Understanding Teachers' Agency as Being Embedded in the Global Policy Terrain: Examples From India

• In Event: The Impact of Racism and White Supremacy on Children's and Teachers' Agency in the Early Grades

Abstract

Objective: This paper focuses on teachers’ agency as situated within larger globalized early childhood discourses that are pushed through large international organizations on to countries like India. I focus on the differential agencies that teachers get to have and its link to the demographics of the children that they serve. And further, how this is translated into the experience that young children get to have in those classrooms. This paper situates structure and agency in globalization when looking at educational practices in developing countries such as India. Within educational discourses of globalization, teachers are seen as those responsible for transformations in the educational experiences of young children. Teachers’ work is positioned as a relatively simplistic response to larger global structural changes. How a teacher responds to global, educational discourses, particularly about early childhood education and care, is varied and multifarious. Understanding the role of teacher agency in how they respond to globalization discourses requires attention to both structure and agency as well as deficit assumptions about the communities of children they serve.

Method: This paper draws on the data collected for a larger comparative multi-sited, multivocal, video-cued ethnographic study (e.g. Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989; 1991) on school readiness located in 2 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.

Theoretical Framework: I draw on Bhabha’s (2004) and Gupta’s (2006; 2014) work on hybridity and juxtapose it in the context of Bernstein’s (1977) work on “invisible pedagogy” to understand how teacher’s agency is determined by class structures and how it allows for maintenance of class inequality and creates neocolonial experiences for teachers and children..

Findings: Data indicates that teachers in the private preschool classroom were treated as partners in the children’s education and had more agency. They could negotiate the larger discourses on early childhood education and hybridize them to suit the needs of the community. Teachers serving low income families, on the other hand, were treated more as interrupters of knowledge (Au & Apple, 2004) and were seen as mere transmitters of education. They had to follow a fixed curriculum designed by others, in ways deemed appropriate by the administrators. I describe how teachers in the private preschool programs could show affection towards the children in their classroom by addressing them with nicknames while the teachers in the low-income preschool had to follow strict guidelines and could address children only with their given names.

Significance: This and other examples show that while privileged families experience education that is dynamic and transformative, families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds get educational experiences where education is seen as a product that needs to be managed and delivered efficiently, achieved by strict regulations, and tighter controls over teachers.

Author

• Shubhi Sachdeva, San Francisco State University