who came from rural backgrounds but never dreamt to catch the stars in the bourgeois world. All the time, he worked according to what he believed right and true to his conscience, and to me, ninety percent out of hundred they were accurate.

He is still governed by the universal signifiers of values inculcated in him during the best days of Oxford education. Though many people do not like him for not following in the cattle mentality of present politics, he still believes in principles and what is right. Universal values demarcate his political acts and many recent events bear witness to that. The word ‘radical’ is often associated with revolutionary politics in a Marxist context, but looking retrospectively at what we experienced from 1990s up to date in relation to English education, we can, without much argument, call Prof. Wijesinha a true rebel and a radical, who brought about significant changes to modern English education after 1978. These steps actually made free education much more meaningful for the under-privileged segments in Sri Lanka in translating their upward social mobility into a reality.