Abstract

This article is based on my experience of teaching Nepalese students, who are from different socio-cultural backgrounds. The study proposes a pedagogy through participatory and interactive reading strategy (PAIRS) for Tribhuvan University’s 4th Semester Graduate class of English Literature on the course of ‘Single Author’ (ENG 582), by making them engaged in dialogues, both in oral and written form, in which they will share and exchange their ideas on literary texts of Toni Morrison by investigating on some specific implications of the author’s vision on the issues of differences, prevalent in America. The proposed pedagogy is intended for raising students’ critical consciousness of the contemporary world’s most pertinent issues of identity of minorities, which Nepalese students face in their day to day living experiences. Thus, it is hoped that an individual and collective engagement would be developed in students for dealing with what is both historical and immediate, and global and local. By practicing PAIRS, students would develop self reflection on their biases that would make them critical of their culturally imbedded ideas and that would gradually make them empathetic to differences. The proposed pedagogy is not for demonstrating a teacher’s knowledge on the author’s works by critical and theoretical tools, but contextualizing the author in Nepalese socio-cultural conditions through the platform of a classroom of diverse thoughts for the students’ better understanding of the world, enriched with ‘differences’. The study further contributes to new pedagogy of English Studies for Non-western students by widening the field of comparative cultural studies, and thus enhancing the scope of comparative literature.

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