Breaking Institutional Ground: Transnational discourses and new narratives of educational leadership.

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education Policy and Practice in South Asia

Proposal

Education in India is riven with inequality. Quality schooling is limited to the select few, ineffective pedagogy is the norm, tens of millions of children have left the school system, and those who remain often attend under-resourced schools (UNESCO, 2021; Ramachandran et al, 2018; Majumdar and Mooji, 2012). This paper explores the stories of seven young leaders starting new educational organizations that challenge this reality. Turning away from typical policy and instructional solutions, they have turned to creating new educational institutions altogether.
One is creating a school for dropouts, another is designing an art program for students to tell their stories through film, and yet another has created a social media coach program to help high school students. Six are under thirty-five, four are women, and all share a frustration with a system locked in a history of dysfunction. These efforts are fully outside government school structures and often fully reject the aims of traditional education.
Tracing their stories connects to the conference theme as these leaders have dared to ask “can education be a catalyst for change?” Though their backgrounds range from urban slums to elite schools, their efforts represent neither protests from a subordinate class nor new reform policies enacted from above. Instead, they approach educational reform as outsiders imagining new educational relationships and leading a resistance that envisions new goals, new structures, and new ideas of what education can be.

Framework & Method
My initial interest was in international school leadership, but I soon found this literature inadequate for describing deeper institutional change. Globally, researchers have created frameworks establishing the importance of school leadership and identifying the traits and dispositions of quality educational leaders. (Grissom, Egalite, & Lindsay, 2021; Day & Gurr, 2014; Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021). But, as Dimmock and Walker (2005) have suggested, these studies are ethnocentric, drawing on business-management ideologies and valuing narrow models of schooling.
This is important within the context of colonialism in India where education was explicitly designed for the purpose of subjugation (Swartz, 2019). To be an educational leader within the colonial bureaucracy implied certain commitments to maintaining stark social divisions and hierarchies (Majumdar & Mooji, 2012). Tikly (2004) argued that colonial history has been reproduced in a ‘new imperialism’ through regimes of international development and governance.
I draw on institutional theory to understand how organizations persist, but also how they can be challenged. Common models of schooling draw on formal myths as a means for national identity and social progress (Meyer, 1977). The well-worn scripts of schooling bring legitimacy and stability even while failing to meet their stated goals. To challenge such myths is to step off the edge into a new organizational frontier (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).
I initially worked with my participants in an educational leadership workshop. I then invited them for open-ended interviews that were recorded and transcribed. My initial coding used traditional notions of leadership for analysis. But, as I re-read my transcripts, I came to see their stories as attempts to renounce the common legitimizing myths of schooling and challenge the hegemony of long standing educational practices (Howarth, 2010).

Findings
Three themes emerged in my analysis. First, my participants experienced transformative moments confronting educational inequality. Shoba was a recent university graduate and was reflecting on a small tutoring program she had started. She had been volunteering with one tenth grade girl who had failed the previous year. The girl’s family had wanted her to drop out, but they were convinced to give it another year. Soon, however, things changed:

I think it had barely been like one or two months since she restarted her tenth grade, and she just said, ‘I have to go to my hometown for some function, some festival.’ She didn’t come back…The family completely cut us off..

The incident was shocking as Shoba was confronted with the reality of child marriage but also the divergent paths of their lives: “We all felt very frustrated and angry that we are leading one kind of life, and there are these other girls who are just three years younger than us who have a completely 180 degree different kind of lifestyle.” This was a transformative moment that cemented Shoba's desire to found a program using social media to connect with girls with quality tutoring.
A second theme was a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo in schooling. Khoj described one example of this. He had grown up in a large urban slum, but with great parental support and effort he was accepted to a good university. After graduation, he enrolled in a preparatory course for medical school:

I was the victim of a coaching class. I mean, 180 students in one class, and there was so much guilt when you are not performing. Their focus was only on the top five percent, because they are going to get them [a good] rank and good scores…it was a very terrible time for me.

The company charged a high tuition to its students but only focused their efforts on the few who were guaranteed success. Spurred by this bitter experience, Khoj dropped out and founded his own tutoring business, though he reserves seats for students who cannot pay. He had since expanded to focus on vocational training.
The final theme is the use of new educational discourses. There is little discussion of rubrics, exams, assessment levels, career advancement, or titles. Instead, my participants brought new language to discussions of equity, innovation, and extracurricular development. Khoj’s engagement with a business model and Shoba’s use of social media are examples; others include focusing on dropouts, leading an arts centered program, and creating an alternative to college. Their stories channel generations of distrust with the state’s ability to fulfill its educational obligations, and instead draws on transnational discourses of reform, startup culture, and technology. Taken together, these stories show these leaders seeking something beyond theory or easy definitions to create liminal, postcolonial spaces open for change (Chawla, 2007).

Author

• Madhu Narayanan, Portland State University