9 March 2016 12:42 am Views - 3779
March 4th marks three months since the passing away of Prof. Manique Gunesekera, who was called “Prof. Manique” by most of the lecturers at the English Language Teaching Unit (ELTU) of the University of Kelaniya in typical Sri Lankan style, or “Miss” by her former students who are now on the staff of the ELTU, or simply “Manique” by the senior staff. Much was written and said in the moments immediately following the shocking news that Manique was no more, but three months after the loss is a good time to make a (hopefully) slightly less emotional appraisal of Manique’s contribution to academia in Sri Lanka.
Manique Gunasekera joined the staff of the Department of English of the University of Kelaniya in 1979, immediately after graduating from the same department. Although she rose to great heights as an academic and an administrator at the University of Kelaniya, she will be most fondly remembered as an outstanding lecturer. As an individual she had the priceless ability to make the people around her feel special. She carried this gift into the lecture room and delighted in making her lectures come alive by paying attention to individual students, encouraging a lively exchange of ideas, and getting her students to connect and apply their theoretical knowledge to their lived experience. All this was coupled with her unique and bold dress sense and her hallmark sense of humour. It was no small wonder that even the worst truant would unfailingly turn up at her lectures.
Eventually, Manique moved up the ranks of academia, received her PhD from the University of Michigan, USA, and became the Head of the Department of English and the English Language Teaching Unit (ELTU), the latter being at that time a fledgling entity devoted to teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to the undergraduates of all faculties. Manique made the university system take the teaching of English as a Second Language (ESL) seriously by instilling a sense of professionalism in the work undertaken by the ELTU and also by ensuring that the ELTU was housed in its own building. In 1998, when all other universities were recruiting English Instructors as “academic support staff”, Manique took the ground-breaking step of recruiting graduates of the Department of English as lecturers of ESL.
Although this is standard practice in all Sri Lankan universities today, it was Manique who set the precedent and paved the way for the recruitment of lecturers and the promotion of suitably qualified instructors to the position of 2 lecturers. This led to the professionalisation of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) in the University of Kelaniya, and following its example, most of the other universities of Sri Lanka did the same. Today the ELTU of the University of Kelaniya stands testimony to Manique’s vision as it consists of highly qualified staff and has become a pioneering Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) degree awarding body in Sri Lanka, thus contributing its mite by addressing the problem of the dearth of qualified English teachers in Sri Lanka.
Manique’s contribution to the field of English in Sri Lanka largely centres on the concept of Sri Lankan English. Calling for a questioning of the assumption that Sri Lankan speakers of English spoke “British English” or “Queen’s English”, Manique promoted in its place the then somewhat revolutionary notion that we become confident and secure users of the Sri Lankan variety of English. To further this cause, she published her book “The Post-colonial Identity of Sri Lankan English” in 2005. Although other academics had engaged in studying Sri Lankan English prior to Manique’s interest in the field, arguably it was she who was responsible for it becoming a trendy topic of academic interest among postgraduate and undergraduate students throughout the country.
Today Sri Lankan English is a robust field of study, with many academics both local and international contributing to its growth, but Manique’s contribution to this process is enormously significant. Manique’s commitment to popularising the notion of a Sri Lankan brand of English and thus democratizing access to English in Sri Lanka made her take her message of Sri Lankan English to the larger populace through the Sri Lanka English Language Teachers’ Association (SLELTA). At that time SLELTA was still under the sway of the British Council which provided the bulk of its funding. But Manique bravely questioned SLELTA’s dependent relationship, recognizing that it was impossible for SLELTA to commit fully to Sri Lankan English from such a position. Under her intrepid stewardship, SLELTA stepped out of the shadow of the British Council and became an independent service organization, self-reliant for funding and therefore able to take an independent stand regarding which variety of English it chose to promote. Manique embraced SLELTA’s mandate of teacher training with her customary gusto and combined her love of travelling and meeting people with her commitment to improving the standard of English in Sri Lanka by travelling to many parts of the country as part of SLELTA.
At the University of Kelaniya, in 2011 Manique was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS). She adorned this office with her signature style and went about her task of managing the faculty with her indefatigable enthusiasm. The Annual Research Symposium organized by the Faculty of Graduate Studies became a scintillating exchange of academic debate with Manique at the helm of the FGS. Manique also served on the academic staff of universities overseas – she was a lecturer in Business Communication at the Michigan Business School and at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her interest in Business Communication and the development of soft skills led her to take a keen interest in preparing the undergraduates of the Department of English of the University of Kelaniya
for employment.
Her workshops on Business Etiquette were extremely popular among the students as she would share her insights on topics as diverse as how to speak and write effectively as well as how to dress to impress in a professional setting.
Manique’s final engagement with the University of Kelaniya was through the Documentation of the Discourse Communities of Sri Lanka project which can be considered her contribution to the Faculty of Humanities. The project was enabled by winning a competitive research grant offered by the Higher Education for the Twenty first Century (HETC) project of the World Bank to identify, map and collect evidence of the different discourse communities of Sri Lanka.
This project was conducted under the guidance of Professor John Swales, Manique’s PhD advisor and the academic who coined the term “Discourse Communities”. The fully equipped research centre of the Discourse Communities project is another legacy that Manique left behind for the graduate students of the University. Identity was a singularly important concept to Manique and she wore two badges of identity with immense pride: being a product of the University of Kelaniya and being
Sri Lankan.
Her pride in being a product of the University of Kelaniya was conveyed in no uncertain terms to her 4 students and junior colleagues if they had “the audacity” to introduce themselves as belonging to a university they studied at subsequent to obtaining their undergraduate degree at Kelaniya. If they had graduated from Kelaniya, Manique wanted them to wear the Kelaniya badge with pride. She was equally proud of being Sri Lankan. While she encouraged all her students to go overseas for their postgraduate studies, she always reminded them of their duty to serve Sri Lanka. Manique’s contribution to the development of the ELTU and the Department of English will be remembered with gratitude. She was in many ways a unique blend of contrasts – westernized to the extreme but deeply rooted in Sri Lanka, unconventional and unafraid to challenge the status quo but somewhat surprisingly conventional in her commitment to traditional family values, loud in her protests against injustice and bigotry but quiet and humble in her generosity and caring for people less fortunate than she.
For Manique, as for many of us, the University of Kelaniya, with all its idiosyncrasies, was “home”. We hope she found a kinder and more lasting “home” elsewhere. She will be forever missed by us at the ELTU. The
ELTU Family.