Curriculum from the Margins: Experience of Building a Dalit-FeministBusiness English Programme as an Untrained Facilitator
Source: https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/jppp/article/view/2136 Parent: https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/jppp
Authors
- Nisha Kumari
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31273/c3fw9f40
Abstract
In September 2024, while working as a part-time Business English facilitator at a grassroots NGO in India, I was entrusted with a unique but revolutionary task- to design an English curriculum for Business and Job-readiness from a Dalit-Feminist standpoint. As a post-graduate student of Cultural Studies with no formal training in teaching, language education, or material development, I undertook the project with equal measure of self-doubt and ambition, and a need for steady income- a perfect specimen of a GTA. This paper offers a critical reflective account of my journey as a GTA over the course of two years of working with the NGO. Unlike a conventional academic setting, the NGO foregrounded socio-political sensitivity and learner autonomy. It forced me to draw upon and question my own past experiences as a student, which I unconsciously began to replicate as a facilitator. Working with young Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi women learners (ages 18-40), I found myself developing creative ways to translate critical theories like intersectional theory, critical pedagogy, and Dalit and feminist scholarship into accessible and context-sensitive content. These experiences highlighted how significant the role of a GTA can be, precisely because of our liminal positionality as both in and out of the rigid frameworks of academia. GTAs occupy a space of possibility and probabilities, not weighed down by institutionalised teacher training, where pedagogic methodologies can be reimagined in real time. This in-betweenness allows for experimentation that is messy, imperfect, but also deeply generative, and holds the power to lead us to a social justice-oriented pedagogy in praxis.
Author Biography
- Nisha Kumari
Nisha Kumari (she/her) is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research focusses on the intersection of gender, military, nation and state, particularly in the Indian context. She is committed to producing knowledge that bridges academic inquiry and social justice, particularly through intersectional and decolonial feminist frameworks, with a specialization in Cultural Studies and Critical Military Studies.
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Published
2025-12-09
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Copyright (c) 2025 Nisha Kumari
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.