Curriculum from the Margins: Experience of Building a Dalit-Feminist Business English Programme as an Untrained Facilitator

Abstract

In September 2024, while working as a part-time Business English facilitator at a grassroots NGO in India, I was entrusted with a unique but revolutionary task- to design an English curriculum for Business and Job-readiness from a Dalit-Feminist standpoint. As a post-graduate student of Cultural Studies with no formal training in teaching, language education, or material development, I undertook the project with equal measure of self-doubt and ambition, and a need for steady income- a perfect specimen of a GTA. This paper offers a critical reflective account of my journey as a GTA over the course of two years of working with the NGO. Unlike a conventional academic setting, the NGO foregrounded socio-political sensitivity and learner autonomy. It forced me to draw upon and question my own past experiences as a student, which I unconsciously began to replicate as a facilitator. Working with young Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi women learners (ages 18-40), I found myself developing creative ways to translate critical theories like intersectional theory, critical pedagogy, and Dalit and feminist scholarship into accessible and context-sensitive content. These experiences highlighted how significant the role of a GTA can be, precisely because of our liminal positionality as both in and out of the rigid frameworks of academia. GTAs occupy a space of possibility and probabilities, not weighed down by institutionalised teacher training, where pedagogic methodologies can be reimagined in real time. This in-betweenness allows for experimentation that is messy, imperfect, but also deeply generative, and holds the power to lead us to a social justice-oriented pedagogy in praxis.