The academic priorities to further one’s education and economic advantages are pushing the young generation of Nepalis to seek opportunities abroad. The competitive test educational system is a path to escape Nepal rather than to stay and build a future here.
More than ever, in the context of diaspora and globalisation, education in Nepal needs a local foundational connection to culture, context and life in the country itself. Education that focuses on local perspectives on life and work enhances a sense of belonging also for those leaving Nepal and hopefully will have a pull factor for returning.
A child’s education includes more than academic priorities. Education includes a wide range of social, emotional and ethical capabilities. Culture constructs our very conceptions of knowledge, ourselves and our identity and participating in it makes possible learning, remembering, speaking and imagining.
The field of education is founded on philosophical questions on the meaning of a good life, and undermining Nepal's cultural heritage of education with its inherent values and philosophies.
These pathways are shown in the close relationship between the guru and the student, in the rituals of self-discipline, or in the practice of caring for domestic animals and growing crops as part of education.
In a cultural approach to education the teachers, communities and learners’ culture, worldviews and value systems are connected to classroom activities. Impulses from the Gurukul and Buddhist pedagogies add value to the academic, social, emotional, ethical and practical capabilities of learners that embrace a wider perspective on education and might also contradict the test-oriented approaches.
In classroom activities, the task is to accomplish a culturally supportive school environment. By connecting lessons to students’ lives, by contextualising curriculum to their home environment creates a stronger sense of belonging and identity.
Classroom activities are thus connected to peoples’ visions of life and work to strengthen identity and local experience as a foundation for teaching and learning.
DEFICIENCY APPROACH
Within teacher education programs, reports and educational research in Nepal there has been a tendency to take a ‘deficiency approach’ to education and educational research, where the point of convergence has been to explore where the failure of education and school reforms might lie.
In much of teacher education and research on education in Nepal, teachers and the communities’ culture and worldviews are seen as barriers to development, viewing teachers and communities from points of failure rather than identifying and acknowledging their desire to contribute to education and students learning.
The deficiency approach to educational research has often maintained a distance between teachers and classroom pedagogies. Empirical evidence shows that when classroom activities are not connected to teachers’ inherent values teaching tends to become more mechanical and as imperatives imposed through reform programs.
These processes have created a classroom discourse that the teachers, communities, and learners inherited values have not been worth pursuing.
Nepal’s cosmologies and cultural heritage in education underpin people’s visions of life and work and contribute to the construction of faith systems. These faith systems provide people with a basis for looking at their life and work that might contradict but also contribute and add value to concepts of ‘modern’ education.
Rather than criticising, comparing, or defining Nepal’s cultural heritage in relation to western ideas of education the focus on local perspectives is to explore and unfold the qualities and values of teachers, students, and the communities of Nepal.
The aim of teacher education, educational research and classroom teaching from a local perspective aims to strengthen identity and document qualities rather than document the failures of teachers and communities to implement imported reform programs.
The aim of unfolding local perspectives in education is to explore emancipatory ideas in Nepal’s pedagogies that are rooted in local inherent values. These contributions to unfold the foundational world views and cultural heritage of education in Nepal gives space for negotiating imported pedagogies not imposing them.
From this perspective, pedagogy is not detached from real situations but are grounded and negotiated in relation to local experiences and knowledge.
This suggests that policy makers look seriously at local context and local pedagogies when designing curricular and educational reforms. These perspectives highlight the urgency and value of incorporating aspects of local cultural context whilst being alert to global educational trends and forces.
Policy makers might be reminded of the advantages of having an appreciation of cultural values and norms and of embracing local cultural perspectives in the drive to strengthen critical thinking, integrity, and an ownership of the process and outcomes of education.
For educational research, describing Nepal’s culture and society by western theoretical concepts, would imply taking a western and external perspective on education and teachers’ lives and work, with the expectations of western values. That would only reveal the inadequacies of these concepts.
Subsequently, it would assume interpreting Nepal’s cultural heritage according to for example western ambitions of democracy to explore whether the goals were achieved, thereby undermining the aim of developing localised theoretical perspectives considering local worldviews.
An attempt to understand teachers’, learner’s and communities’ perceptions of life and work in a Nepali cultural setting entails that the conceptual framework for investigating these perspectives should be sought within the local cultural heritage and worldview.
In research on education the question is ultimately about who controls the data and about disentangling power relations. Two ways to do research seem apparent: one where the effects of reforms are documented and accountability strategies are enforced, the other approach is to look at the culture, worldview and intentions of teachers, communities and learners.
Most commonly, a business as usual approach to both the curriculum and the syllabus means the design and delivery of teacher education content and pedagogy occurs regardless of the students’ life experiences and culture. These activities are, more or less, considered the activity of university teachers in coordination with national regulations and, in turn, isolated from the life world of the student teacher.
An alternative pedagogical approach toward teacher training would accentuate and stress the importance of keeping at its centre the culture and context of teachers and students. This entails the historical, cultural, social, and political environments as well as the participants’ personal experiences and lived life.
The critical point here is that the experiences connected to pedagogical issues emerge from the students’ own life and cultural context which then contribute to pedagogical insight. This generates the possibility of connecting ownership to pedagogical insight and classroom teaching.
A shift in pedagogy has major implications for life in the classroom. The former focus on the administrative framework and teaching methods put less emphasis on the context and the relevance and importance of student-teachers’ experiences and culture .
This shift demands a different orientation in classroom teaching giving greater emphasis to creating reciprocal and dynamic relations between classrooms, culture and context. To produce viable and confident teachers in a rapidly changing society with its multicultural classroom teaching requires a sense of belonging, integrity and critical thinking.
Helen Eikeland is Associate Professor at the University in Agder in Norway and spent most of her childhood and professional life in Nepal, completing her research on the Life World of Nepalese Teachers, Ideals, Beliefs and Agency for her PhD research.