Using VCE to Understand School Readiness Practices in India

• In Event: Reimagining Early Childhood Education Research Using Video-Cued Ethnography

Abstract

Objective
This study explores school readiness practices in India as a way to examine why the achievement gaps between children from marginalized communities and children from privileged communities persist (ASER, 2018; Kaul & Bhattacharjee, 2019). The goal of this study was to move beyond the violence of pre-decided tasks, categories, standardized testing, and quantitative analyses that studies on school readiness practices tend to support and instead, seek out the perspectives of parents, children, and teachers to hear their experiences with schools and within the larger community, to make sense of what is important to them, and find out what they feel is keeping them and their children from breaking out of a life in the margins.

Theoretical perspectives
I draw on Charles Mills’ theory of the Racial Contract (1997). I also use B.R. Ambedkar’s (2014; 1917) and Anand Teltumbde’s (2018) theorization of caste to help me read Charles Mills’ theory of Racial Contract and situate it in the context of India. I use these perspectives to understand how early childhood educational practices and school readiness might not be a transparent public good but mechanisms to educate young children in differentiated ways as “humans” or “others”, as “persons” and “subpersons”.

Method
This paper draws on the data collected over a 7 month period for a comparative multi-sited, multivocal, video-cued ethnographic study (Tobin, Hseuh, & Karawawa, 2009; Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989; Adair & Kurban, 2019a; Adair & Colegrove, 2021) located in two preschool classrooms in Delhi, India. One classroom was located in a private preschool that served high income families and the other one was run by a non-profit that catered to very low income families living in urban slums. This paper draws on ethnographic data including field notes, interviews with teachers, parents and the administrators, and films of young children from these classrooms.

Findings
Findings show that early education and school readiness experiences of the children from these two groups were not very different in terms of the overt curriculum. Both the schools thought of children’s development in holistic ways and ensured that children got rich, hands-on learning experiences that were culturally sensitive and grounded in children’s everyday lives. However, children’s bodies were interpreted and managed differently in these two classrooms. The children from marginalized communities were seen as being dirty, rugged, and in need of civilizing, while the children from privileged communities were seen as being clean, fragile, and in need of care.

Significance
This presentation would detail how VCE provided an opportunity to move away from over-simplified, essentialized, and reductionist understanding of school readiness, often expressed through numbers and tests. It accorded opportunities to go beyond the erasive, exclusive, discriminatory, and non-enabling discourses on school readiness to understand it in a more nuanced and comprehensive way, by listening to parents and communities.

Author

• Shubhi Sachdeva, University of Virginia