Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

Project on a world conflict: in search of a methodology

David Cranmer, Portugal

The opening of the present academic year was overshadowed by the terrible events of September 11th. In my own case, classes would begin just over three weeks later, when the NATO engagement in Afghanistan was imminent. Not to reflect this with my 1st year Media and Culture Studies students at the Catholic University, Lisbon, seemed to me little short of criminal.

For a number of years one of the principal items in the English element of their course had been a project on an English-speaking country – with the very laudable aim of making the students aware of the diversity of countries where English is an official language. But in the second half of September such a project seemed terribly trivial beside the overwhelming relevance of anything connected to the recent events. It was in this context, therefore, that I proposed, and had no difficulty persuading colleagues to follow suit, to replace the English-speaking country project with another involving the forthcoming War in Afghanistan.

When I put the idea of this project to my students in their first lesson, they quickly grasped that this would create the opportunity, from the very beginning of their university careers, to be in the thick of areas of fundamental importance to what they had come to university for. At that stage, however, I could only sketch out in very vague terms what we were aiming to achieve and how we would go about it. The truth was that I had only the haziest of notions, partially for want of a paradigm, but also because the way the War evolved would inevitably shape how we set about it.

A priori I felt it was important not to lose sight of two of the principal aims of the project we were replacing, namely to raise awareness of English as a world language and to develop basic presentation skills. I also wanted to take advantage of two lessons learnt from projects in previous years: that working in pairs (allowing those that are insistent to work individually) reduced the co-ordination problems that often arose in larger groupings; and that for the students to present their project in a large final presentation had many disadvantages compared with doing a series of three or four 'mini-presentations' and a brief final summing-up.

Setting up the project

Thinking of the earlier English-speaking country project, I decided that a good way to approach the Afghanistan conflict would be to follow it from the points of view of a range of different countries. I felt in particular that neighbouring countries might see things very differently from the reports we would receive in Portugal, which as a member of NATO would by and large toe the party line. I was also confident (though I had not yet looked very much) that it would be possible to find enough on-line news sources in English from a sufficient range of countries to make it possible to follow events in the War from the different national points of view.

My first task was precisely to identify the on-line news sources. For this purpose I used the search engine Copernic 2000 (which can be downloaded free from http://www.copernic.com/). I searched for sites for each of the countries I thought would be valuable to include, thinking particularly of Afghanistan's immediate neighbours (including China), Arab states, other states in the Indian subcontinent (dealing with Kashmir separately from India), other Muslim countries (Nigeria and Indonesia), Russia and Australia. I also looked for Afghan news sources, even though I was well aware that these could be disrupted in the course of the War. I discovered it was possible to recognise certain sites listed by Copernic 2000 immediately as being news sources, while in other cases I was hard pressed and had to look at more general sites for the country concerned, especially official sites, and look for a section on news and media.

I found the number and range of news sources staggering. For nearly every country there were at least two, often rather more. My only disappointment was the Israeli and Palestinian sources, which (at least the ones I found) were so concerned with the conflict against each other that their coverage of Afghanistan was poor – a pity as their respective angles would have been particularly relevant. Where there were several possible sources, I chose two as offering the 'best' information, usually because they were the most thorough, in some cases because their points of view were significantly different, the case, for example, with Iran and China.

To give you an idea of the range of countries we covered and the news sources I identified, here they are below:

Afghanistan Project: countries and sites

Afghanistan
Afghanistan Online http://www.afghanweb.com
Afghan Media monitor http://www.megastories.com/attack/aip/aipindex.shtml

Iran
Tehran Times http://www.tehrantimes.com (Islamic fundamentalist)
Tehran Globe http://www.tehran.com

China
People's Daily http://english.peopledaily.com.cn
South China Morning Post http://www.scmp.com (based in Hong Kong)

Pakistan
Pakistan Today http://www.paktoday.com (specially recommended)
Pakistan News Service http://www.paknews.com
Dawn http://www.dawn.com (specially recommended)
Pakistan Daily http://www.pakistandaily.com

India
Times of India http://www.timesofindia.com
Indian Express http://www.indian-express.com

Kashmir
Kashmir Times http://www.kashmirtimes.com
Greater Kashmir http://www.greaterkashmir.com

Bangladesh
The Daily Star http://www.dailystarnews.com

Oman
Oman Daily Observer http://www.omanobserver.com
Times of Oman http://www.omantimes.com

Bahrain/UAE
Gulf Daily News (Bahrain) http://www.gulf-daily-news.com
Gulf News (UAE) http://www.gulfnews.com

Saudi Arabia
Saudi Times http://www.sauditimes.com
Arab News http://www.arabnews.com

Syria
Syrian Daily http://www.syriadaily.com
Syria Times http://www.teshreen.com/syriatimes/index.htm

Russia
The Moscow Times http://www.themoscowtimes.com
Russia.com http://www.russia.com/news
Russia Journal http://www.russia.com/news

Turkey
Turkey.com News http://www.turkey.com/news
Turkish Daily News http://www.turkishdailynews.com

Indonesia
Indonesian News http://indonesianews.net
The Indonesian Observer http://www.indonesian-observer.com

Nigeria
The Guardian (Nigeria) http://www.ngrguardiannews.com
Nigeria World http://odili.net/nigeria.html

Australia
The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au
The Courier Mail http://www.thecouriermail.com.au

As we were to find, though most of these websites were consistently of great value, in a few cases they were not always easy to access.

Having established the countries and news sources we would use, we had to allocate them to the students in the class. There were 35 students and 19 countries. I particularly wanted two pairs to work on Pakistan, as the country most directly affected by the conflict, but they were free to bid for a country of their choice, as a pair or as an individual. I myself took Bangladesh, with a view to doing a project of my own. This would force me to undergo the same kind of difficulties my students might have and enable me to give model presentations.

Presentation I – the country and its map

The brief for the first presentation was for the students to present their respective countries from a map on an overhead projector transparency. The aims were twofold. On the one hand, it required them to identify where the country is (which part of the world and what its neighbours are), its principal geographical features (mountain ranges, main rivers, etc.) and cities (especially the capital), and certain basic cultural data, such as any major ethnic divisions and the religion(s) predominant in the country. On the other, they had to prepare a transparency, write notes, if needed, – I forbade them to read from a script – and to present using the OHP. In other words, the aims involved both content and presentation skills.

Two lessons (i.e. a week) before my students were to give their presentations, I gave a model one, presenting a map of Bangladesh. After doing so, I drew their attention, first of all, to one aspect of the transparency: the main cities were printed too small on the map I was using to be visible when projected, so I had rewritten them large enough round the edge, with an arrow pointing to the location. I then identified features of the way I had presented: checking the transparency was the right way round; pointing to things on the transparency not the screen; making sure I wasn't standing so as to block the view of the screen; using brief notes I'd written on the transparency, not reading from a script; projecting my voice; facing the audience, talking to them, establishing eye contact, not talking to the screen.

When the students came to do their own presentations, naturally enough, they were mixed in quality, varying from excellent to barely acceptable – one student, for example, had connived her partner into doing all of the talking. While, unfortunately, the system and the students' expectations, required me to evaluate the presentations, I tried to minimise this aspect and concentrate on feedback. The most regular problems were either ignoring my instruction not to read from a script, with the inevitable consequence that their delivery was monotonous and the script acted as a barrier between them and their audience, and generally nervous characteristics such as looking everywhere except at the audience and being unsteady on their feet. These faults were not at all surprising – after all, it was precisely to be able to work on them that we were doing the presentation in the first place and the content task was a deliberately simple one, so that it should not distract from the presentation skills aim.

Presentation II – positions taken

With the conflict in Afghanistan now well under way, the aim of the second presentation was to try to establish the positions taken by the respective countries with regard to the protagonists. For first year undergraduates this was clearly going to be a great challenge. For most of them, reading between the lines and recognising subtle differences in how the same incident is reported, would be beyond them. Yet I felt that it was worth asking them to look at two questions: firstly, what position the government of the country they were working on was taking and how far was this in tune with the views of the people of that country; secondly, whether there was any noticeable discrepancy in the ways that their news sources were reporting incidents.

There were a number of intrinsic difficulties in this task for certain countries. In the case of Afghanistan itself, the task made little sense – so instead, the pair working on this country investigated, as far as possible, the political forces that were emerging and already vying for power in a post-War scenario. For those countries for which there was only one real news source, the students had simply to limit the task to what they could realistically achieve.

Once again I gave a presentation concerning Bangladesh. A recent General Election meant that the present government was different from the one in place on 11th September, but from what I could ascertain, there had been no shift in position, namely that the country had offered NATO use of air space and bases, should that be necessary. The people's position seemed to be mostly in line with this or apathetic, the lack of public demonstrations in a country where going to the streets is both culturally and politically possible being strikingly minimal. The only significant hostility had been limited to threats to Peace Corps workers, leading to the volunteers' withdrawal. My two on-line newspaper sources differed little in their political line, both being, to my mind, balanced in giving expression to very varied points of view, from all parts of the spectrum.

For this second presentation I did not use the OHP, but spoke without notes, as the points to be made were brief and simple. I also explained to the class how I had looked for differences between government and people's positions – in manifestations of public discontent, suggesting that in countries where it was possible to demonstrate, examples of this would show up any divergence of view.

Once again, the students' presentations were very variable. Some had not really got to grips with the task, while some had gone well beyond what was required – the pair working on Saudi Arabia, for example, not finding much to report had taken the initiative to speak to an Arab well-versed in the situation (not an easy task in Portugal, where there are few Arabs). Theirs was a particularly valuable contribution. Another student, misunderstanding my (ambiguous, as it turned out) instruction to prepare a presentation along the lines of my model, tried to find out about the situation in Portugal – as she had been working on Kashmir, for which the task was virtually impossible, this was a felicitous 'error'. Furthermore, she had taken the trouble to put together a questionnaire and ask a reasonable range of friends and acquaintances their view of the Afghanistan conflict, to compare with the government position. This again was a presentation of value to us all and because of her personal investment she spoke with particular conviction. This contrasted strikingly with the presentations of some of her colleagues, who, despite my clear, reiterated instructions to the contrary, resolved to read from a script, usually with brain-numbing monotony.

The presentations that didn't happen

I had originally in mind two further presentations. The first was to be on an outrage or tragedy – something comparable to the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982, or, more recently, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in the NATO/Serbia conflict. I wanted the students to see the range of reactions it would provoke. Of necessity this would have to be improvised rapidly in response to the event, as and when it arose. Mercifully, from the human point of view, no disaster on this scale occurred, but it did mean that this presentation never happened.

The Christmas holidays came along and there was a break in teaching. By the time we came back, the Afghanistan War was fizzling out, momentum had been lost and the end of the semester was nigh, leading to a high level of absenteeism among the students because of the need to study for tests. Thus the final presentation – what the students had learnt from doing the project as a whole was also rendered impossible. Now, early in March, at the beginning of the second semester, it is all too distant to go back.

Conclusion

It seems slightly odd to be writing an article about a project that was cut short, but I do so because it is in the very nature of a project of this kind that you never know what turns it will take or how long it will last. There has always to be a strong element of improvisation, according to events and the tasks that make sense, and it is impossible to know in advance what the time-span will be. Indeed, it was precisely because I could foresee this kind of unpredictability that I did not write this article in the early days of the project, when I had felt that other teachers around the world might want to try the same idea. In retrospect, I was perhaps wise to be cautious – by writing only now it has been possible to mention some of the difficulties that arose and the extent it was or was not possible to resolve them.

Thinking of the future, I would not hesitate to undertake a comparable project about another conflict. Bearing in mind what we did this time but also improvements I would want to make, essential features of the methodology would be:

1. Identifying countries whose points of view would be of particular relevance to the project;
2. Identifying suitable news sources for these countries;
3. Identifying suitable topics for mini-presentations – the 4 mini-presentation model (map, points of view in general, points of view about a tragedy/outrage, summary/feedback) seems to me appropriate, but there must be other possibilities;
4. Identifying presentation skill priorities for each presentation, e.g. using the OHP for the first, not reading from a script for the second, use of voice and eye contact for the third, general for the fourth.

In the course of this project, I spent many hours on the internet. When the conflict was at its height, I found myself wanting to know how events were being reported here, there and everywhere, not only in Bangladesh. It was fun to see what extra snippet of news I might discover from Uzbekistan that wasn't being reported in Pakistan, or of some reaction in Nigeria or Indonesia that nowhere else was much interested in. I was awed by the sheer ease with which I could follow the events (such as were being reported) in Afghanistan and reactions to them from anywhere around the globe. I was also extremely struck by the extraordinarily high standard of journalism in many countries, especially in the Indian subcontinent (including Bangladesh) – in particular, I would wish to praise the thoroughness with which the Pakistani paper Dawn followed events, their on-line site being updated roughly every six hours. This was the only site that could in any way satisfy the insatiable thirst I had, to learn every least development as events accelerated following the unexpectedly early taking of Kabul.

And what English did the students learn? It's not easy to say. In any case, the question is not perhaps terribly relevant. For what they did learn, consciously or unconsciously, is that English, as the most widely used language on the internet is the key to international journalism. They read and digested what they found on the internet in English and presented their findings in English. Surely that's the kind of thing we're here to foster, rather than answering inane comprehension questions and carrying out meaningless oral tasks.