Description
Teaching matters. In Professing English on Two Continents Professor Brijraj Singh, who spent forty years teaching English at the college and university level in some of the major institutions both of India and the United States, describes the growth of a teacher’s mind and and shows the relevance of teaching lives. In this teaching autobiography he shows the way in which his experiences of teaching English in different situations and to different students helped not only to shape methodologies for teaching but also contributed to the evolution of a vision and set of values with which to go through life, and how they, in turn, fed into his teaching. Thus the book is about what the author learned about teaching and about life from teaching English. As such, it reaffirms the values for living implicit in the act of teaching and offers a triumphant justification for the pursuit of this profession.
Simply but elegantly and clearly written, this is the first book to deal in a comparative and evaluative manner with English teaching in both India and the U.S. It has many features which will make it of value to
• students and teachers of English in Indian colleges and universities
• their counterparts in the community colleges of the United States
• all interested in the educational history of India
• all interested in the nature, purpose, education and success or otherwise of community colleges in the United States
• all interested in making higher education accessible to less privileged communities, whether in India or the U.S.
• Professional educators interested in issues of pedagogy, discipline, assessment, and other related concerns.
About the Author
Brijraj Singh was educated at St. John’s College, Agra, Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Yale University, where he went for a Ph.D. on a Fulbright fellowship. He taught in his alma mater in Agra, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, North-Eastern Hill University, Delhi University, and Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of four books and nearly fifty scholarly essays, articles and reviews. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, and is a past president of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
