Learning as a spectacle: The case of policies for foundational literacy and numeracy in India

• In Event: "Rethinking Competency-Based Learning, Accountability, and Equity"

Proposal

Research objectives
Recent studies emphasize an ongoing ‘global learning crisis’ - while most children in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are in schools, they are not ‘learning’ (e.g. - World Bank, 2022). A significant number of children in LMICs are believed to be lacking ‘foundational literacy and numeracy’ (FLN) - a term whose usage has been simultaneous with that of the ‘global learning crisis’ (Evans and Hares, 2021). There is a global prioritization of FLN, translated into nations moving beyond earlier goals of enrollment toward quality (understood as FLN mastery).

Such efforts are motivated by a belief that FLN is ‘the building block’ or ‘gateway’ for learning and higher-order skills (UNICEF, 2022; Belafi et al., 2020). Consequently, despite being inconsistently defined (Evans & Hares, 2021), FLN describes any claimed prerequisites for other learning - such as reading simple texts or performing arithmetic operations. However, not only is the centering of basic reading and arithmetic as proxies for learning quality considered limited (Barrett, 2011; Benavot and Smith, 2020), but even the idea that certain ‘basic’ skills are necessary to master before being exposed to more ‘cognitively demanding’ tasks remains debated (see for e.g., Mehta & Fine, 2019; Perkins, 2010).

Despite these contestations, the prioritization of FLN is now core to education systems across several LMICs. We explore how educational policies in LMICs make claims about FLN and seek legitimacy. Our intention is not to argue against the supposed relevance of FLN to learning; instead, we examine how certain ideas about FLN are rationalized. How are claims about FLN naturalized in policy discourse? In what ways are specific representations of learning made dominant?

Methods
We examine these questions in the Indian context. The latest National Education Policy (NEP) in India declared the achievement of FLN for all children by the end of Grade 3, by 2026-27 as an “urgent national mission.” Given the recent mobilization of resources towards FLN, India is an ideal context for our analysis. Instead of treating India as a bounded ‘case’, we ‘unbound’ our site (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017), and focus on how “actions at different scales mutually influence one another” (p. 14). We frame our study amid the backdrop of a worldwide focus on FLN and attend to how discourses about FLN in India are animated through ‘global flows’ of ideologies. Through critical discourse analysis, we examine global and national documents about FLN (e.g. India's National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN)), media narratives, social media posts, and our semi-structured interviews with national and state-level actors in India.

Analytical framework
We apply Edelman’s (1978; 1988) works to the current hyper-prioritization of FLN in global and Indian education to understand the various mechanisms through which specific groups use ‘political spectacles’ to promote ideologies and agendas (Anderson, 2005). We examine educational policy as a performance, where “​​the link between problems and preferred solutions is itself a construction that transforms an ideological preference into a rational governmental action” (Edelman, 1988, p. 22). We draw on the mediatization of policy to highlight how news and social media are deployed to “‘sell’” FLN policy as a “public relations” exercise (Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Rawolle and Lingard 2014). Further, we examine how the discursive usage of science is deployed to legitimize particular ideologies and naturalize common-sensical public knowledge (Hilgartner, 2000; Jasanoff, 2005). We contribute to understanding how global flows surrounding FLN operate and how certain ideas about learning become common sense.

Findings and discussion
We demonstrate the processes through which FLN is emphasized in Indian education policy, highlighting how the FLN agenda is ‘sold’ (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) through traditional and new media (Adhikary, Lingard, and Hardy 2018), including press releases, social media hashtags, handles, videos, anthems, graphics, and professionally designed slides.
Statements and beliefs about FLN are often framed as common sense, indicating those to be obvious and long-known public knowledge. For instance, India’s Minister of Education refers to ‘foundational skills’ in passing as those that “indeed forms [sic] the basis of all future learning” (italics ours). Similarly, an interviewed participant emphasized: “A child cannot really learn if he [sic] cannot read at all, right?” This is often accompanied by accessible metaphors to reinforce these ideas, for example, “children must learn to walk before they can run, and they cannot learn more skills without having foundational ones to build off of.” We argue that such instances are a manifestation of ideological power (Fairclough, 2001), exercised to essentialize FLN as a vital component of learning. We notice how commonsensical discourses about FLN are often specifically utilized for statements that lack substantive causal or empirical evidence from research or practice.
FLN-related claims are also made using ‘scientific discourse’, often without concrete citations or supporting evidence. These statements often invoke the ‘brain’ as an object of action to justify the recommendations. For instance, foundational learning is framed as “related to heavy synaptic activity in the brain up to 8 years of age”. Such scientific references are a medium for achieving universal legitimacy for certain policies, relying on the cultural authority of science (Jasanoff, 2011). With respect to FLN, uncited, science-infused discourse is also used to foreground learning as a techno-scientific process and deprioritize the social and political contexts in which it happens. For example, according to the NIPUN guidelines, “if neural circuits used in reading are functional, even poor and malnourished children should learn to decode and read fluently”. Thus, the invocation of science and research holds up selective neuroscientific, cognitive, and economistic ideas about learning as the dominant discourse - thereby reifying a particular ‘policy paradigm’ (Hall, 1993) in education.

Significance
Our study contributes to critical scholarship on the politics of the global education sector and its effects on learning. We highlight how FLN is transformed into a commonsensical policy priority through the mediatization of policy. By raising questions about FLN-related claims, we challenge the current hegemonic focus on reading and arithmetic across LMICs that threatens to leave out equally ‘foundational’ aspects like safety, critical thinking, cultural consciousness, and social-emotional skills.

Authors

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

• Tanushree Sarkar, University of Missouri