Women’s Critical Literacies in a Pakistani Classroom

The students enrolled on this course are aged between 18 and 22 years and have had 14 years of school and college education. The course is primarily a traditional English literature course, where canonical texts such as Shakespeare or Marlowe’s plays, Bacon’s essays, Hardy’s and Jane Austen’s novels, Chaucer, Spenser and Pope’s poetry form the core courses. The traditional approach to teaching has been that of analyses of texts in terms of plot construction, character, theme and genre analysis. The courses are designed by the Board of Studies in English, and go through a cycle of committees and Advanced Board of Studies and the Syndicate before any change in the syllabi can be approved or implemented. Hence, the teachers have no say in the selection of teaching materials or course-books. Their hands are tied and they must teach traditional classics. However, what they can do, with certain reservations, is teach the same texts in an unconventional manner. Although ELT experts in the country have voiced their concern over teaching these imperialistic texts, this has not resulted in any significant change in the syllabi. However, the same sexist, racist and imperialistic texts can be turned around and exploited fruitfully. The students in the classes are largely young women. In the year 2000, 42 out of a total number of 63 enrolled students were women. This is significantly correlated to the number of women teachers in the department, who again constitute a two-third majority of the faculty of the English department. So, women have a stronghold in the department through sheer numbers, and this is an empowering phenomenon in itself. The context is important—this peculiar teaching and learning environment where most women teachers are educated in the West, with a strong feminist stance in their perception of their own identities, can be effectively used to enhance the critical literacy awareness of the students regarding feminist and gender issues. I must also emphasise that although women have a lower social status, owing to their exclusion from public domains and their economic dependence on men, teachers of both sexes are highly respected by the students and have considerable authority. I therefore mustered up courage to incorporate feminist pedagogy in my teaching repertoire. The point of taking a critical approach to women’s literacy is to use reading and writing as a means for enabling women to consider their aspirations as valid and their knowledge and views of life as genuine contributions to human understanding, since merely enabling women to read and write without reference to their social and political inequality and its origins contributes materially to maintaining their oppression (Bee, 1993). Teaching is a kind of performance—it gives us a site for modelling feminism— how we as women teachers project our femininity or masculinity in the classroom,