The idea for the language workshop came about after some reflection on my status as a linguistic mongrel. Growing up in India, which has around 26 official languages, it is next to impossible to remain a monoglot. As a child I lived in cities across the length and breadth of the country. Therefore, I was taught – Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit alongside English. Having spent eight years in Delhi I was exposed to Urdu and Punjabi. I picked up a bit of Japanese as I travelled there for work, and recently I have been tinkering with Dutch. I would like to emphasize that I am fluent only in English and Hindi, for the rest my skill-level varies from beginner/intermediate to just a few words.

There is a lot more that goes into speaking a new language than the ability to memorize words, swot grammar and regurgitate stock phrases. I think intuition, confidence and self-awareness play a very important role. The workshop was designed around these soft values. The students had been studying German and French (of which I know next to nothing) for a few months and I hoped that by the end of the session they would be sufficiently enthused to teach me a bit of both.

The workshop was divided into four sections – Making New Sounds; Looking for Similarities; Gestures and Emotions and Reading Japanese. We began with the easy, accessible stuff and then moved on to unfamiliar territory. Although a number of different languages were used, progress was pegged to speaking/reading Japanese in order to have some structure. The Reading Japanese section was a challenge – I introduced some logical rules about Kanji and asked students to read a sentence written in some fairly difficult characters.

To be honest I was quite nervous as the kids could focus on my lack of fluency and not take the session seriously. So I did a fair bit of practice beforehand with some native speakers. I also had another wee trick up my sleeve. This is something I used as an ice-breaker during my breath workshops in Japan. I wrote my name down in three scripts – Abhay, アバィ and अभय to illustrate how different my name sounds in different parts of the world. For the workshop we tried pronouncing names from various countries, tried a few tongue twisters and there was a sing-along to the 46 phonetic sounds of the Japanese language (あいうえお… etc.).

I am happy to report that the students were thoroughly excited and participated enthusiastically. After the Looking for Similarities bit, they started translating some of the things I was saying into German, which is what I had hoped for. In a way the workshop was already a success.

Then we came to the Reading Japanese challenge. I began by introducing the following characters: 日 (sun),　木 (tree),　本 (root/origin),　女 (woman),　子 (child),　言 (speak),　五 (five) and 口 (mouth). After explaining their meaning and how they have been derived, we looked at some combinations. For example, Japan is written as 日本. When correlated with the meaning of the individual characters it makes sense why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.

The atmosphere in the classroom was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese.

We then moved onto making more kanji by combining the above. Starting with a simple example, 女 (woman) +子 (child) =好 (like) I asked students to guess what happens when many mouths say the same things, 五+口+言=?? You get the character for language 語 which is combination of all of the above (Obviously a wee bit of artistic license has been used to arrive at the above). And so piece by piece we assembled the sentence = 私は日本語が好きです。The kids had no trouble guessing what it meant. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese, so we talked about stroke order and so on.

Given how successful the workshop was, I have been asked to consider delivering a few more. One of the teachers commented that there are very few male language teachers. There are a number of additional benefits, these range from employability to increasing tolerance of others. I won’t go into too much detail as this post has become fairly lengthy. I would like to end by saying that as usual, I cannot wait to work with another batch of students, hopefully in the very near future.

Stress management in schools

Theme 1: Self-awareness and stress management

So what’s going to happen? Well, the workshops focus on two very different themes – breath awareness and language skills. The former is related to my research and the subsequent work I carried out in Japan. The idea is to introduce children to simple stress management skills they can use in any situation. Is it relevant? Most definitely. As I have said many times, I feel stress has become a ubiquitous commodity and there are very few means in mainstream education for students to become aware and manage it. I will go into details about the format in a separate post. I would like to add that this is quite a significant opportunity. Other than than the time I conducted the 12-week pilot study at a primary school in York to evaluate the breath-control ICT device, there has been little opportunity to work with schools in the UK.

Theme 2: Language Skills

The second workshop is focused on language skills. When it comes to speaking, reading and understanding different languages – I am a bit of a mongrel. My Hindi and English are fluent (As most bilingual people tend to, I too have been known to break out into ‘Hinglish’ a weird combination of Hindi and English). I have basic/intermediary Japanese skills and have a limited understanding of Punjabi, Bengali and Urdu. I have recently started learning Dutch (for no reasons other than to have fun making guttural sounds). I feel the act of ‘speaking’ a language is a culmination of a number of soft-skills such as confidence, self-belief and flexible thinking. And as is well established, the ability to speak myriad languages is a gateway to multicultural experiences, knowledge and insights (sounds rather melodramatic but it is true). So what’s going to happen? Well, rather than focus on a particular language or on the tedious bits, I will be working with the children (who are learning French and German) to construct a multi-lingual story via prezi. I hope this will be a collaborative experience, they have as much to ‘teach’ me as I have to them. Incidentally, this is a principal I follow for all my workshops. There is a lot more fun to be had by diving into the session and working closely with the participants, as compared to following the old-school model of standing in the front of the class and issuing orders.

I have a number of activities/games planned. Once again, I will go into the details of the format in a separate post. As I am a fan of using technology (in the right context), I think prezi will come in very handy. As a presentation tool, it can bring words, phrases and sentences to life through simple movements. Take a look at the lazy man’s example I have prepared below. I do hope to create something slightly more sophisticated than this working with children during the workshop.

I am quite excited (and a little bit nervous). As I said, there are a couple of weeks to go, so if you have any advice, suggestions or comments, I would be grateful if you would leave them in the form of a comment underneath this post. Let me know if there is something you don’t understand or if you feel I should incorporate anything particular in either session. Hope to hear from you guys!

Interacting with Japanese school children

These are early days still. However, I am keen to document what little progress has been made. Everything is well and truly up in the air at the moment and I am keen to bolster my confidence by documenting these small steps. In the event this project does come to fruition it would be great to reflect on the journey.

So what has happened? Conversations mainly. With some very interesting people. The sort who grasp the fundamentals of the breath-awareness programme. Now if I may temporarily digress into hyperbole. I get a sense that these people also appreciate the aspiration that guides the project. 50 Schools in Japan will be a tremendous opportunity to realize my work in a meaningful context – to enable children to become more aware of themselves and to recognize and handle stress and anxiety.

Coming back to the point – what have these conversations been about? A number of different things, from addressing the practical aspects of returning to Japan and convincing 50 schools to participate, to fine-tuning the nature of the workshops so that they adhere to the cultural sensitivities.

A breath-awareness workshop in England differs tremendously from a workshop in Japan. Both have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. While working with native english speakers offers much more flexibility, working with the Japanese allows me to use more abstract references when it comes to themes such as reflection and self-awareness. However, I have to be very careful.

Let me explain the configuration in which the previous Japanese workshops took place. Rather than deliver instructions in broken and confused Japanese (not to mention the problem with accents), I worked with a native speaker who translated my instructions in real-time. As the nature of the audience (young children, teenagers, some office workers, teachers) varied, there was a lot of improvisation to adapt these instructions. The only thing I had to be mindful of was to convey the message as simply as possible so that it could be translated quickly in real time. However, conveying abstract references in simple english isn’t the easiest tasks. And often, during the most intense moments of the workshop I came up with gems which elicited the ‘raised eyebrow’ reaction from my translator. To her credit, she never lost her composure and after a split second, came up with an appropriate explanation in Japanese.

Almost everyone I have spoken to so far has generously offered their help and some have already agreed to step in as advisors to guide the programme’s development. This makes me very hopeful. There is a very long way to go but as I said earlier, at this stage these small steps are hopefully seeding momentum for future strides. Over the next few weeks as these relationships take on a more formal hue, I will be happy to introduce these people along with their fascinating professional profiles through this blog.

By regularly posting entries, I hope I am creating a digital footprint that might catch the attention of potential collaborators. To the readers, if you know of someone who might be interested, may I request you to forward this post to them. If you would like to write to me to find out more about the breath-awareness workshops you can contact me at abhay dot adhikari at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Delivering a breath-awareness workshop in Japan

When I began my research with the intention of creating a ‘unique’ digital instrument, I had little idea that four years later I would end up delivering breath-awareness workshops to children at primary schools in Japan. Perhaps I will delve into the details of this journey in another post, at the moment I would like to draw your attention to a puzzle I am trying to solve – How can I introduce my work to mainstream education practitioners in the UK? There is definitely a context for it, the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) initiative.

Breath-awareness sounds strange, especially when juxtaposed with the relentless demands placed on school teachers to meet an ever increasing number of targets. It seems silly to suggest that they encourage their students to become aware of their breathing and develop effective control over it. But then again, such activities can have a positive impact on students’ behavior, emotional control and academic performance (again, some of the key objectives of SEAL). I am not making this up as I go along, there are a host of scientific studies that have demonstrated these claims and I will be happy to point you in the right direction should you be interested.

So how does one present breath-awareness to mainstream education?

When I decided to focus on breath-awareness in my research, I knew that the most important challenge would be to dissociate it with some of the, lets say… rather esoteric associations. This is because many so called holistic therapies attribute a fantastic array of benefits to breath-control and awareness. They aren’t necessarily rooted in science fiction, its just that these benefits have been extrapolated and exaggerated to such an extent that they alienate most rational, clear-thinking people. Furthermore, many breath-control methods use vague and elaborate instructions, so there is no objective way to gauge the application of their exercises or systematically evaluate their benefits . Clearly, there is no room to introduce breath-awareness in this way within secular educational establishments in this manner.

Although it was a tedious exercise (given the sheer volume of literature available on breath-control) it was relatively easy to separate the rational approaches from the irrational and come up with a list of complimentary therapies which formed the base of my research. Along the way I drew some surprising conclusions. For instance, although the Alexander Technique and Pranayama would appear to be disparate techniques (in their teaching and practice), their fundamental principals are rooted in similar concepts such as self-awareness. No doubt this would deeply trouble F.M. Alexander who strongly denied any links between the two.

To cut a long story short, I identified a series of exercises used in Alexander Technique and Pranayama, and correlated their basic principals with those of Respiratory Physiotherapy Rehabilitation. This created a rational framework for my research. The next step was to bolster this framework by eliminating as many variables as possible.

[end of part 1]