In Summer 2008, Professor Leela Prasad directed the first DukeEngage program in Hyderabad, India, where Duke students volunteered at a school for economically disadvantaged children, teaching literacy through the visual arts and communicative English (highly interactive ESL instruction). In 2010, she will return to Hyderabad with DukeEngage students to continue their service.
In a recent interview, Prasad, who also serves as vice-chair of the faculty advisory committee for DukeEngage and the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, discussed the DukeEngage program in Hyderabad and how her involvement in the civic engagement program has enriched her teaching and research.
1. You currently have several students in your "Hinduism" course who participated in the DukeEngage in Hyderabad program in Summer 2008. To what degree has your DukeEngage involvement affected your relationship with Duke students in general and DukeEngage "alumni" in particular?
From what I gather from my former DukeEngage students, they took the class because they were looking for ways to continue being associated with one another and with me in a regular way that the academic schedule provides for, and equally because the rich experience in Hyderabad triggered intellectual questions that they felt they wanted to explore further.
In class, they're my students as much as anybody else, and they too respect these roles and the context. Outside of class, of course, we have a terrific sense of community, one that doesn't depend on how much time we actually spend time with each other. A good measure of this implied sense, I think, has come from the nature of our engagement during our DukeEngage time; I've come to know a little bit about their personalities, the issues they are grappling with, and their aspirations, and they've seen me in varied interactions and day-to-day contexts. What is fabulous is that I know that they know they can reach me whenever they want to.
2. What similarities do you find between being a program leader for DukeEngage and being an engaged teacher?
I came to DukeEngage with my background in ethnographic theory and method. At the heart of the method, as I see it, are four challenges: how one listens, especially to the suggested or unarticulated; how one theorizes uncertainty; how one engages everyday life; and how one delivers on responsibility and reciprocity. I found myself in the DukeEngage experience guiding "uninitiated" students in a relatively short timeframe on practices of engagement that involve these challenges. Undoubtedly my teaching will draw on my DukeEngage experience as I teach ethics and ethnography--but this is something whose longer resonance I have to wait to see.
3. Given the other demands you face as a full-time faculty member, how do your responsibilities related to DukeEngage fit into a busy schedule...and why do you feel it's an important element of your experience as a faculty member?
I have for long been interested in the "lived" aspects of ethics how we could turn to everyday talk, to performance and art, to material practices, for instance, to understand ethical theorization. In fact, this turn has helped me think about the muddled ways in which "theory" and "practice" inflect each other, and the politics involved in safeguarding a pre-determined distinction between them. Of late, I've become seriously interested in Gandhi beyond the naïve admiration for him that most of us who have grown up in India automatically inherit! I have become interested in critically understanding his theory and his praxis, and the culture and the industry that have created and developed around his image.
While there are arguably many different dimensions of "Gandhian ethics" and many readings of it, I am personally persuaded by how successfully Gandhi yoked the "macro" and the "micro" of life. For him, the grand-political mission was absolutely tied to the small-everyday routine. The DukeEngage experience is a wonderful point of entry for me to explore through active engagement some contours of Gandhi's vocabulary of ethics, like "service," "experiment," "community", "change" and "compassion." It's a great forum for me to reflect on how historically contingent and subjective his use of those terms might have been, and how they could be made to transcend their specific historicity and subjectivity for a contemporary ethics-in-practice. I plan to teach a course called "Gandhi: Image & Reflection" in Spring 2010.
4. How would you characterize the success of the program in 2008 and what are you planning to do differently in 2010?
The program's success came from an astonishing synergy between individual talents, the desire to learn, and an on-the-ground ability to adapt. There was measurable impact as schoolchildren went from not knowing the English alphabet to being able to read billboards, simple stories and to write short letters in English, which our partner scanned and e-mailed to our DukeEngage students. This was an enormous step toward building their self-confidence.
Our eight Duke students came back changed, I would imagine, for life. They not only experienced everyday life in another country, culture, economy and democracy but also came back with the most important lesson of learning how to make a change, both as an "interior" process and as a sensitized practicum. We saw this mirrored in their daily and weekly blogs, their final reports, their relationships with each other, with us and the kids they worked with, and in our group reflection sessions over the duration of the program.
But the success of our program is something I'd like to measure also by the learning we did from our missteps. The most significant change that we are planning to make is in the choice of schools; the schools we will serve in 2010 are not only easier to commute to but also have more stable administrations.
Another change for the better is the decision to team up with an additional NGO so that there is better classroom support for DukeEngage students. The neat thing about this additional collaboration is that we can begin to envision DukeEngage-Hyderabad as an important contributor in a wider, emerging NGO/grassroots network working to better elementary education in the state of Andhra Pradesh.