“Established beyond any debate…”: Foundational literacy and the making of a policy mission in India

• In Event: Engaging with the foundations: How the global learning crisis reshapes policy and pedagogy in the Global South

Proposal

Amid concerns of a ‘global learning crisis’, achieving foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) has become a priority for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (Evans & Hares, 2021). Supported by transnational actors, several LMICs recently joined commitments to achieve foundational literacy goals (UNICEF, n.d.)). In 2021, India launched one of the world’s largest initiatives to achieve universal foundational literacy by 2026-27.
Given that the term ‘foundational literacy’ was absent in earlier policy discourse in India, little is known about how it is conceptualized similarly or differently from earlier used terms like ‘early reading’. Neither do we know much about how this term gained salience and became common educational parlance in a short time. We examine the discursive strategies employed to make foundational literacy a policy priority in India.
We draw on an approach to policy analysis that examines how problems are constructed and configured through policy (Bacchi, 2012). We examine how FLN came to be viewed as a problem for the state and non-state actors to address, the practices that enable the construction of a problem of ‘learning’, and what effects this problem construction rationalizes. We combine corpus linguistics techniques with critical discourse analysis (Baker, 2023) and the WPR approach (Bacchi, 2012), analyzing 90 documents – totaling approximately 1 million words – published by government and non-state actors as India launched its foundational literacy mission.
Findings indicate considerable connections between the framing for foundational literacy and the discourses deployed in the Science of Reading (SoR) debates in the United States (e.g. Aydarova, 2023). Even though the foundational literacy discourse in India advocates for the balanced literacy approach in contrast to the advocacy for phonics by the SoR discourse in the US, the discursive strategies used bear close resemblance. These include creating a sense of national urgency about severe risks, vaguely defining the key policy idea as a ‘floating signifier’ and framing it as the only solution, invoking ‘science’ and ‘research’ to legitimize a hegemonic discourse, obscuring systemic and sociopolitical issues in service of technoscientific solutions, and positioning non-government actors as experts.
Our study contributes to critical scholarship on the politics of learning reforms. In the last decade, governments, organizations, and donor networks have collectively prioritized the achievement of FLN for all children as an urgent priority for LMICs (Beeharry, 2021). Our work, using India as an example, captures how this occurs and is communicated. At a time when other LMICs are fervently launching FLN policies, our analysis sets precedence, cautions, and questions to examine such reforms in future research. Our paper throws further light on the discursive politics of education policy. Studies elsewhere have shown how specific discourse and narratives are deployed to gain credibility and legitimacy for policies, such as in the case of the ‘science of reading’ reforms in the U.S. (Aydarova, 2023). Our study contributes to this literature by highlighting how a policy object is made to seem essential and adds nuance to that existing scholarship by extending it to the unique sociopolitical contexts of LMICs like India.

Authors

• Tanushree Sarkar, University of Missouri

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University