Shanil is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at UNSW Law & Justice and a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this post, he sets out a pedagogy which re-imagines education as a practice of freedom and an ethos of his research making sense of who he is and where he is from.

How does your law school fit into the university landscape in Sri Lanka? What is the demographic of your student body?

The University of Colombo is a public, secular (in the sense that it does not explicitly profess to be religious) university. It is the oldest and largest university in Sri Lanka, with a history than can be traced back to 1870. Primary, secondary and tertiary education provided through all state institutions in Sri Lanka including the University of Colombo is virtually free of charge, with only nominal payments needed to be made. This was the outcome of the ‘Free Education Scheme’ implemented in 1945 as a strategy to provide more equitable access to tertiary education which had previously been dominated by rich, male students (Karunanayake 2021).

The Faculty of Law in the University of Colombo is the only law faculty in the country. There are departments of law at two other public universities (see here and here) which are also virtually free of charge and a department of legal studies at another which is paid, but the cost is subsidised. In addition, a Defence University controversially offers a paid law degree for civilians. There are also private higher education institutions which take many forms. Often, these entities are registered as for-profit companies in Sri Lanka and affiliated to a foreign university, usually in the UK or Australia. All public and private institutions offer law as an undergraduate degree (LLB). Accreditation to enter the legal profession is administered by a separate institution; namely, Sri Lanka Law College.

Admission to the Faculty of Law is through the state-administered Advanced Level examination in secondary schools. Raw marks are converted into a ‘z-score’ – then, a ‘cut-off mark’ is decided – that is, the minimum z-score required to enter different faculties of public universities. Cut-off marks are tied to socio-economic indicators within the district in which students sat for the Advanced Level exam – the higher the indicators, the higher the cut-off mark. This admission procedure results in a diverse student body consisting of different races, religions and socio-economic backgrounds. The university supports students financially through, for example, bursary payments and a ‘Mahapola scholarship’ and by subsidising hostel facilities, laptops and canteens.

What is the language of education at your law school? Why does it matter?

Sri Lanka is a plural society. Sinhala and Tamil are the national languages. The textually equal status of Sinhala and Tamil is seriously undermined in practice. In 1956, Sri Lanka passed the infamous ‘Sinhala only’ Act which was a textbook case of discrimination against Tamils and the Tamil language. This, compounded by other factors, culminated in an internal armed conflict which was fought for nearly three decades. Thus, the question of language in Sri Lanka is extremely significant.

The Faculty of Law is presently transitioning to offering the LLB exclusively in English. But prior to this, students could choose to undertake their studies in either of the national languages – Sinhala and Tamil – or in English. The functional justification for offering the LLB in the vernacular is that the language of the lower courts is Sinhala or Tamil, depending on the district.

The transition to a fully English degree has been challenging, to say the least. This is due to vast disparities in access to adequate English language and English medium education at the secondary school level. There are also deeper questions about the inherent relationship between law and language, with language being the medium through which law is expressed, and choices regarding language and the meaning of words being fundamental to the study of law. If this is true, language literacy is virtually a prerequisite to study law in that language. The significance of language was recognised by the framers of the Free Education Scheme as well. For example, this scheme includedreforms to primary and secondary school education alongside the abolition of fees from primary to tertiary education. Primary education was conducted in the vernacular, and the most competent students were given an opportunity to be educated in the English medium at the secondary school level, thus preparing them for a tertiary education that was also to be in English medium (Karunanayake 2021). Unfortunately, these reforms were undermined by the ‘elitist old guard’ (Karunanayake 2021, p 100) and they are no longer even on the agenda.

Conversations about the language of legal education also cannot be separated from the context in which we live, where English literacy is a gateway to social mobility, as well as to certain segments within the job market and higher education opportunities; and where a majority of legal research is published in English, both within and outside Sri Lanka.

Thus, the question of the language of legal education in Sri Lanka is deeply significant. It cannot be separated from history, the plural nature of Sri Lankan society, social disparities, the inherent relationship between language and law and present-day realities.

Why did you decide to become an academic?

In short, I became an academic because I love teaching. I am fully in agreement with bell hooks’ view (1994) that the classroom is the most radical space of possibility in the academy. I have begun to understand that pedagogy is transformative. It can defy hierarchies that inhibit critical thinking and encourage compliance; challenge stereotypes which undermine women and seek to control their place in society, the legal profession and the academy; and build bridges between students who come from different worlds.

Many secondary schools have a largely homogenous student body. This is due to reasons including the fact that Sinhala Buddhists constitute a significant majority of the population, and the higher concentration of ethnic and religious minorities in particular geographic regions (for example, Hindu Tamils constitute a majority in the Northern province). So, the Sri Lankan university classroom can be the first time that a student sits together and interacts with folks from a different ethnicity or religion than their own. This opens up radical possibilities.

But Paulo Friere (1970) reminds us that the classroom can also be a place where oppressive patterns in society are reinforced and perpetuated; where hierarchies are affirmed, stereotypes are institutionalised and students are left to inhabit their separate worlds. This happens where education is practised as ‘banking’ – an act of ‘depositing’, where ‘students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat’– and not as a practice of freedom (at p 72).

In society, the oppressed do not have freedom or agency and their opinions, life experiences and problems – none of these seem to matter. This can be replicated in the classroom. For a student who is oppressed, a lecturer – even a university – could be just another oppressor, a part of the same machine, built on the same ideology. In the Sri Lankan context, oppression and the oppressed can be nebulous notions. Characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, sex, age, disability, location and economic status all play a part. In this context, re-imagining education as a practice of freedom, I think, becomes a core part of the ethics of being an academic in Sri Lanka.

The flip side of all of this is that such a re-imagination of education – including re-thinking pedagogy and reflecting on teaching, learning and assessment – takes time, and this is often extremely scarce. Lecturers have extremely high workloads which are dominated by teaching, marking and administrative duties. The body which decides the number of students admitted to public universities – the University Grants Commission – has steadily increased student numbers over the years, leading to the ‘massification’ of university education (Karunanayake 2021). But funding, in real terms, has decreased and so academic and administrative positions remain unfilled or are inadequate. Re-imagining education as a practice of freedom, can sometimes feel like a naïve fantasy in a classroom of 300+ students! Lecturers also do not have any additional support for marking (tutors, etc). The combined number of scripts that lecturers mark can number in the 1000s. In addition to undergraduate courses which are free, public universities now also offer degrees and certificate courses which require payment (see here, here, here and here for examples from the Faculty of Law). Most of these, if not all, are taught on the weekends. All of these factors impact an academic’s teaching, marking and administrative commitments, as well as their emotions, motivation and energy.

One direct result of this is that research is often neglected. Local contexts and issues remain under-researched (or even unresearched), and this impacts every part of the legal system, from legal education to doctrine to access to justice. Where research is done, this is often done despite the system, not because of it. And these are not the only challenges faced by academics attempting to research. For example – and at the risk of stating the obvious – paywalls to published research are prohibitively high. Academics often access published research behind paywalls through formal (e.g., fellowships) and informal (e.g., friendships) relationships with institutions and academics in the Global North. In order to be published, academics also write in a language, in a register and on issues which are ‘publishable’. This could result in domestic audiences being entirely neglected. This is not even to speak of challenges flowing from the epistemic dominance of Northern perspectives in academia which view the South as a place of transgression and distort understandings of the domestic legal system on its own terms (Samararatne 2024).

What does it mean to be an academic in this context? Perhaps there are no fixed answers. To me, part of the answer – to think with Samararatne (2024) – is to recognize that my work must make sense to where I work from and who I am. This means striving to bring my location and self to the questions that I ask in my research; and how I imagine my role and responsibilities as a lecturer, marker, researcher, colleague and citizen of both the Sri Lankan and global academic community. In doing so, I strive to perceive the office of an academic less as a job and more as a vocation or a calling, and as including an ethic of care that not only thinks about knowledge and its dissemination, but also what this knowledge is doing (and not doing), who it is benefitting (or not benefitting), what it is making visible and centring (or making invisible and decentring), and how it is (or is not) being disseminated.

This is not to say or even suggest that I have done any of this successfully. I continue to learn what it means to be an academic in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I am grateful for the wisdom, generosity and kindness of colleagues who grapple with such questions and model wholesome ways of inhabiting this office.