Between Educational Equity and Social Order: Examining Teachers' Mediation of Stakeholder Relationships in Residential Schools for Marginalised Girls

• In Event: Social exclusion, inclusion and justice: Policies, practices and interventions in South Asia

Proposal

Schools become effective and empowering learning spaces when all stakeholders–administrative authorities, school staff, families, communities and students–believe in and collectively prioritise formal education. Especially for girls, whose education is still considered negotiable, relationships between these stakeholders greatly determine access to schools, quality of learning, and ability to pursue their aspirations in the long run. This work recognizes teachers as crucial figures in driving girls' education outcomes, as working with parents, school authorities and girls is central to their jobs. Closer attention to these processes is needed to encourage collaboration towards an equitable, transformative education. This paper examines the role of teachers in building peace, inclusion and justice in Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) in Uttar Pradesh (UP), which is India's most populous state with over 15.68% of all teachers (Government of India, Ministry of Education, Department of School Education and Literacy, 2024).

Launched in 2004, KGBVs are residential government-run schools for adolescent girls from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes and religious minorities who have historically been excluded from and marginalized in education spaces (NCERT, 2024). Introduced in areas with poor educational outcomes, KGBVs were imagined as a transformative space, where dropout girls could be re-engaged in education within an encouraging environment, and with all necessary amenities provided by the state. Teachers in KGBVs shoulder many responsibilities to actualise this vision, including enrolling girls from the community, identifying learning gaps, bringing their academic skills up to speed, and providing care.

In this paper, we aim to highlight the importance of gender transformation and systems change in UP. Placing adolescent girls at the center of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model (1977), this work focusses on understanding and intervening in the microsystem, mesosystem and microsystem–consisting of families, teachers, community leaders, government structures and actors and civil society organisations. These measures will act as catalysts to shift patriarchal structures, policies and social hierarchies at the chronosystem and macrosystem levels towards gender transformation. Through qualitative participatory action research, the project engaged multiple stakeholders in 2 northern UP districts, Shrawasti and Bahraich. Home to 20 of UP's 746 KGBVs, Shrawasti and Bahraich are situated near the India-Nepal border, and have a low women's literacy rate of around 39% (Mission Prerna, n.d.; NCERT, 2024; International Institute for Population Sciences and ICF, 2021). The research was conducted in 2 KGBVs in May 2025, and involved interviews, focus groups, and exercises to understand local perspectives around the education system, gender transformation and systems change from teachers, girls, community members, school staff and village-level leaders. Prioritising a community-led and culturally sensitive approach based on power mapping exercises, the work attempted to recognize barriers to collaboration, in order to align all stakeholders. Findings revealed many challenges in the two KGBVs, including student retention issues and complex hierarchies of caste, religion and disability among girls. Additionally, school and teacher practices often mirrored wider social exclusions.

We argue that the KGBV system positions teachers in a sharply paradoxical role, where they must act both in the interest of girls' education, and maintain KGBVs' legitimacy, harmonious relations with stakeholders, and status quo social order. The need to reinforce equity, critical peace and justice, motivates and underpins this work in gender transformative education and systems change to support teachers in their roles. As 'soft systems' thinking suggests, dialogues between stakeholders, their meaning-making processes, and the presence of trust are all important aspects of understanding and building effective education systems (Jones et al., 2023). Similarly, in the Indian context, Ramachandran (2018) draws out the links between teachers' beliefs about teacher motivation, prevalent systemic and material conditions in which they work, and on-ground contradictions that structure their work, informing the current paper. Examining teachers' interactions with girls, warden-principals, block and district-level education authorities, and parents, through retellings of conflict and tension, led to some key learnings.

First, the contractual, underpaid and insecure nature of KGBV teachers' jobs necessitated compliance with authorities, lacking the platforms to advocate for themselves or to cultivate social agency and inclusion among students. Second, in relation to parents, teachers have to represent the 'educated' and stand in for the school, so they rely on pre-existing social divisions and prejudices to manage conflict and backlash. Finally, teachers act as moral first-responders and peace-keepers with girls, vis-a-vis bullying, caste and religious divisions, though they also often discriminate and perpetuate religious biases.

Teachers have long been the focus of proponents of gender transformative education, critical peace education and human rights education, recognizing them as key stakeholders to shift cultures and attitudes (M Bajaj, 2011; Miller and Ramos, 2000; Life Skills Collaborative, 2023). Interventions by governments and civil society organisations in the Indian education landscape have further relied on teachers' labour and time, organising trainings and enabling them to implement programs in their classrooms. Interactions with KGBV teachers reveal their ambivalence towards these initiatives, desire for teachers' voices to be heard much more in education planning, and the need for synchronized efforts towards greater integrity across different layers of the education system. In their analysis, KGBV teachers linked their own position to the marginal position of the KGBV as an institution in the educational landscape, as schools catering to marginalised girls are often sidelined in policy, resource provision and decision-making. These findings reveal the need for systems-wide change, and a reimagining of the position of the KGBV teacher and the KGBV itself. Rather than merely engaging teachers in trainings or as on-ground delivery mechanisms for interventions, a gender transformative education approach recognizes the need to unlock their power and create an enabling environment for gender justice at all levels of the education system (UNICEF et al., 2021). This paper proposes some powerful routes to systems change to achieve transformative education in KGBVs, which can be adapted across states and institution types. Analysing teacher practices through a systems lens serves to move away from a status quo maintenance approach to peace to critical positive peace, which addresses structural violence and education's potential for social justice.

Authors

• Nidhi Kinhal, SwaTaleem Foundation

• Ananya Tiwari, Texas A&M University

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina

• Vaibhav Kumar, SwaTaleem Foundation