Teaching, learning and schooling in contemporary India

This research project explores how teaching and schooling practices forged under neoliberal ideology are operating within two burgeoning public-private education partnerships in Delhi, India. The research focuses on how teachers who work within these two partnerships are emotionally and professionally affected by the specific pedagogical, organisational and ethical demands introduced by these projects. Through questioning how teachers respond to the complex pressures and opportunities of neoliberal subjectification, the research seeks to illuminate how children might be influenced by similar, albeit less direct forms of controlling institutional discourse.
The project is located within (a) current sociological debates concerning the proliferation of global education policy, to which neoliberal practices are central; (b) the anthropological study of neoliberalism as the ideological handmaiden to free-market speculative capitalism; and (c) ethnographic literature of schooling in India.
Qualitative data will be collected during Year Two of the project via a 12-month ethnographic field study of two schools in Delhi; (1) a government school managed in partnership the British-based educational charity Ark, and (2) a government-run school in which Teach For India fellows are employed. The researcher will work as a voluntary teacher, spending four months in one school, and a subsequent four months in another, during which the researcher will hold interviews with
teachers, and facilitate 'sharing' workshops through which the teachers and researcher will actively collaborate in their analysis of their position as teachers, and discuss how this position might be affecting the pupils they teach.
The project will address these specific research questions:
- How are primary school teachers in Delhi responding to the pressures of pedagogical uniformity, standardisation of assessment, and regulation of style introduced by private and partnership education?
- How are new forms of teacher and teaching affecting the subjectification and experience of pupils (and the creation of citizens)?
- How do these teachers understand their role, authority and the meaning of education?
Fieldwork: Months 1-3. I will spend three months living in a low-income community amongst the children and families who constitute the primary target of charity-style teaching and schooling projects like TFI and Ark. This will allow me to improve my Hindi, understand the background of pupils, and, importantly, connect 'institutional research' (i.e. a school) to the fabric of the city surrounding it. I will introduce myself to the parents as an anthropological researcher who is soon to be a part-time teacher of their children, and conduct semi-structured interviews in Hindi or English based around questions such as:
- What will your child gain by attending an Ark school, or being taught by a TFI teacher?
- What are the most important skills/perspectives for your child to learn in school?
- How has your child changed since enrolling in the Ark/TFI school?
Fieldwork: Months 4-12. My ethnographic aim is to explore teachers' emotional experience of working under the pressures of pedagogical uniformity, standardisation of assessment, and regulation of style that neoliberal schooling impose. I will enrol on the five-week residential teacher training program - known as the 'Institute' - that Teach For India organises for its newly recruited fellows. This training programme will provide me with useful skills for teaching in schools in India, and provide opportunities for more thorough observation of TFI's operations, orientation and logic. I will also use this opportunity to negotiate a support teacher role in a TFI-affiliated school in Delhi.