“Literacy sucks!” Lived experiences of Tharu women [Unpublished M.Phil Dissertation]

Abstract

My interest in adult literacy has been growing with the agendas of Dakar conferences and United Nation Literacy Decade (UNLD). United Nation educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been celebrating the literacy decade during these days understanding that there is no single or universal method or approach to literacy. Under such circumstances, Tharu women in social hierarchies felt harsh discrimination in the village and thus viewed literacy as mere imposition. Tharu women are disinterested to participating in literacy that follows a single instructivist approach. My observations on social hierarchies and multiple forms of oppression are barrier to create an inclusive approach of literacy. Layers of oppressions also influence the pedagogical practices in literacy classroom. It further makes them subordinated whereas they are trying to get their identity through the literacy. As a result they resist literacy programmes to challenge social hierarchies and oppressions. I generated initial research questions on the basis of these problems which hinders Tharu women to participate in literacy programmes. I research questions set on my childhood experiences and the first field observation during the national literacy programmes, viewing the current literacy programmes and practice among Tharu women. I created four research questions based on the social hierarchies and oppression, literacy pedagogical approaches, identities of Tharu women in literacy and their resistances in the society via literacy or vice versa. ii Then, I addressed social oppression and ways of learning among Tharu women with metaphors of hierarchy, anarchy and holarchy in Chapter III. Likewise, I hooked up inventing metaphors of literacy pedagogical approaches as pain giver, pain killer and pain healer addressing my second research questions. Similarly, I observed potency of identities of Tharu women in literacy and coined three metaphors of identity as blaming, (re) naming and no/naming. In the same way, I emphasized on the forms of resistance that were viable among the Tharu women. I found that Tharu women were resisting in silence, voice and solitude and thus formed three metaphors to depict their ways of resistance. I used a multi-paradigmatic research design space. I applied mainly the paradigms of interpretivism, criticalism and postmodernism under multi-paradigmatic research space. The critical paradigm offered me a critical outlook needed to identify the research problem, to reflect upon my experiences as a university graduated -male- Brahman, and to make my lifetime’s agencies transparent to readers, whereas the paradigm of postmodernism enabled me to construct multiple genres for cultivating different aspects of my experiences of culturally de/contextualised literacy programmes. The paradigm of interpretivism enabled me to employ emergence as the hallmark of my inquiry. Within this multi-paradigmatic design space, I chose performance ethnography, auto/ethnography and critical ethnography as my methodological referents.