Schooling and Aspirations in the Urban Margins: Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context PDF
Preview Schooling and Aspirations in the Urban Margins: Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context
SCHOOLING AND ASPIRATIONS IN THE URBAN MARGINS This book presents a detailed ethnographic study conducted in an urban slum in India. It explores how a State school, as a social and pedagogic institution, shapes the aspirations and worldviews of children in the urban margins. The volume engages with the children’s experience of marginality and exclusion as they negotiate the intersecting axes of caste, class, gender, and citizenship. It further explores how their everyday school experience is mediated by the power asymmetries between the teachers and the community. In this process, it makes sense of the political dynamics between the State and its margins while highlighting the role of schools and locating childhood in this context. Based on ethnographic feldwork, the book will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers of education studies, sociology and politics of education, teacher education, childhood and youth studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful for education policymakers and professionals in the development sector. Gunjan Sharma is a faculty member at the School of Education Studies (SES), Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India, since 2011. She teaches courses at the research, postgraduate, undergraduate, and professional development levels, in the areas of education studies, education policy, teacher education, curriculum studies, child rights, and action research. Her research and professional focus is on education policy–politics particularly at school and teacher education levels. Her doctoral research examined educational aspirations in the urban margins in a post Right to Education Act context in India. During 2016–2017, she completed her Fulbright- Nehru Postdoctoral research on policy implications of publication networks in teacher education in the United States and India, while exploring teacher education as a special sub-set of higher education. Dr. Sharma has worked with various government and non-government organisations on matters of education policy and served in various capacities on the national-level teacher education policy framing process in India. SCHOOLING AND ASPIRATIONS IN THE URBAN MARGINS Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context Gunjan Sharma First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Gunjan Sharma The right of Gunjan Sharma to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-90365-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00478-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02801-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS Foreword by Shyam B. Menon vi Acknowledgements viii List of abbreviations ix 1 Introduction 1 2 Education and urban marginalisation: international comparisons 13 3 Studying the non-linear: ethnographic explorations in education 23 4 Constructing and deconstructing the slum 39 5 The idea of sarkari school: negotiations and aspirations 65 6 The teachers and the school culture 84 7 Experiencing childhood in the margins: meanings and aspirations 98 8 Concluding thoughts 127 References 135 Index 144 FOREWORD The economic growth that India has seen since liberalisation, particularly in the frst decade of the millennium, is linked critically with large-scale migration of labour from rural hinterlands to urban centres. Most of the migrant workers, being in the unorganised sectors that account for more than 90 per cent of India’s work force, are grossly undercompensated and pushed into the margins of urban spaces with not even minimum civic amenities extended to them. The emergence of the phenomenon called urban slum is a consequence of this. Much as the slum continues to be held as a problem in the popular imaginations, there is now an increasing acceptance to reversing this perspective and looking at slum as a creative, albeit grossly suboptimal, solution that the poor have devised for themselves. What is notable is that this project is with minimum support from governments and none at all from the organised sectors of the economy, although the economic activities associated with the slum are critical to their sustenance. There is a growing body of research literature in India on slums. Public policy studies have paid a great deal of attention to the provisioning of ser- vices and interfaces with governments. Health, sanitation, and livelihoods have evoked considerable research interest. Many of these are by way of surveys that paint the big picture with broad strokes of the economic and demographic aspects of slums. Life in slums with all its complexities is made sense of by a relatively new genre of research characterised by a methodology that adopts ethnography and other qualitative methods. There are not many studies of this kind. Yet, whatever body of work, it brings up interesting insights into the complex social dynamics in which caste and gender struc- tures and relations get played out. There is very little in the literature by way of understanding the child and the school in an urban slum location. This is the critical gap that this fascinating book by Gunjan Sharma seeks to fll. The book is an outcome of a painstakingly and patiently conducted eth- nography that extended for more than a year. The author has had to go past an array of gatekeepers within both the governmental and non-governmental spaces to access the child and the school. The world that reveals itself to her in this process is a complex and diffcult one, all the same a fascinating one. vi FOREWORD She has been both effective and elegant in communicating through this book some interesting glimpses of this fascinating world to the readers. School is essentially a creature of the imagination of the privileged. The book shows a clear disjunction between the school and the community that it purports to cater to. It is almost as though the compound wall of the school separates two distinct worlds. The child transits between these two worlds day after day, and this is hardly seamless. There is always the lurk- ing possibility of the child being forcibly weaned out of school anytime and pushed into the world of work, but the irony is that she also looks at that possibility as inevitable and sometimes even as a kind of deliverance. All the same, the child assimilates the messages of the school, some overt and much hidden, and struggles to make sense of the horizons that the school seems to open up for her, located as she is on the margins and given the limited aspi- rations that her socialisation permits her to have even at an ideational level. It is this delicate and troubled complexity of the child’s fractured world that this book tries to capture. Gunjan Sharma’s perceptiveness, patience, and perseverance make it possible for her to gain access to the otherwise inaccessible niches of the school–slum interface. She also gets to engage with others in the commu- nity, particularly women as well as some critical actors in the governmental spaces who do the gatekeeping. The book comes across as a sensitive rendering of the perspectives of the critical informants. The rigour and the eye for details are its essential charac- teristics. The book will be a signifcant addition to the growing scholarship in the area of education of the urban poor. It will be an essential reading for scholars and practitioners in education, childhood studies, urban studies, and public policy. Shyam B. Menon Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work has been supported by several individuals and institutions. Fore- most among them are Professors Shyam B. Menon and (Late) Gaysu Arvind, who mentored me during this study. They introduced me to ideas and ques- tions that helped in shaping the work and how I think about education and marginalisation. Professor Menon’s continued interactions with me as a colleague for now over a decade have been critical in writing and refning this volume. My interactions with Dr. Jayshree Mathur and Professor Rama Mathew were also critical in developing this work. I have also learnt immensely from Drs. Geeta Menon and Ajay Kumar Singh, both of whom facilitated several opportunities for a close engagement with the feld and practice of education. My association with my alma matter, the Department of Education, Uni- versity of Delhi, was immensely facilitative in developing this manuscript. It was only because of my association with the Department that I could meaningfully situate myself in the feld. Ambedkar University Delhi, where I work, was very supportive in the course of writing this book. AUD provided me access to scholarly discourse and academic resources for completing the work. Both these universities hold a special place in my life and learning. I am indebted to the informants of this study, especially the children of M Block and Sitapuri, whose contribution to the work is equivalent to, if not more than, mine. My experience with the children, teachers, and NGO workers continues to shape my intellectual growth as an individual and a professional in education. This book is dedicated to them. Gunjan Sharma October 2020 viii ABBREVIATIONS BLO Booth Level Offcer (Election Commission) EWS Economically Weaker Section FCRA Foreign Contribution Regulation Act FGD Focus Group Discussion GAIL Gas Authority of India Limited GNCTD Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi GoI Government of India IFCI Industrial Finance Corporation of India JJ Jhuggi Jhompri LIC Life Insurance Corporation MCD Municipal Corporation of Delhi MHRD Ministry of Human Resource Development NCERT National Council of Educational Research and Training NCF National Curriculum Framework NFE Non-Formal Education NGO Non-Government Organisation NLF New Light Foundation OBC Other Backward Classes PTR Pupil Teacher Ration RtE Right to Education SC Scheduled Castes SSA Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan ST Scheduled Tribes UEE/UEEM Universalisation of Elementary Education Mission UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund ix
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