Fomenting a Silent Revolution: Bureaucratic Activism and Radical School Change in Tamil Nadu, India

• In Event: Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Leadership for Educational Transformation

Abstract

Activity Based Learning (ABL), a reform movement steeped in child-centered, constructivist approaches to education, has recently transformed the primary-level government schools in Tamil Nadu, India. In 2010, we conducted oral history and ethnographic interviews, along with an extensive review of reform documentation, to develop a case study that explores how educational change happened in cultural context. This paper provides an in-depth discussion of one of the findings of the study: central to the success of this reform movement was a unique style of bureaucratic activism. Importantly, the administrators engaged in a participatory, grassroots approach to extending the reform movement network that was infused by an egalitarian spirit. Yet, the administration also strategically used its ‘top-down’ power to institutionalize the reform.

Author

• Tricia Niesz, Kent State University