Duty and Service: Life and Career of a Tamil Teacher of English in Sri Lanka

Duty and Service: Life and Career of a
Tamil Teacher of English in Sri Lanka
DAVID HAYES
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

This article discusses the life and career of a Tamil teacher of English
working in the government education system in northern Sri Lanka.
Based on data gathered in an extended life history interview, the article
explores the teacher’s own experiences of schooling, his reasons for
entering teaching as a profession, his professional training, and aspects
of his working life in areas fought over by government and LTTE
(Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) forces. The teacher’s narrative is
contextualized within the history of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka
between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils and aims to shed
some light on how an individual finds the motivation to continue to
work in a situation of extreme personal danger and, further, how he
positions himself within his community as a teacher of a foreign
language which might be seen as an irrelevance to students in his
context. Though the limitations of case studies are recognized, as well
as the particularly distressing conditions of life and work for this
teacher, the article nevertheless contends that his story will contribute
to extending the knowledge base of TESOL as a discipline by providing
space for a voice from a peripheral community to be heard.
doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.214048

he primary purpose of this article is to give an account of aspects of
the lived experience of a Tamil teacher of English in the state
educational system in Sri Lanka, in which English is taught as a foreign
(or, for some students, a second) language. The article aims to
contribute to an increased understanding of teachers’ lives within

their specific social contexts in order that the knowledge base of TESOL
in its multiple professional realisations might be expanded. Much
current TESOL practice worldwide has been criticised as being unduly,
often inappropriately, Western-influenced (Canagarajah, 1999a, 1999c;
Holliday, 1994, 2005; Phillipson, 1992), and there has been considerable
debate surrounding the desirability of developing contextually
appropriate pedagogies (Bax, 2003; Harmer, 2003; Holliday, 1994),
which I contend could be better informed by research that focuses on
the life histories of individual teachers. Such research is especially

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pertinent in the light of recent work in critical applied linguistics that
has emphasised the importance of ‘‘local social practices, communicative
conventions, linguistic realities, and knowledge paradigms for actively
informing language policies and practices for classrooms and
communities in local contexts’’ (Canagarajah, 2005, p. xi), because
this type of research is able to uncover just such local knowledge,
practices, conventions, and realities in all their variety.
I hope, then, that this study will contribute to an understanding of the
realities of schooling in non-Western contexts, by illuminating features
of this teacher’s own schooling, training, classroom practice, conditions
of work, and broader experience of his educational system and attitudes
toward the English language. In this instance, there is a specific focus on
life as a teacher in a context of armed conflict. Many readers will have

little experience of such contexts. Though there are numerous societies
around the world afflicted by conflict, investigations of the conditions of
teaching and learning within them rarely feature in the TESOL
literature and, therefore, I feel that this teacher’s story is particularly
worthy of attention.
I acknowledge the paradox of my own position as a native English
speaker1 and the story that I am recounting being that of a nonnativeEnglish-speaking teacher. Ethical issues relating to this are explored.

ASPECTS OF CONTEXT IN SRI LANKA: TESOL,
EDUCATION, AND BEYOND
Political Context
The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority Sinhalese and
minority Tamils has been a central feature of the postindependence
history of the country. It is an ethnic conflict intertwined with language
and religion, with the Sinhalese being predominantly Buddhist and the
Tamils being predominantly Hindu. From July 1983 until May 2009 the
country was in an almost continuous state of civil war,2 though there was
a period of relative peace from 2002 to late 2005, when a cease-fire was
signed between the Sri Lankan government and the rebel movement,
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). However, from
November 2005 onwards, there was a resumption of violence, increasing
in scale and intensity, until in January 2008 the Sri Lankan government
formally withdrew from the cease-fire, launching an all-out offensive
1

I recognize the problematic nature of the terms native English speaker and nonnative English
speaker but, because they are still used extensively in TESOL literature, I have retained
them here for convenience.
2
The war, its causes, and its consequences are documented in such works as Bose (2007)

and Gamage and Watson (1999) inter alia.

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against the LTTE, which resulted in a military victory in May 2009. As
many as 90,000 people have died in the war since 1983, and there are
some 300,000 internally displaced ethnic Tamils in the country living in
government-controlled camps (Amnesty International, 2009a). The civil
war has had a direct impact on the lives of Sri Lankans of both ethnic
communities, with attacks on civilians in the urban areas of the south
being common, and civilians in the north and east also directly targeted
as well as often being caught in the cross fire of fighting between the Sri
Lankan army and the LTTE (Amnesty International, 2008). The LTTE
was also criticised internationally by the United Nations throughout the
duration of the conflict for its recruitment of child soldiers (Amnesty
International, 2008). At the time of writing this article it is not clear how
the Sri Lankan government will seek to win the peace in the country,
now that it has won the war. Actions such as raising the military budget
even after the end of the conflict have given rise to concerns about longterm military fortification and surveillance in Tamil-majority areas; and
international concern about the length of time being taken to screen
internally displaced Tamils held in camps has been growing and is seen
as an infringement of basic human rights (Amnesty International,
2009b), as well as being a threat to Sri Lanka’s relations with its major
trading partners (‘‘Sri Lanka and the EU,’’ 2009).
It is not the purpose of the article to trace the causes of the conflict,
but it is important to note that any discussion of English teaching in the
country must be set against the context of more than 20 years of war.

Further, if history is not to repeat itself and armed conflict is not to
break out again in the future, education has a central role to play in
long-term resolution of the differences between the Sinhalese and Tamil
communities. This resolution is dependent on the establishment of
mutual respect and understanding between the communities. As the
Report of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and
Understanding (Sen, 2007) notes, ‘‘Educational content is linked with
the promotion of respect and understanding—or the opposite. Thus the
educational curriculum is central in embodying and communicating
values and messages about the relationships and understandings
between and across existing identity groups’’ (p. 62). This applies as
much to English language education as it does to other subjects.

Education and Language Policy
Language policy is commonly held to have played a major role in
precipitating the ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and
minority Tamil communities. The 1956 Official Language Act—the
‘‘Sinhala Only’’ act—made Sinhala the sole official language and thus
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devalued Tamil as well as the former colonial language. As Bailey (1998)
comments, ‘‘The unhappy state of beautiful Sri Lanka is in part a result
of language legislation enacted by majority pride. The inevitable
consequence has been minority misery’’ (p. 219). In some recognition
of the effects of the 1956 act, the 13th amendment to the 1978
Constitution of Sri Lanka, certified on 14 November 1987, revised the
position of Tamil and English as follows in clauses (2) and (3) of

Chapter IV on language, ‘‘Official Language. 18. (1) The Official
Language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. (2) Tamil shall also be an official
language. (3) English shall be the link language.’’ The wording seems to
be intentionally ambiguous and indicative of a clear language—and thus
ethnic—hierarchy. The constitution does not state that ‘‘The Official
Languages of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala and Tamil,’’ which would have
given the two languages unequivocal equal status, but retains the
original 1978 article with Sinhala first and Tamil inserted in a
subsequent clause without the capitalisation for ‘‘official language.’’ In
practice, although Tamil has the status of an ‘‘official language,’’ its
place in national life remains subservient to that of Sinhala. With respect
to English, given an official place as a ‘‘link language’’ between
communities, it seems that economic imperatives as much as social
circumstances were the driver for language policy, with proficiency in
English being seen as important in private sector employment (National
Education Commission, 2002).
The structure of the system of education in Sri Lanka is heavily
influenced by its former colonial power, the United Kingdom. Children
attend school from the age of six onwards, and compulsory basic
education consists of five years of primary schooling followed by four
years of junior secondary schooling. In 2006, the last year for which
statistics are available, there were 3,836,550 pupils in 9,714 government
primary and secondary schools with 204,908 teachers (Ministry of
Education, 2007). Breakdown of teachers by subject is not available, and
so precise figures for the number of English teachers cannot be given.
Mirroring the ethnic divide, schools are separated according to
medium of instruction, with most children being taught in their first
language—Sinhala or Tamil—throughout their primary and secondary
schooling. In both types of schools the government of Sri Lanka has for
some time made considerable efforts to promote the learning of English

(National Education Commission, 2002). Formal teaching of English
begins in Grade 3, and it is there that it is supposed to begin to play its
part in contributing to the overall objectives of lessening social
differentiation and contributing to the achievement of social harmony
between communities. These objectives are encapsulated in the first two
of the nine ‘‘national goals’’ for education (National Education
Commission, 1992), namely
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1. The achievement of a functioning sense of National Cohesion, National
Integration and National Unity.
– Understanding and valuing the concept of the Sri Lankan nation, in the
context of the global community.
– Inculcation of a deep feeling of patriotism and commitment to the
service of the nation and its upliftment.
– Appreciation of the contribution made by the cultural traditions of every
ethnic group and religion to the enrichment of the Sri Lankan nation.
– Sensitivity to the role of language use and cultural appreciation in
sustaining national cohesion.
2. The establishment of a pervasive pattern of Social Justice and the active
elimination of inequalities.
– Awareness of and sensitivity to the significance of social justice and active
elimination of inequalities.
– Sense of personal responsibility and accountability.
– Ability of rights and duties of self and others; and a sense of fair-play.

The goals are intended to permeate the entire educational

curriculum and be incorporated into educational materials. They may
be seen in part as a response to reviews of textbooks in use as the conflict
turned into civil war. In Sri Lankan history textbooks of the 1970s and
1980s, for example, it was found that ‘‘There was no attempt either in
texts used by the Sinhalese or by the Tamils to use positive illustrations
of the other group. The texts were culturally inflammatory and laid the
intellectual foundations for social conflict and civil war’’ (Heyneman &
Todoric-Bebic, 2000, as cited in Harber, 2004, pp. 93–94). The extent to
which teachers and students actively perceive the instantiation of these
national goals for education in newer textbooks has yet to be
determined. Certainly, the goals have not been realised in practice
since they were first developed in 1992; and it remains to be seen
whether they will in the future, now that the military conflict has ended.

TESOL, Education, and Conflict
Studies of TESOL in local contexts worldwide have been increasing in
their frequency in recent years, although those that focus on what are
usually termed developing or less developed countries, such as Sri
Lanka, are more scarce. A notable exception is Braine’s (2005) edited
collection that provides accounts of the history of English language
teaching in 15 countries, amongst them Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and
Sri Lanka. Moving closer to the concerns of this study, Braine’s
contributors provide biographies within each chapter of their experiences of ‘‘Becoming an English teacher.’’ However, these biographies
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are restricted to just over two pages each and inevitably skim the surface
of the authors’ lives. Further, both of the authors of the chapter on Sri

Lanka now live outside the country of their birth, in contrast to the
research participant in this article, who has spent his entire working life
in Sri Lanka; and, most pertinent to this article, there is no mention in
the chapter of the ethnic conflict in the country, which has been such a
dominant feature of its history postindependence and particularly since
1983. This omission is redressed in Canagarajah (1999c), which
documents the teaching of English in a conflict zone in the north of
Sri Lanka, with a primary focus on how teachers and students negotiate
responses to the various challenges posed by centre–periphery imbalances related to materials and pedagogy, but the educational level it
deals with is the university. In contrast, this article is an examination of
the personal experiences of learning English, the journey to becoming
an English teacher, and the meanings ascribed to the teaching of
English in a conflict zone, from the point of view of a school teacher. It is
notable that, apart from Canagarajah’s work, there seems to be a dearth
of literature on TESOL and contexts that are afflicted by armed conflict.
In educational literature more broadly, the effect of violent conflict
on schooling is widely discussed. Davies (2004), for example, explores
the effects of war on education systems in a variety of contexts, including
Kosovo, Nepal, Palestine, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, in the late
20th and early 21st centuries. She notes (Davies, 2004) how children are
‘‘damaged by war on at least three interrelated levels,’’ namely
First is the direct experience of war or violence against themselves or the
adults who care for them. Second is the damage done to society round them,
through which their ability to learn and develop is mediated because of the
loss of security and sense of their place in the world. Finally is the disruption
to educational opportunities, in that conflict destroys schools and school
systems as well as people. (p. 95)

With specific reference to Sri Lanka, she cites a survey of children in the
northeast town of Batticaloa which found that:

Over 40 per cent of children had personally experienced conflict related
violence (e.g. home attacked or shelled, being shot at, beaten or arrested).
Over 50 per cent had close family members killed violently, including
disappearance of a family member following abduction or detention. Severe
levels of post-traumatic psychological distress were found. (Chase, 2002, as
cited in Davies, 2004, p. 99)

These harrowing statistics highlight the enormity of the task to restore a
sense of normalcy to children’s lives once armed conflict ceases, a task
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even more difficult and complex for those children in Sri Lanka forced
to become soldiers by the LTTE, in defiance of all international
conventions (Amnesty International, 2008). Given their emotional and
psychological vulnerability, it is hardly surprising that children form the
focus of most of the research into education and conflict, but the harm
done to teachers as well as children in schools must also be acknowledged. In summing up the damage done by the war in the Northeast
Province in Sri Lanka, Walker (2004) records that, inevitably, teachers
were dislocated along with their pupils and that ‘‘an estimated 10–15%
of the teachers are themselves traumatized’’ (p. 11). Though there are
examples of successful programmes to assist child victims of war in Sri
Lanka (Schauer, 2008), they are generally dependent on teachers for
their implementation. However, teachers’ own psychological needs are
not addressed by professional counsellors separate from the training
given to prepare these same teachers for their counselling roles in
schools; that is, they are required to provide counselling for children
before they themselves have been counselled (Walker, 2004).

Looking to the future, Colenso (2005) emphasises the role that
education has to play in lessening the patterns of social inequality and
discrimination that contribute to ethnic conflict. Though education
cannot bring about social cohesion in Sri Lanka by itself, it can help to
lay its foundations (DFID and World Bank, 2000). Language education
has a crucial role to play in this as ‘‘an exercise in interculturalism’’ since
‘‘a central aim in any language learning endeavour is human
interaction’’ (Lo Bianco, 1999, p. 60). Certainly, curriculum development efforts in Sri Lanka have been focused on realising this
intercultural goal for a number of years. Hayes (2002) shows how
English language textbooks introduced into Sri Lankan primary schools
from 1999 to 2001 were designed to instantiate the national goals for
education, promoting mutual respect amongst ethnic communities by
eliminating bias. Indeed, a review of the first of the books in the series
noted that there was ‘‘an implicit sense of harmony throughout the
book’’ (Hayes, 2002, p. 191). However, as already noted, whether the
goals have been realised by teachers in their classroom interaction with
students in the separate Sinhala- and Tamil-medium schools is another
matter and one which has not, to my knowledge, been systematically
researched.
Any resolution of the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka also goes beyond
the provision of textbooks that are designed to enhance interethnic
understanding to issues of resource allocation, because, as Colenso
(2005) notes, ‘‘given that many of the significant areas of educational
deprivation are in the predominantly Tamil conflict-affected areas, such
inequities are often perceived to be perpetrated by the state on ethnic
grounds’’ (p. 418). This view is supported by Walker (2004), who reports
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that, because there is an acute shortage of teachers even for subjects
viewed as essential in Tamil-medium schools, it will be extremely difficult
in conflict-affected areas of the country to fulfil the desired intercultural
goals of language education. A shortage of teachers and resources has
inevitably had an impact on general education indicators, with reports
from the Tamil-dominated north and east of the island indicating
‘‘enrolment figures somewhere in the low 80 percent range’’ in contrast
to the 97 per cent elsewhere and that ‘‘low attendance rates and poor
education quality are problematic in these regions’’ (Ashford, 2009,
p. 363). In addition to redressing these inequities, I would also contend
that understanding the experiences of teachers (and children) who have
been affected by armed conflict is an essential factor in eventual
reconciliation. I hope, accordingly, that in some small way the English
teacher’s story presented in this research study may contribute to
understanding in and beyond Sri Lanka of the damage wrought by
conflict as well as to demonstrating the immense value of education in
times of adversity.

THE STUDY: METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Research Participant
The research participant, part of whose life history is recounted in this
article, is a male, ethnic Tamil teacher of English. For the purposes of
this study he has been anonymized as Krishnan. He is married with two
school-age children; his wife is also a teacher. Krishnan has been
personally known to the researcher since 1996, though direct communication has broken down, with e-mail messages as this article was being
written and revised up to late 2009 receiving no reply. However,
information from third parties indicate that Krishnan remained safe and
continued to focus on his school work and other community activities.
Krishnan agreed to be interviewed for this study and for his story to be

presented as part of the author’s research project into the lives and
careers of nonnative-English-speaking teachers in Sri Lanka and
elsewhere.

Life History Interview
The interview for the study was conducted in English, though the
research participant occasionally used Tamil for the names of particular
organizations. Life history interviews, as the name suggests, are essentially
in-depth, unstructured interviews that range over the entire course of an
individual’s life (Atkinson, 1998; Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Roberts, 2002).
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The purpose of research of this nature is to uncover aspects of the social
world, ‘‘to collect and interpret the lives of others as part of human
understanding’’ (Roberts, 2002, p. 15). The research is emic (examining
phenomena from the perspectives of the researched themselves) rather
than etic (privileging frameworks that classify behaviours on the basis of a
set of features devised by researchers alone). Critics of interviewing as a
research tool often contend that interviewees provide merely subjective
responses to questions, and so the resulting data are not trustworthy in
the way that data collected in a more objective manner are. However,
critics ignore the fact that, even with supposedly more objective methods
of data collection, such as survey questionnaires, there is subjectivity in
selection of areas to investigate as well as in the formulation of questions
(why ask this question in this way; why not a different question asked in a
different way?). Here I acknowledge at the outset that the interview was
co-constructed by two individuals, each a complex array of beliefs,

attitudes, and feelings, who have interacted with and within the
context—the interview as a method of investigation—and that my own
background and beliefs may have influenced the research process (for
example, because I decided to pursue one particular area of interest
arising in the interview and chose not to pursue another) as much as
Krishnan’s background and beliefs have influenced his responses to my
questions and probing of issues.
The nature of humans as socially located beings and the nature of
human communication, which is shaped and influenced by social
structures, have important implications for research of this nature. Issues
such as the relative power and status of participants involved in the
interview must be considered, along with whether rights of refusal to
participate in the interview are genuinely respected, the possible impact of
self-revelation and disclosure to strangers on an individual’s life beyond the
interview, and, during the interview, the impact of close personal contact
with associated risks of giving and taking offence or of causing loss of face.
These are, ultimately, ethical issues (Bar-On, 1996; Kaz´mierska, 2004).

Ethical Issues
The standard concerns for any research with human participants are
those of informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality (Ryen, 2004).
Though essential to provide basic protection to research participants,
such requirements do not necessarily ensure that the welfare of research
participants is at the forefront of a researcher’s thinking. Further, there
seem to me to be particular ethical issues to be considered when a nativeEnglish-speaking researcher—particularly of a powerful language such
as English—is working with nonnative-English-speaking research parti66

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cipants. This problem is not necessarily acknowledged if ethics are
viewed simply as dealing with the standard concerns. For example, to
what extent may work such as that presented in this article be considered
as giving voice to the nonnative English speaker, or is the nonnative
English speaker’s voice merely being appropriated by the native English
speaker? I return to this issue later, and I also hope that, in the
presentation of aspects of Krishnan’s life, I am able to demonstrate that,
as Denzin and Lincoln (2005) declare, ‘‘Action-oriented and clinically
oriented qualitative researchers can also create spaces where those who
are studied (the Other) can speak. The evaluator [researcher] becomes
the conduit for making such voices heard’’ (p. 26).
The standard ethical issues of informed consent, anonymity, and
confidentiality have been dealt with in this research in what may be
termed the standard way, albeit with an understanding that they are far
from problematic. Prior to the interview, I secured my participant’s
consent to being interviewed, although I recognise that questions of
power may have been subconsciously at play when agreement was given.
At the start of the interview I explained as fully as possible the purposes
of the study, the benefit to myself of carrying it out, and that I would
render anonymous all participant contributions, and then I sought my
participant’s consent to whatever he said being written about in an
academic format. Nevertheless, as Goodson and Sikes (2001) point out,
because of the personal, idiosyncratic nature of information in a life
history, once re-presented in publications anonymity and thus confidentiality are always difficult to guarantee. This danger is exacerbated, as
Ryen (2004) warns, in an age of rapid mass communication, where
researchers have little control over their research or the uses to which it
may be put, once it reaches the public domain. Nevertheless, attempting
to ensure anonymity is one aspect of meeting ‘‘our basic human
responsibilities’’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 27) to any research
participant, within a general framework of morality or ‘‘ethics of care’’

(Piper & Simons, 2005). Given the context of the study and the
harrowing nature of some of the revelations, I have had continually to
confront the ethical dilemma of ‘‘to what extent can somebody’s
biography be treated as mere research material?’’ (Kaz´mierska, 2004,
p. 189). I believe, however, that bringing Krishnan’s story to a wider
audience is important as a contribution to the process of understanding
in Sri Lanka and as a contribution to a much-needed expansion of the
knowledge base of TESOL. At every stage of this work I have striven to
bear in mind Denzin’s (1989) injunction regarding the obligations of a
life history researcher:
We must remember that our primary obligation is always to the people we
study, not to our project or to a larger discipline. The lives and stories that we
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hear and study are given to us under a promise, that promise being that we
protect those who have shared with us. And, in return, this sharing will allow
us to write life documents that speak to the human dignity, the suffering, the
hopes, the dreams, the lives gained, and the lives lost by the people we study.
(p. 83)

Giving Voice, Appropriating Voice
As I have noted, qualitative researchers may claim to be giving voice to
those whose voices are not usually heard in academic discourse (Denzin
& Lincoln, 2005). However, the vision of an ethics of care in research,
which I have argued underlies this article, requires that the issue of
appropriating rather than the claimed giving voice to the teacher be
addressed. I do not subscribe to the view that Krishnan consciously feels

himself to be silenced or oppressed by Western hegemony in TESOL,
even though I recognise the existence of that hegemony. As the extracts
from the interview will show, Krishnan is an articulate and engaged
professional who is focused on the development of education in his own
context on his own terms. Where he does feel constrained, this is more
by the limits imposed by the circumstances of the conflict in his
community and the Sri Lankan educational system than by outside
forces. In claiming to be giving voice to the teacher in this study, I am
making a personal claim about what is, for me, the significance of the
study within the wider TESOL community, where stories such as
Krishnan’s are rarely heard (see e.g., Braine, 1999; Canagarajah, 1999a;
Medgyes, 2000, on the underrepresentation of nonnative English
speakers in TESOL). The potential political purpose of presenting
Krishnan’s story here must also be recognised. Some years ago Goodson
(1994) wrote that ‘‘The sponsoring of the teacher’s voice (if sponsorship
can be accepted with its paternalistic overtones) is thus counter-cultural
in that it works against the grain of power/knowledge as held and
produced by politicians and administrators’’ (p. 31). I would argue that
Krishnan’s story certainly ‘‘works against the grain of power/knowledge’’
in Sri Lankan education as well as in TESOL more broadly. However,
though Krishnan gave his consent to being interviewed and it is his
actual voice that is represented in the interview extracts in this study, the
authorial voice in the elements of life history presented in this article is
inevitably my own. Thus my own subject position needs elaboration.
My involvement in education in Sri Lanka has not been as an
academic tourist or as a ‘‘jet in, jet out’’ Western consultant who simply
flies in to give advice or to run a seminar with no knowledge of the local
context but who is listened to because of his or her status in the field as
an expert. I did not engage in the context initially for research purposes
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but to work on a joint Sri Lankan–British educational development
project. This was my second extended stay in the country, first arriving
there as a volunteer teacher in 1982 and witnessing the events the
following year, which saw Krishnan lose his livelihood in what is known
as Black July. My commitment to education in Sri Lanka has been long
term, and I see this article, through its stated purposes, as an extension
of that commitment. I write from the subject position of one who has
spent much of his professional life attempting, through development
projects, to assist others in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas of the
world to access the opportunities that formal education is widely
acknowledged to bring to its recipients (UNESCO, 2008) and that,
indeed, it has brought to me personally. I remain committed to a vision
of education as an instrument for achieving social equity. In the Sri
Lankan case, this inevitably includes a focus on the development of
respect amongst ethnic communities. From this personal perspective I
see my engagement in Sri Lankan education, and the retelling of
Krishnan’s story, as interlinked. I have chosen extracts to support my
interpretations of what my informant has said, framing and analysing
based on my experience of the context and my personal understanding
of his life and career; but, in so doing, I hope I have remained faithful to
the essential truth of the stories as told to me and created ‘‘texts to
develop the conditions of agency—[my] own, the individuals with whom
[I am] involved in the creation of the text, and with the reader’’
(Tierney, 1999, p. 311). In that hope, I now turn to Krishnan’s story
itself.3

KRISHNAN’S STORY
Beginnings: Formal Schooling and Introduction to English
Krishnan was born in 1959 in a small town on the east coast of Sri
Lanka to a Tamil family in which his father was a public health inspector
and his mother a primary school teacher. He had his own education in
Tamil-medium primary and secondary schools from 1963 to ’78. At his
semirural primary school he was not taught English, because the school
had no English teachers, and it was not until he entered Grade 6, the
beginning of secondary school, that he encountered the language in the
classroom. Moving to a large, urban secondary school, he was at a
disadvantage, because most of his class had been taught English from
3

Inevitably, in an article of this length, I am not able to report on Krishnan’s life and career
in its entirety. Selections have to be made, and I have concentrated on what seem to me to
be important themes in his learning and teaching experience, particularly his teaching in
areas directly contested by government and LTTE forces.

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Grade 3. However, for a while Krishnan managed to mask his lack of
knowledge through use of his natural intelligence, as he explained:
My first teacher was one Mr Subramaniam,4 a very ferocious looking, tough,
rough man; and I was a very skinny, small fellow but I was quite intelligent to
notice that he didn’t beat the children who sat in the first row very much and
children who were sitting in the first row were all clever students so I went
and sat with them. Before the teacher came in—he was taking the reading

class for me—I got them to write the English sentences in the textbook, wrote
them up in Tamil, memorised them and then rubbed off the pencil marks;
and when he asked, when my chance came in the line to read the sentences, I
just parroted out what I had memorised and after one or two sentences he
just goes to the other one. So I had been escaping from his beatings.

It was only when one day he ‘‘was pushed to the fourth line by the other
students’’ that the teacher realised he could not read English at all and
the next moment I found myself among the branches of the flamboyant
tree: he had been holding my waist with one hand and pushing me through
the branches of the tree. That was a very frightening thing but he nicely said
‘‘My young fellow, next time I find you’re doing this sort of cheating I will not
let you down easily.’’ So that was the thing and after that I didn’t know how I
learnt English, I was very fast in learning the language.

It seems to have been common practice at the time for teachers regularly
to beat children who could not do what they were asked to do, but
Krishnan does not harbour any resentment because of it, commenting,
‘‘It was common in those days. Nobody worried about it and it was the
way to discipline children in those days.’’ Indeed, Krishnan remembers
all of his English teachers with affection and respect, ‘‘I remember all
throughout my schooling my English teachers were wonderful.’’ Other
teachers seem to have been less ferocious than Mr. Subramaniam
(though physical punishments remained), and Krishnan learnt to enjoy
reading stories in English, transferring skills from his mother tongue:
‘‘So because I was reading Tamil stories a lot I was able to understand
what sort of language was going on and what was happening in the
story.’’ Spelling bees, reading competitions, and drama were also typical
school activities for which Krishnan developed a facility, supported not
only by wide reading at home but also by the special attention given by

one of his teachers in Grade 10, Mr. Kumar, who ‘‘asked me to do the
exercises at home and he checked the books during interval time. . . . he
explained to me this should be this way because of this reason and I got
to learn very well. So it was that I never failed in English.’’
4

70

This, along with other names in Krishnan’s story, is a pseudonym.

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Krishnan thus excelled in English after his rather inauspicious start,
but the motivation to do so came from his teachers—‘‘I feel my teachers
were very supportive to me, in motivating me to read, to study
English’’—rather than from wider society, as he noted that, ‘‘At that
time, people didn’t—in my eyes—didn’t think English was that much
important because I didn’t hear anybody saying something high of
English, nobody cared about it actually except the English teachers.’’
This notwithstanding, Krishnan ‘‘found the English teachers had a
respect. . . . they had high esteem, they had good salaries in those times.’’
This was connected in his mind with the higher esteem given to teachers
as a whole during his schooling.
At that time the teaching profession was considered to be a very high
standard, or teachers were considered very respectfully. . . . as students we
had a good respect for the teachers; and everybody thought of them as one of
the higher-ups in the society.

However, he himself elected not to become a teacher after completing

secondary school in 1978, but instead took an office job. His path into
teaching is the subject of the following section.

Career Change: Becoming a Teacher
Krishnan’s path into teaching was not a conventional one. He had
had a series of jobs in lawyer’s offices and private businesses before
working in the commercial capital, Colombo, where he set up his own
business. However, in 1983 everything changed for him during Black
July, when Sri Lanka was once again riven by islandwide ethnic riots that
finally precipitated the beginning of all-out war between the Sri Lankan
government and the LTTE. As Krishnan explained:
Actually I was doing a private business before I joined the teaching
profession. My business was burned down in the July riots so I had to go
back home. So I was doing paddy [rice] cultivation and I found one day in a
post office some people were writing applications, going through the
[government] gazette notice. So I looked at the notice and it was an
examination, competitive examination, for recruitment of English teachers
[. . . ] So I applied and I got selected, one of the six people who passed on the
merit basis. So I joined and I was sent to [college] for the pre-service training
and I found that was the job for me.

As he indicates, once accepted as a teacher, Krishnan seems to have
realised that he had found his vocation, a concept defined by Hansen
(1995) as ‘‘describ[ing] work that has social value and that provides
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71


enduring personal meaning,’’ rather than ‘‘simply a choice among the

array of jobs available in society’’ (p. 9).
Following a pattern common at that time, after his one-month
introductory course to teaching, Krishnan taught in schools for four
years before attending English Teacher’s College for a year (1987–1988).
His college experience had both its positive and negative sides. Negative
in that the training lacked a practical focus, as he commented:
The English language side, I didn’t learn very much from the training
college, but I got books from outside about teaching methodology and
teaching behaviour in the class [. . .] I think our training college lecturers
were not good models, because we got knowledge from the books and we got
theories explained in the classroom but we didn’t see the models; so we
couldn’t translate the knowledge into application skills. [. . .] They were
teaching us in a kind of lecture mode.

But the experience was also positive in that Krishnan came across an
inspiring role model at college, one of his lecturers who looked beyond the
subject matter of English to the underlying purpose of education itself:
‘‘There I got a mentor. He was a guru actually. He was teaching about
morality, our duty to give education to children and the meaning of
education.’’ In addition, even the negative experience of the theoretical
nature of the teacher training was offset to some degree by the opportunity
that students created for collaborative learning: ‘‘So we taught ourselves,
the peer group teaching was there very much.’’ Nevertheless, the negative
aspects of teacher training constituted in this fashion could do little to
prepare him for the classroom realities of his future teaching career, even
though the personal inspiration of his mentor may have helped him to
endure the hardships he had to face as the war raged around him.

Being a Teacher: Education in a Conflict Zone
For Krishnan, the act of teaching in the classroom cannot be

separated from an acknowledgement of the wider social responsibilities
of being an educator in one’s society. He derived a profound sense of
satisfaction not just from his interaction with his students in the
classroom as they engaged with the subject he was teaching—‘‘Every
moment when there is learning taking place you can see it in the eyes of
the children, and they never would like to let you go out of the
classroom’’—but also from a belief in the value of his teaching in terms
of what education could do for his students in the wider society.
It is not teaching that I enjoyed most, it was actually leading the children to
be more dynamic and more devoted to public responsibilities; like having
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self-discipline, acting as leaders, conducting programmes, doing homework
and having responsibility in your hands. That part I enjoyed very much
because that was producing more results. [. . .] So I think I was doing a
correct thing by giving them the spirit or confidence to take the matters in
their own hands, to decide what to do.

Both of these sources of satisfaction in his professional life seem to have
sustained him while working in conditions of constant physical danger.
Teaching as he did for some years in an area actively fought over by the
Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (known euphemistically by the
government as an ‘‘uncleared area’’),5 he had to endure the effects of
violence on a daily basis. In such conditions, human capacity for
endurance of what, under normal circumstances, would be regarded as
intolerable seems to come to the fore.
I took the challenge as it came. Most of the teachers . . . every day we talked of

what would happen, what is happening, how we can evade attacks or things
like that. And that was part of the life and we took that as it was.
I6:

So you just went to school as normal?

Yeah, as normal.

However, these experiences have inevitably had a continuing impact on
his life, as he explained:
But if I had been caught up in a helicopter shooting and things like that at
school or outside school—when we had to safeguard ourselves behind the
trees or behind the buildings and taking cover, things like that—immediately
after the raid is over, my body shakes and shakes when the release comes. Still
I think the fear of getting killed is within me. . . . this shaking is still there
when I try to relax.

Nonetheless, at least at a conscious level, he seems to have been able to
put aside fears for his physical safety whilst in the classroom, and the
conditions outside the class seem to have provided an additional stimulus
for students to study: ‘‘But in the classrooms that didn’t affect the teaching
very much because the pressure from the outside society motivated our
children to be more vigorous or aggressive and to acquire knowledge.’’
As far as his classroom teaching is concerned, in his early professional
life Krishnan relied more on what he had imbibed from his own teachers—
Lortie’s (1975) apprenticeship of observation—than anything he learnt from
training courses. Over time, his own innate reflective capacity seems to
5
6

The government of Sri Lanka continued to support education in all areas of Sri Lanka
throughout the conflict, including those areas under the control of the LTTE.
In the extracts from the interview transcripts, ‘‘I’’ refers to the interviewer.

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have been the main driver in the development of his teaching methods.
But this does not mean that Krishnan totally rejected the methods
experienced in his own childhood; rather, it means that now he places
them within a principled methodological framework, as he made clear:
I think still we need to study about learning styles of children and how they
can be motivated to gain knowledge, because these days we have gone from
one extreme to the other extreme. Earlier it was knowledge-centred now it is
much more skill-centred, but the knowledge part is missing. There should be
a balance. [. . . ] We also want knowledge, children need knowledge, so the
older traditions, some of them—memorising words, memorising spellings
and abstract affairs—also can be brought in, not hurting the children but
promoting the children, that’s what I think.

He also sees teachers as role models for the children in their classrooms.
Children need leadership and children want or expect their teacher to be
pro-active, dynamic, entertaining and pouring with knowledge. So they just
wanted that sort of different character amongst them, and I believe I gave
them sort of what they expected.

Beyond the classroom itself, Krishnan sees his work as a teacher within
the context of service to his community. The relevance of English to

students in that context, particularly in an area subject to the constant
threat of military action, might be questioned. What purpose does
teaching English serve here when even one’s physical survival could not
be ensured? However, such questions were readily answered in
Krishnan’s mind. He seemed to have no doubts about the value of
English to the children in his school, a value which the ethnic conflict
only served to intensify: ‘‘I found I was doing a social duty to empower
our people with the knowledge and the weapons to acquire knowledge,
that’s English.’’ The choice of metaphor is noteworthy. And, like most
teachers, Krishnan takes great pride in the accomplishments of his
students and in seeing them forge successful careers once they leave
school, but inevitably for some of his students this has also been directly
influenced by the ethnic conflict in the country.
I am proud to say my children, some of them, are now English teachers [ . . . ]
and some are computer experts, they are doing very well with computers.
Some are military leaders [with the LTTE] because their knowledge gave
them, their English gave them, an additional power.

On a daily practical level, the value of his own possession of the English
language was recognised in dealings with government security forces.
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There is a powerful illustration of this instrumental value of English in
alleviating some of the effects of the appalling circumstances that both
he and the schoolchildren had to face in Krishnan’s account of the most
extreme of the violent incidents he had to face in his area.
For four days I was in the school under attack but I hid myself; and then,

fortunately I had friends in the police forces so they came on the fifth day
looking for me because my family had been complaining that I was missing in
the raid or something, no news. [ . . . ] What has saved me is, whenever in my
area the schoolchildren were nabbed by the security personnel I’d go with
the principal and get the children released, saying they are innocent and
things like that, convincing them because I had English in my mouth. So I
was able to release them. So the police officer had a high respect for me, and
when he heard I had got caught in the melee or the battle they took me out.

For Krishnan, then, it seems evident that his teaching life is an extension
of his commitment to his community. It is not just a job that he does but
part of his contribution to the wider Tamil society in Sri Lanka. He
acknowledged that people become teachers for different reasons and
that the simple security of a government post is a sufficient driver for
many—‘‘People go for government jobs just for the security for their
later life because their pension will look after them, that is the only
reason they want government jobs.’’ However, his own beliefs go beyond
that: ‘‘My belief is something different. I believe in morality. If you are
doing a job, you must do it with a lot of sincerity. [ . . . ] For me the
human inner satisfaction is more important than the external rewards.’’
Krishnan embodies the ideal propounded by his guru at training college
of a teacher as a moral agent for good in society through education. As
part of this he has been engaged on a continuing quest for professional
self-development. He recalled that, after leaving his school in the
uncleared area, he had the opportunity in another school in the
provincial capital to further his development as a teacher: ‘‘I started
developing my own philosophy because I was reading a lot of books on
methodology and then the [training centre] had already come to
[provincial town] so I attended seminars and workshops.’’

The Future: English Teaching and Beyond
What does the future hold for Krishnan? Wherever he finds himself,
there is no let up in his attempts to play his part in building better lives for
members of his community in varied ways. He has not only sought to
develop as a teacher but has also been active in additional voluntary work,
in education, and in other forms of social welfare. He began to help in a
local school for children with physical impairments, raising funds and
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contributing to creating opportunities for the children—‘‘Last year seven
children sat for their ‘O’ level exam and they got through’’—which they
could not get in the state sector. He refers to this as his ‘‘second role as a
social worker.’’ Not content with that, he also has a ‘‘third role.’’
The third role is, I am a religious person, not in the ritualistic way but in the
spiritualist social welfare way. I find our society could help more in uplifting
the society, so I contribute as a coordinator for the [province].
I: Coordinator of?
Of the Hindu affairs, preventing fighting and cooperating with other
religious institutions and doing service for the war-victimised Hindu part of
the community.

Krishnan believes that education is a part of the moral enterprise of
social transformation through helping others ‘‘try[ing] to satisfy their
needs by giving them food, or giving them pleasure, giving them
knowledge or whatever and lead them to elevation.’’ He does not
consciously focus on the future in customary terms of career advancement but rather in terms of the impact he might have on others. When
asked to think about the future he commented:

I don’t believe in the future, I believe in the present.
I: So you have no vision of where you personally might be in five years time?
Not in the timeline, but I visualize myself . . . I have more energy, I have more
knowledge of working things out so I think I would be kind of like a magnet. I
would be transferring some of the energy to people who are going to be
associated with me in the years to come. That’s what I believe in doing. I
know I’m gathering things, I know I must leave it to others.

DISCUSSION
Education and Conflict
There are aspects of Krishnan’s education and teaching experience
that are reflected in those of teachers in other contexts, and others that
appear to be unique. This is, of course, likely to be true for any
individual, but the circumstances of Krishnan’s life and work in a
conflict zone make his story particularly worthy of attention. It is true, in
any case, that conditions such as those that have shaped Krishnan’s life
are more common than many of us may like to admit. Teachers are often
seen as representatives of governments and can be specific targets for
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violence from militant political opponents. This is happening, for
example, in southern Thailand where more than 90 teachers have been
murdered and numerous schools burnt down by secessionists opposed
to the central government (see, e.g., ‘‘94 Teachers,’’ 2009). Elsewhere, in
Colombia, teachers who are trade union activists are specific targets of
violence: In 2006, of the 75 murders of trade unionists, 40 were from the
education sector (Novelli, 2009). And being a teacher of a language such

as English—often seen as an imperial language (Edge, 2006)—can bring
particular dangers, as can be seen in the news report of a 16-year old
Afghani boy murdered for teaching English to his schoolmates (‘‘Boy
Teacher ‘Killed by Taleban,’’’ 2007).
Why is it that teachers and children in conflict zones continue to go to
school every day, when the mere fact of going can be regarded as an act
of bravery and a triumph of will, when it would seem so often to be much
easier just to give up? Krishnan’s experience has been shared by
countless others on a daily basis in Sri Lanka over many years. To
illustrate, whilst still living in the country I received a letter from another
English teacher with whom I had been working which read, in part:
I hope you will understand the difficulties that we are facing in [town].
During the early part of this year I got displaced with my family to far distant
place. Again I got displaced owing to the internal war closer to my house. I
also lost my household goods and other items. Most of the Government
departments and schools did not function during this period. Therefore we
could not organise our [programme of] workshops and other [centre]
activities during the second term.

Perhaps schooling is one of the few connections that these teachers and
children have with a normal everyday existence and, as such,
maintenance of this routine is all the more precious. Worldwide,
children affected by war express similar hopes; in the words of a 10-year
old, ‘‘I want peace, the war to stop and to go to school’’ (Albertyn,
Bickler, van As, Millar, & Rode, 2003, p. 230). Schooling offers hope that
the future does not have to be the same as the present. In Krishnan’s
case it would also seem that continuing to go to school when his safety
could not be guaranteed was an extension of his personal, moral
commitment to teaching as a vocation. Teaching may not have been
Krishnan’s first choice of career, but once he had begun, he had clearly

found his calling. His experience also suggests that the concept of
vocation should not be thought of simplistically, as a calling that one has
when one takes up a profession in the same ways as monks or priests are
called to a religious life. Rather, the concept of a vocation can be seen as
something that can develop over time, as well as being a stimulus to take
up a career. There is little doubt that Krishnan sees in education the
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means for social transformation and that for him the teaching of English
has a role in this process in Sri Lanka. In spite of—or even because of—
the difficulties engendered by the war, the acquisition of English, in
Krishnan’s view, will help his students to access the social capital (Fuller
& Hannum, 2002) that is available to users of the language in Sri Lanka
or beyond its borders.

English: Tool of Oppression or Liberation?
Krishnan does not see English as an imperial language, one that
oppresses its learners, though there is evidence elsewhere of resistance
to the hegemony of English in Sri Lanka. Canagarajah (1999c) provides
an analysis of how his students at the University of Jaffna in the early
1990s resisted both the alien discourses of the American textbooks and
his process approach to pedagogy. There was similar resistance to the
perceived evils of English, associated especially with the legacy of British
colonialism, from the students in Lo Bianco’s (1999) survey. In contrast,
for Krishnan, English is a language that offers the prospect of
empowerment for the children in his classes and for his community as
a whole. In this sense, with respect to English, Krishnan may be said to

demonstrate a commitment to ‘‘shar[ing] its resources widely in [his]
community to democratize its possibilities’’ (Canagarajah, 2001, p. 24).
Though we cannot know if his students shared his vision of empowerment through the English language, the fact that Krishnan also observed
that some of his students had become military leaders with the LTTE
‘‘because their knowledge gave them, their English gave them an
additional power’’ is significant. It also supports opinions espoused by
other Tamils during my visit to LTTE-held areas of the northeast of Sri
Lanka, before the breakdown of the cease-fire, that their leadership was
concerned to foster education in areas under their control, stressing the
importance of English in education in particular. This may have been
attributable, at least in part, to the fact that it was predominantly
through English that the LTTE’s case was made to the wider world.
There are interesting parallels here with the struggle against colonial
rule in Sri Lanka, where independence activists sought to appropriate
English, previously denied to the large majority of Sri Lankans, as a
means to further their own freedom movement (Brutt-Griffler, 2002).
Acquisition of English may also be seen as a way of challenging national
language policies favouring the dominance of the Sinhalese majority,
which act as a means of ‘‘legitimization of power relations among ethnolinguistic groups’’ (Bekerman, 2005, p. 2).
Without the views of Krishnan’s students, of course, we can only note
the possibility of English being used as a tool for liberation rather than
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oppression in these circumstances. Nevertheless, his experience would
seem to be a useful addition to the literature on nonnative-Englishspeaking teachers, which has little to say about teaching English in
situations of conflict, although important work has been done on
discrimination experienced by teachers working in Western environments

(see, e.g., Braine, 1999, 2004; Pacek, 2005) and on variations in classroom
practice between native speakers and nonnative-English-speaking
´ rva & Medgyes, 2000; Benke & Medgyes, 2005).
teachers (see, e.g., A
Krishnan’s experience is particularly relevant to work that has explored
concepts of linguistic imperialism (see, e.g., Edge, 2006; Phillipson, 1992).
Some of this work has been criticised for ignoring the agency of learners
and teachers of English. As Canagarajah (1999b) puts it, the notion of
linguistic imperialism (LI) ‘‘is insensitive to the many outcomes other
than domination—such as ways of modifying, mixing, appropriating, and
even resisting discourses. LI also fails to acknowledge the critical
consciousness subjects enjoy to negotiate domination’’ (p. 207).

Education and Context
I hope also that Krishnan’s story amply demonstrates that accounts of
the lives of teachers of English are an important contribution to an
ecological approach to English language teaching (Tudor, 2001).
Indeed, the value of life history research was emphasised by Hayes
(1996), who, in a study focused on secondary school teachers of English
in Thailand, argued that ‘‘in order to understand teaching-learning it is
not sufficient for us to focus only on the classroom and what happens
inside it’’ but that ‘‘we need also to know much more . . . about how
teachers themselves perceive the social and educational structures and
events of which they are part’’ (p. 174, original emphasis). Clearly,
Krishnan’s development as a teacher was influenced by the ecology of
his context. There were a number of instances in his life of what Denzin
(1989) calls epiphanies, experiences that had life-changing impact. As a
student, being caught trying to deceive Mr. Subramaniam had a profound
effect on his motivation to learn English, and having his business
destroyed in the July 1983 ethnic riots provided the impetus for him to

become a teacher, resulting in the discovery of his vocation. This sense of
vocation was reinforced by finding a role model at teacher-training
college, whose example struck a chord in Krishnan’s life, to the extent
that he too talks of his work as a social duty. His working life epitomises
this sense of duty willingly undertaken. It is evident in all the teaching he
has done, but particularly in schools where the physical safety of teachers
and students was constantly threatened, so too in his voluntary work
helping to develop a school for physically impaired children neglected by
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the state sector, and in his community work to assuage the effects of war
on its victims. As a teacher of English he has continually sought to reflect
on his classroom practice and, building on his own apprenticeship of
observation (Lortie, 1975), to develop to meet the needs of his students,
balancing what he feels are the strengths of more established ways of
teaching-learning with newer methods that have proven their value within
his own educational philosophy and practice.

CONCLUSION
Krishnan’s sense of self as a teacher is inextricably intertwined with
the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. In such contexts, individuals may often
feel themselves powerless to influence events that seem beyond their
control, larger than their own lives. However, Krishnan’s experience
shows that individuals can seek out opportunities within their particular
personal and professional contexts to make a difference, to effect
change at a local level. As Woost and Winslow (2004) comment, ‘‘people
are never completely powerless. They create spaces to live in despite the

many constraints they may experience. In those spaces, they also live
their identities, their sense of their place in the world’’ (p. 201). The life
of a teacher, of English as of any other subject, goes beyond subject
boundaries to encompass all aspects of life in a particular context. If we
do not make an attempt to understand a life in its totality, we will fail to
understand the professional life of which it is part. I hope, in particular,
that by making Krishnan’s story available to a wider audience I will have
helped in bringing to its readers a sense not just of the hardships that all
too many teachers around the world endure on a daily basis but also of
the immense commitment that teachers have to the students in their
care and for whom education, including the teaching of English, offers a
means to achieve a better life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the editors and the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful
responses have helped to strengthen this article. Above all, I am deeply grateful to
Krishnan for sharing his story with me and allowing me to represent it in this format.

THE AUTHOR
David Hayes teaches in the Department of Applied Linguistics, Brock University, St.
Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Prior to moving to Canada he worked on educational
development projects in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia. He has also taught at the
Universities of Leeds and York in the United Kingdom. His main research interests are
the lives and careers of teachers of English in government education systems and the
role of language education in peace-building in countries affected by armed conflict.
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