1st Edition
Schooling and Aspirations in the Urban Margins Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context
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 fieldwork, 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.
Foreword by Shyam B. Menon. 1. Introduction 2. Education and urban marginalisation: International comparisons 3. Studying the non-linear: Ethnographic explorations in education 4. Constructing and deconstructing life in the slum 5. Idea of school: Negotiations and aspirations 6. The teachers and the school culture 7. Experiencing childhood in the margins 8. Concluding thoughts
Biography
Gunjan Sharma is a faculty member at the School of Education Studies (SES), Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), 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 2016-17, she completed her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral research on policy implications of publication networks in teacher education in the US 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 has served in various capacities on the national level teacher education policy framing process in India.
