Hindi-English Service-Learning: Collaborating with IP College in New Delhi
Duke Hindi students performing their poem through action
As a class, our first exposure to Dr. Harsh Bala was during our lessons. She made the trip from New Delhi halfway across the world to Durham and offered us a new perspective as well as engaging exercises. Dr. Harsh Bala introduced herself through not only her professional background, as a Hindi Literature professor, but through her unique identities and experiences which were very fascinating to hear about. Ultimately, these initial classes, which were composed largely of conversing with her, gave us a great deal of practice with our spoken Hindi. Dr. Harsh Bala also helped us improve poems we had previously prepared in anticipation of her arrival. As a class, our poems ranged from topics of our families, to introspections about our feelings, to a story between a bear and fish. Given her expertise in the field, Dr. Harsh Bala thoroughly reviewed each of our poems, offering us constructive criticism, revisions, and even practice delivering our poems. Overall, I really enjoyed Dr. Harsh Bala's presence, as she was friendly, well-informed, and helpful.
Our second experience with IP College and Dr. Harsh Bala was during our service-learning period. As a class, we had the opportunity to virtually meet with students interested in pursuing Hindi at IP College who studied in Dr. Harsh Bala's class. We began by exchanging our poems once again, receiving helpful feedback from the students at IP College. After this, we joined breakout rooms and had conversations in Hindi about our interests, routines, education, and more. It was a great opportunity to not only practice our conversational skills but also observe the cultural differences between Duke students and IP College students. Finally, we shared a pre-prepared presentation of common English slang words, where we taught the students at IP College new terms and gave them examples to practice. This was particularly enjoyable for me since we were able to also teach the IP College students something given how much they had taught us. Overall, I am very thankful to Kusum Ji, Anshul Ji, Harsh Bala ji, and the students at IP College for this insightful experience.