Foundational Steps Toward Building a Bridge Program for College-Ready Students from Jharkhand and Odisha, India Tribal Areas

• In Event: Comparative issues in higher education across South Asia

Proposal

Relevance
This proposal serves as the initial step of a new project with the end-goal of developing structures and mechanisms for enabling success for college-ready secondary school graduates from tribal areas in Jharkhand and Odisha, India. Working alongside ASPIRE India (A Society for Promotion of Inclusive and Relevant Education), an NGO whose “working towards making education inclusive, socially relevant, and keeping pace with 21st century challenges”, we begin (ASPIRE India, n.d.) by conducting a literature review on the notion of ‘college-ready’ and the concept of a ‘bridge program’, and how they work together as the first step in reaching our long-term goal of developing such a program for students planning to enter college from tribal areas in the aforementioned states.

ASPIRE works in Jharkhand and Odisha leading educational initiatives supporting completion of secondary school, and I work on initiatives within Indian higher education research and policy contexts, both for many years. Our synergies are built through years of dialog and engagement; hence, considering foundational project dialogs, overarching dimensions entail engaging in participatory/collaborative methods, and ensuring communal knowledges and values of tribal communities are leveraged in concert with higher education structures to ensure successful upskilling, psychosociocultural development and graduation. Since this is a new project, one which would be enriched with dialog from CIES colleagues, a roundtable proposal was selected versus a formal paper proposal.

Theory/Context
Conley (2008) acknowledged in their often-cited work that college-ready includes a preparation level needed to academically succeed in college, yet also focuses on behaviors exhibited by students such as study habits. We extend this idea well-beyond to include psychosociocultural dimensions from an asset-based lens to focus on the values and knowledges of tribal students, while including Wathington et al.’s (2011) work highlighting the psychological and emotional adjustments many bridge programs offer. We lean into the theory funds of knowledge which centers knowledges and values, particularly of those from marginalized communities, as assets to draw upon (Kiyama & Rios-Aguilar, 2017). Studies including Cruz’s (2025) aid us in understanding the ways indigenous students tapped into their own culture knowledges and values to elicit college readiness.

Mode of Inquiry
We engage in a systematic literature review, particularly located within the college-ready and bridge program nexus. While we acknowledge much of the literature on college-ready and bridge programs are centered in Western literature, we intentionally include literature in international and indigenous contexts to ensure we locate this topic more closely to the context of tribal college-ready students in Jharkhand and Odisha. By undertaking our due diligence of rigorously developing a set of similar key terms (such as ‘enabling programs’ in Australia (Stokes, 2014), we develop a more well-rounded knowledge-base of the literature toward our goal of setting a foundation for our context.

Contribution
This work centers tribal students in Indian higher education from asset-based and theory-to-practice dimensions. With a lack of resources and attention toward tribal students in Indian higher education, this project can aid communities and colleges in supporting tribal students and developing programs ensuring their success.

Authors

• Matthew A Witenstein, University of New Mexico

• Kartika Bhatia, Durham University UK

• Dayaram Yadav, Aspire

• Madhumita Bandyopadhyay, NIEPA