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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

With the shift in focus towards ‘quality’ in global education (Tikly & Barrett, 2011; Sayed & Moriarty, 2020), there has been an emergence of new policy paradigms, data and measurement regimes, modes of governance, and teaching and learning practices across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) over the last two decades. Specifically, the recent salience of a ‘global learning crisis’ – wherein, a majority of children in LMICs are attending school but not learning (UNESCO, 2013; World Bank, 2019) – has spurred action among transnational institutions, donor networks, and governments to advocate for the prioritization of what is often described as ‘foundational’ or ‘early-grade’ learning in education systems (Beeharry, 2021; Evans & Hares, 2021). This has led to a proliferation of reforms, programs, and assessments aimed at improving the basic reading and arithmetic abilities of children.
The targeted focus on foundational learning in LMICs often derives from long-standing human capital perspectives that associate proficiency in basic skills with national-level economic growth, employment, and wages (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2012; Kaffenberger and Pritchett, 2020). These notions are also reflected in prevalent global discussions about education; for instance, children’s inability to read a simple text by the age of ten is now spoken about widely as ‘learning poverty’ (World Bank, 2019), or the claimed ‘learning losses’ in basic reading and arithmetic due to pandemic school closures are explained in terms of potential drops in GDP in the future (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2020). Additionally, recent discourses about foundational learning also posit basic reading and arithmetic skills as essential pre-requisites or ‘gateways’ for not just advanced learning in schools (Belafi et al., 2020), but also improved life outcomes – despite the lack of any substantive conclusive evidence for such claims (Evans & Hares, 2021). This widely-considered primacy of foundational or early-grade learning has popularized assessments like EGRA, EGMA, and ASER for monitoring learning outcomes and interventions like structured pedagogy and Teaching at the Right Level for achieving quick and cost-effective gains in those outcomes across LMICs.
Despite the popular consensus about their necessity, these new developments in response to the ‘global learning crisis’ have been critiqued for driving neoliberal agendas and private interests (Languille, 2014), narrowing down visions for teaching and learning (Benavot & Smith, 2020; Schweisfurth, 2023), failing to engage with the micro- and meso-level institutions in education systems (Clarke, 2022), and ignoring the effects of racism and colonialism on learning inequities (Silova, 2018; Sriprakash, Tikly, & Walker, 2020). Further, the marriage of economistic and managerial thinking with neuroscientific insights in the large-scale promotion of technoscientific practices has constructed such reforms as silver-bullet solutions that ‘work’ (Biesta, 2007). This not only obfuscates the political economy and politics of educational decision-making, but also diverts attention from and fails to engage with long-standing systemic issues and sociopolitical barriers that inhibit equitable learning in LMICs. As such, this panel seeks to respond to the ways in which the narrative of a ‘global learning crisis’ shapes teaching and learning in LMICs, while significantly depoliticizing it in service of simplistic technical fixes. The papers in this panel will address a range of critical questions: How are these reforms assembled and formulated? Who gets a say in them, and who benefits from them (and who does not)? How do these reforms transcend borders, contexts, and populations? Who or what are overlooked in the institutionalization of these developments? What consequences emerge from the implementation of these reforms?
We attend to the different manifestations and effects of the responses to the ‘global learning crisis’ in diverse national contexts. Additionally, the papers analyze these responses and their implications through various methodological approaches. The first paper in the panel offers a critical discourse analysis of documents produced by state and non-state actors in India around the time of the launch of one of the largest FLN initiatives in the world. The study demonstrates the discursive approaches that are employed to create the legitimacy of ‘foundational literacy’ as an idea and of the approaches to teach the same. Through an integrative literature review, the second paper offers a re-examination of the impact of Teaching at the Right Level, a pedagogical approach developed by the NGO Pratham as a ‘seeming’ innovative solution to achieve foundational learning. The last two papers in the panel emerge from comparative case studies (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to understand how teachers experience the ramifications of national policies that prioritize foundational or early-grade learning. In the Ugandan context, the third paper examines how teachers’ working conditions influence their enactment of pedagogical reform brought on to boost early-grade reading. In a similar vein, the fourth paper explores how teachers in an Indian state negotiate their professional identities and mandated responsibilities in response to a large-scale initiative to achieve FLN outcomes.
On the whole, the panel makes an important contribution toward understanding how the global learning crisis and responses to it are playing out in the global South. Even though the studies are based in the contexts of India and Uganda, findings from them reveal crucial implications for other LMICs – particularly in relation to the interconnectedness of transnational stakeholders (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), the decontextualized transfer of policy solutions across geographies (Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), and the increasing privatization of public education (Moschetti, Edwards, & Caravaca, 2024) in the developing world. By illustrating how learning problems and solutions are formulated as well as how they both shape and are shaped by the experiences of teachers, this panel complicates the simplistic theories of change that currently dominate the global education paradigm. Through these papers, the authors call for the need to improve educational quality without overlooking issues of inputs and labor conditions, as well as to be cautious of simplistic technoscientific policy solutions that promise quick fixes to long-standing challenges of teaching and learning.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Organizer

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

Chair

• Tanushree Sarkar, University of Missouri

Individual Presentations

• “Established beyond any debate…”: Foundational literacy and the making of a policy mission in India - Tanushree Sarkar, University of Missouri; Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University

• Understanding TaRL Interventions in India - Aanchal Gidra, Michigan State University

• “Give us the one for the teachers”: Exploring the relationship between working conditions and pedagogy reform in Uganda - Jonathan Marino, UW-Madison

• Teacher Perspectives on the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) Push in Karnataka - Amogh Basavaraj, Florida State University

Discussant

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison