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| ISBN-13: | 9781907994197 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | London Publishing Partnership |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 41 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator
By Ken Banks
London Publishing Partnership
Copyright © 2013 Ken Banks and the contributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907994-20-3
CHAPTER 1
Let a Billion Readers Bloom
Brij Kothari
Watching yet another Spanish movie in his friend's apartment to avoid writing up his doctoral dissertation, Brij Kothari makes a throwaway comment about subtitles, which plants the seed of an idea and spawns a literacy initiative that has, in Bill Clinton's words, 'a staggering impact on people's lives'.
Conception
hat does Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodóvar's zany award-winning film, have to do with mass literacy in India? Nothing, and yet ... everything! In early 1996, after almost a decade of student life at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, I was finally in the home stretch of writing my doctoral dissertation. That is precisely when, I believe, the desire to watch movies peaks.
So there we were, Bernadette Joseph, my special friend at the time and now my wife, Chris Scott and his very pregnant wife, Stephanie Buechler, watching this hysterical movie in Spanish at the Scott–Buechler apartment. As students of Spanish, we had soon discovered that watching movies in the language was not only effective, but also great fun. Those were pre-digital and pre-DVD days when foreign language movies in the USA came on videotapes with English language subtitles.
In an ambience of hilarity, a couple of unrelated thoughts crossed my mind during the movie. I wondered whether uncontrolled laughter could act like a natural Pitocin and precipitate labour. That one I had the good sense to keep to myself. The other thought, which I blurted out during a bathroom break, was simply: 'Why don't they put Spanish subtitles on Spanish films. We'd catch the dialogue better.' My friends agreed. So I casually ventured an extension, without worrying too much about its linguistic narrowness in a country that has 22 official languages and over a thousand dialects: 'Maybe India would become literate if they simply added Hindi lyrics to Hindi film songs.'
'I think you're onto something,' Chris reacted. Coming from a fluent Spanish and Hindi speaker who had grown up in India, who understood Bollywood's hold on Indian passions, it was the sort of nonchalant affirmation I needed in order for a synapse of an idea to become a lifelong obsession. The idea couldn't have had a more serendipitous beginning. But before I could get too excited about it, I had to confirm the originality of the thought. The idea seemed too ridiculously simple to have not been thought of, or tried, for mass literacy.
I found that most of the literature on subtitling was coming out of the USA and Western Europe. One major stream dealt with the use of subtitling for access to audio-visual content across languages or translation subtitling. Considerable attention is devoted to how translation subtitling can and does contribute to additional language acquisition (second, third, foreign, and so on). Some even suggested subtitling in the 'same' language for improving one's pronunciation and listening comprehension. The other major stream, Closed-Captioning (CC), leveraged subtitling for media access among the deaf and hearing impaired. A trickle of articles talked about subtitling as karaoke in the limited context of entertainment in bars or on increasingly popular home-based karaoke machines.
The bulk of the literature made one crucial assumption; subtitling was only for functionally literate viewers. Still, there was an occasional mention of the potential of subtitling to support reading skill development, lost in the cacophony of subtitling for other purposes. The idea of 'same' language subtitling was articulated in some cases with academic terms like 'unilingual', 'intralingual' and 'bimodal' subtitles, in the context of language acquisition. The odd piece, however, would also refer to subtitling and its potential for literacy. Subtitling in the 'same' language for literacy, albeit in a limited classroom or research context, had at least found a passing expression.
It would be fair to ask about the original contribution we were making. The first thing that occurred to me was that the idea of 'sameness' tying audio and text was somehow lost in the many monikers floating around in the literature, like, unilingual, intralingual and bimodal subtitling. The tight bond I wanted to forge between audio and subtitles needed a more fitting term that brought 'sameness' of language front and centre. The term 'Same Language Subtitling', and its very own acronym (SLS), thus came into being.
Concocting SLS felt a bit like sweet revenge for all the academic jargon I had endured in my coursework in graduate school. Now I had my own term to inflict upon others. My literature review made two things patently clear. SLS had never been used on television or other mass audio-visual media, anywhere in the world, expressly for the purpose of improving mass reading or literacy skills among functional non-literates. Research on the potential impact of SLS exposure, or subtitling generally, on the reading skills of early-readers, was rare. To an aspiring academic trained in development communication and education, stumbling upon a novel idea, as yet unproven, at the crossroads of these two fields, felt tantamount to finding the proverbial pot of gold.
By the time I had finished writing my dissertation, 'Towards a Praxis of Oppressed Local Knowledges: Participatory Ethnobotanical Research in Indigenous Communities of Ecuador', a mouthful that couldn't be further from subtitling and literacy, I had been offered a faculty position at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), in its Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation. The centre was created in honour of IIMA's first fulltime Director who had a vision of establishing an institute of management dedicated to the application of management principles, not just to business, but also to the public and social sectors. Although I did not realise at the time, SLS could not have found a more suitable base than here at one of India's most prestigious institutes. The year was 1996. Within nine months, SLS would go from conception in a living room in the USA to its first tiny steps in India.
Life Before SLS
While most of the SLS story developed in India after 1996, it would be remiss of me not to outline the part played previously by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur), Cornell University and Ecuador in shaping my abilities, interests and motivations to pursue this idea.
I had the fortune to grow up from ages of six to twenty, literally in one long sweep, at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, entirely schooled at its Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE). In a country where fierce educational competition and specialisation is the norm, it was unusual to experience an 'integral' system that aimed for a broad-based education, including a strong emphasis on languages, literature, performance arts, music and especially a physical and spiritual education. The medium of instruction was English and French. Every student picked up an average of three other Indian languages and had considerable flexibility to choose subjects, teachers and even the time one wished to allot to particular subjects. There were no exams, from kindergarten to college, and therefore no degree(s) to boot. The guiding philosophy was to awaken a love for learning built on the precept that every life has a higher transformational purpose. I grew up with a strong belief that if I could contribute to human progress in any meaningful way, I would be happy to have lived up to the ideals of SAICE, an institution that is at the core of shaping my identity.
The first exam I ever took was at the Master's level in physics, at IIT Kanpur, arguably the pinnacle of competition in India. How a degree-less student got into IIT Kanpur is another story, but once I was there a two-year stint allowed me to acquire my first real degree and join the educational mainstream. It also humbled me by bringing me face to face with some sharp minds and a timely realisation that it would have been a loss to physics had I continued any further in the field. Nevertheless, that degree served as a launch pad for my dream of studying in the USA. Fortunately, Cornell accepted me for a Masters degree, but this time in communication. I could safely decline a couple of other acceptances I had for an onward PhD in physics. As my train changed tracks, little did I fathom that it would be for a decade-long sojourn in Ithaca, NY.
More than any other place, Cornell brought to bear a focused desire for international development, through two years in the department of communication followed by eight more in education. It was stimulating to be around student colleagues, many of whom I encountered in cross-departmental courses, cafeterias and graduate student parties, who not only spoke eloquently about how to change the world, but also had clear-headed strategies to achieve their goals. You just had to catch them early enough in the party. People were dazzlingly adept at making connections between seemingly disparate ideas, which sometimes provided great comic relief, but often produced 'eureka' moments.
I realise now that I must thrive on serendipity. The topic for my doctoral research came to me initially in the form of a $99 coupon from Continental Airlines (now part of United Airlines) for a round trip from anywhere in the USA to Ecuador. My trip started as an opportunity to see Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. A chance encounter in a Sunday market with Mr Juan José Simbaña, the president of an organisation representing seven communities in Andean Ecuador, led to a two-year immersion in Imbabura province. Simbaña and his people were concerned about conserving their knowledge of medicinal plants. I was enamoured with participatory action research. Together we conceived and executed, with two campesino volunteers from every community as co-researchers, one man and one woman, a project to document their knowledge of medicinal plants, for themselves.
Although all campesinos selected as co-researchers were literate, the majority of their own community members, for whom they were documenting their knowledge, were not. Low literacy achievement in rural schools further exacerbated the problem of how to conserve knowledge in the absence of basic functional literacy. To bridge the literacy gap, we decided to represent every medicinal plant and its administration visually. We devised an icon-based representation of medicinal plant preparation and usage, resulting in the publication of a bilingual, Quichua–Spanish book, Ñucanchic Panpa Janpicuna: Plantas Medicinales del Campo, Abya-Yala, Quito, in 1993.
My dissertation documented the entire action research process, including a critique of extractive forms of ethnobotanical research among indigenous peoples. While watching Pedro Almodóvar's movie that winter night in Ithaca, NY, my thinking was already a ferment of Paulo Freire and his approach to literacy, Bob Marley and his songs of freedom, and a new-found passion for Spanish and Latin America. Subtitling Bollywood songs for mass literacy was hardly a stretch. That same year, in September 1996, I accepted IIM Ahmedabad's offer, the first and only real job I've ever had.
SLS: The First Five Years (1997–2001)
As a new arrival, my immediate motivation was to publish and get tenure. So I began putting together a research agenda based around SLS. The early hitch was that I was in an institute of management, albeit within a centre for educational innovation. Admittedly, this is my reading of the situation. At least some of my faculty colleagues valued a research focus on innovation in educational management, with the focus on 'management'. My proposed research was at the intersection of literacy and media. I credit the academic freedom of the institute and some faculty colleagues who encouraged me to pursue any direction of research that seemed meaningful to me and not be overly preoccupied with undercurrents that would rather see me fit in.
After crudely subtitling some Gujarati film songs, in Gujarati, at a local videographer's studio that specialised in covering weddings, we set out to test receptivity to SLS among our target viewers. In villages and slums, at train stations and bus stops, wherever it was easy enough for curiosity to gather a crowd, our small research team would set up two identical TV sets, connected to VCRs, synchronously playing the same film songs. One showed the songs with SLS, the other without. The onlookers' reactions were recorded on video.
Everywhere, it quickly became clear that most viewers – literates and weak-literates alike, children, youth and adults – preferred songs with SLS. Surveys later confirmed that around 90% preferred SLS. The top-of-mind reason was usually that SLS enhanced the entertainment value of songs, although around 20% also mentioned that it was good for literacy. The karaoke effect is what viewers enjoy foremost, including the ability to sing along, and know the song lyrics. A majority of non-literates wanted SLS, not because it was beneficial for them, but because it was perceived to be good for children in their family and social networks. Some also saw in SLS the primary benefit that is attributed to closed-captioning – media access among the hearing impaired, to which one might also add improved access to the audio in a strident Indian television viewing context characterised by group conversations and ambient noise.
A few who did not prefer SLS seemed not to mind living with it. In other words, SLS did not provoke a strong rejection. For the literates in this camp, SLS had nothing special to offer and, if anything, served as a distraction from the visuals. The karaoke benefit was insufficient to offset the diversionary effect of SLS. Fortunately, though, most literates also took to SLS. We were aware all along that the idea, even though it was targeting the weak-literates, could not succeed on mainstream television without also winning over the literates. In the long run, it had to be established that SLS did not hurt ratings and, ideally, improved them.
The overwhelming preference we found for SLS was a necessary first step, but did it lead to automatic reading engagement? To explore this question we bought an eye-tracker that, once calibrated, could tell us, 60 times per second, where exactly a viewer was focusing on the screen. The focal points, when plotted, paint an accurate pattern of a viewer's eye movement. We brought into our lab several weak-literates, showing the same person a film song, first without and then with SLS. Unlike the standard Bollywood song without SLS, the resulting focal pattern from a song with SLS had two distinct bands. The bottom band visually and precisely captured viewer engagement with the subtitles. SLS was evidently not being ignored by the weak-literates, an observation consistent with a similar finding by the highly respected Belgian professor, Géry d'Ydewalle, whose ground breaking research on subtitling was undertaken predominantly with literates. Whereas he concluded that, if the subtitles are there they will be read by literates, our conclusion with weak-literates, at best, could be that if subtitles are there, they will be attended to.
The eye-movement pattern alone did not allow us to ascribe reading engagement, let alone reading improvement. A noteworthy weakness of our eye-tracking research was its artificiality. The weak-literate viewers, already edgy from being in an institutional lab, had to position themselves on a chin and head support and undergo a process of instrumental calibration before actual data collection could begin. The instrumentation required that only the eyes could move while viewing. Overall, it was a far cry from enjoying film songs on TV at home. Still, it brought us another small step closer to proving the scientific merit of SLS. Weak-literates, like literates, simply could not and would not ignore SLS.
Through qualitative interviews captured on video in the villages and slums of Gujarat state, we determined that people claimed not merely to look at the subtitle band, but also to try to read along. The popularity of SLS, and the fact that people were attending to it and asserting that it was inviting reader engagement, were expected to result in measurable improvement of reading skills.
Our first real study on the impact of SLS was conducted in 1998/99 in a municipal school in Ahmedabad, serving low-income children. Half the students in grades 3 and 4, the stage at which the Hindi language is introduced in such schools, were regularly exposed to Hindi songs with SLS. The other half saw the same songs, but without SLS. After three months of exposure, three times a week for roughly 30 minutes in each session, we found that the SLS group was, measurably, further along in reading Hindi. This was the first real piece of evidence that SLS had a positive impact on reading skills. Arguably, however, the value of SLS had been found in a controlled setting wherein students were artificially and regularly required to watch songs with SLS. Nevertheless, that study laid the groundwork for piloting SLS on mainstream television. With that began the protracted battles for mindsets. At the time, we had only a vague presentiment that it would take more than research and data to move people with decision-making power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator by Ken Banks. Copyright © 2013 Ken Banks and the contributors. Excerpted by permission of London Publishing Partnership.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements, xiii,Foreword Archbishop Desmond Tutu, xv,
Introduction Ken Banks, 1,
1. Let a Billion Readers Bloom Brij Kothari, 11,
2. Silicon Savannah Rising Erik Hersman, 33,
3. Data-Powered Development Joel Selanikio, 49,
4. Dial M for Medicine Josh Nesbit, 71,
5. Where There Is No Light Laura Stachel, 93,
6. The Power of Touch Louisa Silva, 117,
7. The Ripple Effect Lynn Price, 135,
8. Patent Wars Priti Radhakrishnan, 147,
9. Without Mud There Is No Lotus Sharon Terry, 165,
10. Building for a Better Future Wes Janz, 179,
About the Authors, 201,
Further Discussion, 211,