Conference Theme: Securing the Future for International Education: Managing Growth and Diversity

Transcription

1 Welcome keynote, 17 th IDP Australian International Education Conference Conference Theme: Securing the Future for International Education: Managing Growth and Diversity Recollections on Creativity and Scholarship: the Sri Lankan/Australian Exchange Minister Kosky, Lindy Hyam/Prof Lance Twomey and distinguished guests. It is my pleasure to give this welcome address at the 17 th IDP Australian International Education Conference. I thought that the best welcome I could offer you is to reflect on why and how the educational exchange programme between Sri Lanka and Australia worked so splendidly for me. Through this, I hope to raise awareness about how such educational exchanges between countries can be a two-way flow, mutually productive and beneficial. I was educated up until my Master of Arts in Sri Lanka. I grew up within a family and national tradition that deeply reveres education. My mother was the principal of one of the major high schools in Colombo and my father retired as a Director of Education. This might sound like a cliché, but actually, my toys, and those that were as precious to me as my dolls were the books that lined the walls of our home. Books in Sinhalese, and books in English, and a couple in other languages. This happened because my mother was a highly westernised Sinhalese Catholic, and my father, a highly conservative Buddhist Sinhalese. I remember best reading the illustrated children s editions of the complete works of Shakespeare, and the abridged and illustrated Indian classics, The 1

2 Ramayana and the Mahabharata. So from childhood, the East and the West had equal hold on my heart. My family s ethos, its focus on education for my brother and myself, is merely a microcosm of the national culture that holds at its heart a deep rooted and ancient system of education that originated in the Buddhist temples. It was the Buddhist monks (before the Portuguese Dutch and British colonialists introduced their western system of education) who were responsible for passing on knowledge to the lay people. The disciple pays homage to the guru an external demonstration is the way the disciple goes down on his knees to touch the feet of the guru showing the highest form of respect and then offering the guru a sheaf of betel. This is guru bakti bakti describes the guru-disciple relationship as something sacred and devotional. In fact, Buddhist literature itself is eloquent on this ethos of education. Our temples are full of images that display for the masses the respect with which Lord Buddha s disciples regarded him, always standing behind and not alongside him, in speech, eyes generally focussed to the ground because the eyes of the guru were too brilliant to be directly confronted. Generally, the disciple sits at a lower level than the guru, literally at his feet. These are merely the external mannerisms of the relationship which is built on respect and devotion of the disciple for the guru. All Asia, and I m speaking only for Asia here, would boast of this kind of traditional, high culture of education. I went to a westernised Catholic convent from which I passed into the university in Sri Lanka. I did English, French and Classics for the first 2

3 degree and a MA in English Literature in Sri Lanka. But still, though educated in western ways, I ve never really grow out of this basic principle of guru bakti. If Professor Ashley Halpe, my old guru in Sri Lanka who supervised my Masters thesis, and for whom I have the highest respect, materialised now, I d stand up as he approached. I d still address him as Sir. It would be unnatural for me not to do any of this. It is an in-built conditioning that, with all my exposure to the west, I still hold as infinitely sacred. I came to Australia from Sri Lanka in 1987 on a commonwealth scholarship to read for the PhD in English. I am immensely grateful for the scholarship because it offered me the wonderful opportunity to continue with my research in Literature at a time when Sri Lankan universities did not provide facilities for PhDs. I learnt more than I can say during my scholarship in Australia. It was certainly an education that was different from what I d experienced. I appreciated the differences - it was in Australia that I was introduced to the egalitarian system of education based on a more equal relationship between teacher and student. I could see its benefits of the ways in which it demanded me to develop my own voice and independence as a scholar. I also had the great opportunity to travel to overseas conferences from Australia, fully funded by the scholarship. As a result I was able to research for my doctorate in the UK, and not only that to meet international scholars in the field, and even to have my research published before I completed the doctorate. There was also sophisticated interlibrary facilities and high technology all this facilitated my research. I have since published 7 books: four scholarly books for Oxford University Press, two novels published by Penguin Australia, and a book of short stories. I am fully 3

4 aware of the difficulties I would have faced had I attempted this from Sri Lanka. For all this I am still grateful. At another level. I did not feel any culture shock even in the first months in Australia because I d already travelled to England and Japan. It was a bit strange my coming to Australia from Sri Lanka. Generally, still suffering from the Anglophilian malaise, a legacy from the British colonisers, most Sri Lankans made a bee line to England whenever possible. I remember my mother telling me rather cattily to lock the front and back doors of my house in Australia because she d heard that kangaroos run through people s houses in the middle of the night. She was venting her anger on me for not going to UK for my PhD studies it was a cultural boundary that was remote to her, and dangerous, far away on the other side of the world. She could not open up her heart to it. Now she visits me regularly and is proud of my achievements. Finally, I liked Australia so much that I migrated to it. And now it is a constantly balancing act my love for Sri Lanka and my love for Australia almost like two marriages that are very positive, with each essential to sustain the other but, on retrospect, I think it worked so well for me because I could embrace difference as positive. I think that for exchange students like me, because there is no culture shock, no moving from one culture to a completely different other culture, the exchange is easier worked out. Being bilingual, having travelled to the west, and coming in for a PhD on one of the best scholarships available - all this makes the exchange easy, exciting and a wonderful adventure. 4

5 It also means that people like me end up as hybrid products for those who taste of two cultures, and of two such very different ones, it can be a dangerous balancing act. It is a challenge, this being shaped by two cultures so very different from each other. It has its dangers: As Salman Rushdie says of the hybrid: Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. And also, the rest of the world needs to accept the hybrids that we are. For without that acceptance, we could become outsiders in each culture. I take up this theme in my novels, both If the moon smiled and Turtle Nest: the migrant s need to belong to both the mother country and the adopted country, and the tragic consequences when this is not possible. But, there is no one story that we can hold up as general it can be positive, negative or in-between as with all cultural interacctions. My own story that I think would apply to quite a few students who come over from cultural and social milieux like mine that blend the east and the west in the formative years. But let us look at the other end of the spectrum, at exchange students who come to Australia on their first visit overseas, steeped only in the mother culture they must leave behind. Then, I think, the host country, in this case Australia, as well as the source country, needs to carefully look into ways in which the exchange can be productive rather than damaging, in both the short and long term. It means looking at the exchange as a two-way flow. I think that currently, most exchange programmes are working well, but I also think 5

6 that generally, we ve still not attained the ideal. I believe that Australia and the source country from which the student comes over, could look for more ways in which the overseas student s way of life and culture can be creatively drawn into Australian culture. We see it happening in the most wonderful ways, with multi-culinarism in Melbourne you need only to walk down any street to fill your senses with the smell and taste of food for a dozen different nations and there is the hybrid-culinarism as well where the East and West blend beautifully, to create new scents, new tastes. Where self and other no longer exist as two ends of the spectrum, but celebrate difference even while integrating into one rich full flavour. It is only if this concept spreads to encapsulate less visible areas of culture, can we celebrate that oneness of spirit that is truly global. We celebrate multiculturalism with wonderful food festivals in our educational institutions, and on such days, the spirit of camaraderie among students is so heart warming and inspiriring. But the question to ask is: does this interest extend to all areas of the cultural exchange? The questions to ask, and I know that this conference will engage fruitfully with these challenges, is: Does Australia fully understand or appreciate the cultural specificities of exchange students, or does it still treat the exchange student as someone welcome but alien, exotic, other? Or does it regard and judge the student from a rather superior first-world standpoint? If so, we are actually still in the grips of a fossilised colonialism of the self/other binary that was so damaging to both self and other, in the long term. Does Australia appreciate, for instance the education system in which the student has developed before coming to Australia? Or does it expect the student to assimilate fully to the Australian system? The solution to this 6

7 goes way beyond offering the student social service (which is efficiently done in Australia) and student counselling. I think it needs to go deeper how many Australian families we know entertain exchange students from other cultures, and vice versa? And within the institution itself: are students seamlessly integrated into the system, or do they remain outside on the margins. Would Australia be aware, for instance, of the high culture of education from which I come to Australia? Would it be interested to listen to that side of me, or would it rather expect me to turn Australian in my attitude to education, in the ways in which education is dispersed in Australia? Would it respect the guru/disciple relationship as I have known it, or would it scoff at it with its more egalitarian policies, considering them more civilised and superior? Let us seek a middle, moderate path in which these two ways of culture can blend for mutual benefit. There is the flip side of the guru/disciple relationship. In its extreme it can mean the absolute devotion of the student for the teacher. And this could result in the student slavishly imitating the teacher to the extent when it can be labelled plagurism. There is also the participation that is expected of students in the Australian system of education. Most students who come from the East have no experience of questioning the teacher. I remember in Sri Lanka how a Sri Lankan student who d been on an exchange to the States came back quite changed. She actually stood out in her class like a sore thumb by the ways in which she questioned the teacher at the end of the lesson. I remember how the teacher called her aside one fine day, and told her that the Sri Lankan educational system did not encourage such forward behaviour from a student. In Australia it is the other way around. How can such problems be avoided? These are 7

8 questions that have no easy solutions. I think teachers, councellors and student mentors play an important role in the exchange in seeking the most practical and productive ways that integrate the best of the two systems. There is a legendry swan in ancient Sinhalese literature that is able to extract milk from a mixture of milk and water. I often think to myself that it is only if we can extract the best of each culture in our journey through life can we be truly nourished. To take another simple example, one of the most important ways in which we are defined is our name. In my own country there is a long and cherished tradition when naming a child according to auspicious time and date that must coincide with the right phonetic sound of the alphabet. I know that when I was born, the sound that would be most auspicious for me, was cha. And so I was named Chandani. And I remember how important it was for my father to explain to me that my name meant moonlight and not sandalwood. And others who come to Australia have various other traditions attached to their name. However, more and more, we find exchange students taking up western names, because Australia can t pronounce the local. I quote Paul Carter here who has said of the significance of names (in the context of migration) and we can easily apply it generally to our subject today: Carter writes of RA Baggio, born in Victoria and the son of an Italian migrant, who is subjected by white Australians to so many mispronunciations of his name, that consequently his identity, becomes unstable [like] one s sense of place ; and his name becomes, a swag he shouldered, a means of travelling from one human situation to another, but it no longer provided him with a house of his own, a place from which he could speak. 8

9 From the side of the exchange student. How far is the student ready to absorb the cultural differences with which he or she is confronted in Australia? How open is the student to Australia? Often as a tertiary lecturer, I see overseas students develop small racial clans they often prefer to move with a group of students from their own countries or regions. You can see that this is important because it provides a support system, an anchor of the known and the familiar. But while this is encouraged, I think it is important that exchange students also step out of such self-imposed boundaries, into friendship with Australia. More and more, what we call the mate system or the buddy system needs to be encouraged. A constant companion from the host country would help familiarise each with the other s way of life. In this way, little by little we are able to transcend borders between cultures, recognise cultural boundaries, the very differences that they project, as bridges rather than as walls - bridges that provide us entry into quite spectacular treasures - and that I think is one of the greatest long-term achievements of educational exchange. Cultural boundary, as Martin Heidegger says is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins So, I think that international or trans national education is one of the most positive pathways to restfulness finally that true restfulness, that we call vishranti in Sanskrit and it comes with higher grace from the highest achievement, and what achievement can be higher than being at home in all cultures, bound by none. In today s globalised world what other way is possible for us? It is a restless world and its inhabitants constantly in transit between past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. This can lead to mental and psychological confusion, and disturbance in direction, if globalisation in all its plurality of races, 9

10 cultures and religions is not acknowledged and understood. I emphasise the integral role that international education can play in fostering global understanding. To quote Salman Rushdie again: Of all the many elephant traps lying ahead of us, the largest and most dangerous pitfall would be the adoption of a ghetto mentality. To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile I think it is important to keep these higher perspectives alive and take inspiration from them even while we pursue more immediate pragmatic aims in our exchange programs, like practical gains of professional development for the exchange student coming into Australia, and the funding benefits that Australia receives from the exchange. People come to Australia to gain specific qualifications and teaching international students is now an important element of the funding of all universities. But this does not mean that we lose sight of the richer and even higher possibilities for mutual enrichment. My aim in this address has been to compliment the wonderful system already in place, to reiterate how essential it is in our globalised world, and to raise consciousness more than to answer questions about the ways the system could improve as it continues to grow. International students are not a welfare category requiring charity. Their strengths need to be acknowledged and drawn out. At the same time, for the best benefit of international education, exchange students need to look further and beyond professional development and consider the exchange as a long 10

11 term investment, providing them with the equipment to move confidently into globalisation. I would like to conclude by sharing with you my own moment of vishranti in my current hybrid life. And that is when I m sitting in the plane as it carries me from home to home either to Australia from Sri Lanka, or to Sri Lanka from Australia, when I ve had the fill of one beloved culture and am on my way to the other. It strikes me then, how richly fulfilled I am, how blessed by higher grace. And I embrace the moment. But a moment later, I think: who knows what new challenge lies just beyond? Thank you. My warmest wishes for a stimulating and fruitful conference. Dr Chandani Lokuge Lecturer, English Director, Centre for Postcolonial Writing Monash University Victoria, Australia 11