Pedagogy and Diversity: Difference or Deficit

Changing Teacher Attitude

Teachers’ negative attitudes towards children from scheduled caste and tribe communities, leading to their experiencing difficulties in schooling and achieving educational aims, have been recognized since the early 1960s when sociological studies of education in India were first initiated (Gore et al, 1967). These studies documented the problems in the education of these children that were arising from deep-rooted cultural prejudices regarding their ineducability as well as from discriminatory practices leading to psychological stress and demotivation of children. Numerous studies document the stress created when teachers subject children to ridicule or ignore them in the class, effectively leading to children not only being excluded but even being ‘miseducated’—forming negative beliefs about themselves and their capabilities. Whether a teacher feels positively about the children she is teaching or whether she feels negatively about them is very visible when one visits schools in rural areas and schools for children of the poor, whether they are government, aided, charitable or private schools. The fact that contemporary studies continue to notice and document teacher attitudes, and the ill-effects of negative attitudes in particular, is testimony to the fact that teacher education has remained unreformed and uninformed by this issue. Clearly, much remains to be done to reform teachers’ attitudes towards children who are girls, who are from marginalized communities such as tribal groups, scheduled castes and nomadic groups, and who are poor—in short children who are not urban-middle class males.

The concept of ‘diversity in childhoods’ could be seen as a conceptual tool to address and bring about attitudinal change. Recognizing that there is diversity in the ways children experience childhood should lead one to greater acceptance of children from different communities and different circumstances. These could be differences in the resources they have access to and are provided with, differences in the expectations towards how they use their time, differences in how responsible they are held for their actions, differences in how much and how far outside the home they are allowed to be, differences in how ‘clean’ they are expected to be and differences in aspirations for them. These differences could arise out of the community’s own culture in general or from the community’s view regarding children and childhood in particular. The conception of ‘diversity in childhoods’ encourages accepting these different ways of being ‘children’ and of experiencing childhood as cultural differences that are legitimate, therefore removing or dissolving the basis for negative attitudes towards children whose childhood is different and towards their parents/community who are culturally different. This view not only directly challenges the belief basis of negative attitudes but also challenges the educational solutions that arise from these beliefs—such as taking children out of their communities and circumstances in order to educate them and then putting them into hostels to insulate them from their own culture and their (lack) of resources.

Positive attitude towards all children, belief in the ability of (all) children to learn–leading to the development of their self-confidence—and motivation to work with children even if they are from disprivileged and marginalized communities are undoubtedly essential attributes for teachers. In general, this is the attitude that enables them to work with all students in their class, regardless of their individual differences, enabling all of them to feel included, valued and supported. This attitude is particularly important when teachers are working in government schools with children, but also for those who are in private privileged schools under the RtE-mandated 25% regime. Such an attitude is a sine qua non for a good teacher. If this view is formed through their understanding of and exposure to ideas of diversity in childhood, then this is a formulation that must be learned and into which they must be socialized during their teacher education. Indeed, it could be that it is in the pursuit of the idea of a positive attitude towards children that the idea of recognition of and acceptance of diversity of childhoods has acquired its importance in the contemporary context. In this article, I propose to explore these two ideas in relation to each other more deeply.

First, I want to examine the idea that teachers who have positive and inclusive views regarding children may not necessarily come to hold these views from an acceptance of the proposition of diversity in childhood. It may come from a middle-class-norm referenced notion of deficiency that clarifies to the teacher what they need to do.

Second, I want to explore the implications of the acceptance of the recognition of diversity in childhoods. What are the elements of this ‘diversity’ that need recognition? Is this an ‘identity’ recognition and, in this sense, ‘inclusion as opposed to exclusion’, or does this also invite and require curricular and pedagogic responses that go beyond identity affirmation and respect? If there is the desired and desirable positive attitude and inclusiveness towards all children, then where and how does difference manifest. I will explore two studies that look at what may lie ‘beyond’ attitude: what pedagogic issues arise in relation to acknowledging diversity in the classroom, and why they take the form that they do.

Positive Attitude

Contrary to the popular stereotype of government schoolteachers being neglectful, lacking agency and neglecting the children in their classrooms, and recent studies that claim that such apathy marks the culture of elementary government schools, four recent empirical studies document teachers in government schools who are investing effort and are working with children of the poor. It is instructive to examine closely what they were doing and why. In addition, I will also examine the question of what is the view of childhood that these teachers hold that enables their positive practice.

Sharma (2013) identified five teachers working in Delhi government schools who were ‘good’ teachers. These four women and one man were all engaged in making considerable effort in the classrooms; nurturing individual children, encouraging them to talk, be independent, have arguments and ask questions; and also challenging them to achieve, with affection, and supporting them. Each of these teachers had a unique and different mould into which they seemed to ‘cast’ themselves—as a friend, a guru or a mother—which enabled them to accept these children and find resources to be positive about what they could achieve. For all these teachers except one, the children’s circumstances were in stark contrast to their own. They and their own children were middle class, while the families of the children they worked with were poor migrants with irregular work. The teachers were knowledgeable about and spoke of the children’s home circumstances: lack of money, drunken fathers, broken families and non-availability of food. But rather than these being approached as ‘diversity’ in childhoods, these were accepted as the circumstances of the poor, but also as deficient for these very reasons, and therefore the need for teachers and the school to ‘compensate’. They nurtured the space of the school as one where the children need not remember their homes and difficulties, and instead could forget that and think of positive things and of what they could achieve. For each of these teachers, there was a personal story of their conviction that children should be equipped to succeed in difficult circumstances. They perceived the differences between themselves and their students as a deficiency, undoubtedly in comparison with their own middle class as the ‘norm’. However, this did not lead them to have a negative attitude towards the children, or to lose motivation to struggle and put in the effort; rather this ‘norm’ gave them a sense of what needs to be done in order to enable children to cope with school and to succeed. In fact, for these teachers, enabling students to succeed in school was central to their understanding of how students may alter their current unhappy situation. Interestingly—and this is a point to which I will return later—these teachers felt that for ‘such students/children’, thinking and being independent and confident, and standing on their own feet was essential for their resilience in life, as they would need to succeed in the world on their own. It is quite possible that in a middle-class school they may have not emphasized these learning outcomes and may have in fact adopted more ‘conventional teaching’ and where they would be teaching children to be confident but also obedient and more accepting of authority—still being ‘good teachers’, but for different purposes and therefore in a different way.

My second story comes from my study of schools in Hyderabad (Sarangapani, 2018). I found the most ‘progressive’ type of pedagogies—where there were dialogic processes adopted in the classroom, where children were encouraged to think and were challenged with questions involving higher-order thinking, and where all children were confident and involved, with the teacher knowing each student’s name and paying attention to them—only in schools for the elite and schools for the very poor. ¹ These latter schools included a few government schools, a few aided schools and all the charitable schools, both recognized and non-recognized (a Madarsa school, a Shishumandir school, a Christian-charity-run night school and a CSR school). This pedagogy was also found in a school that catered to children with special needs.

When asked about the students’ backgrounds, the teachers all exhibited awareness of the difficulties of their home circumstances. These were often Dalit children or the poorest of the poor Muslim children living in slums. Their parents were migrants to the city and were involved in rag picking and scavenging. The children often came to school without a bath or hungry without having eaten. Their home circumstances were difficult. Yet this knowledge of difference did not result in a negative attitude to the children. Teachers spoke of these matters quite matter-of-factly and it did not seem to lead to them neglecting the children.

These teachers all emphasized the following as important learning outcomes for children: the ability to think on their own, to reason and decide on the correct answer, to read and understand and to read with understanding, and to stand on their own feet and act confidently. They felt that school learning was important, but they did not expect students to continue their education and complete school. They expected them to have to fend for themselves in the world and to find occupations on their own, for which being resourceful and resilient were important. They saw themselves as educating children for this and not for a ‘school-based’ success in the world (i.e., where certification of school may lead to the formation of skills, access to higher education and work opportunities). These teachers mostly derived their sense of purpose from their own community and the community they served—religious purposiveness. For the government and aided schools’ teachers, this came from a sense of national mission.

In both these cases, there is an acceptance of difference seen within the framework of mainstream society and education hierarchically, and as ‘deficiency’ vis a vis the middle-class norm. The children were perceived as ‘poor’, and aspirations for them were framed accordingly. However, it did not lead teachers to believe that the children were ‘ineducable’. Within this framing, teachers then crafted their practice. Students had a positive attitude and they achieved valuable learning within the school. These teachers noted how their own children differ from the ones they teach in many fundamental ways. Motivation to attend school is ensured by parents; willingness to engage with routinized work whose value lies in the distant future of adulthood, being able to come to school punctually, well fed, bathed and ready to pay attention; regularity of attendance; and supervision for homework—all of these are taken for granted when curriculum and school are designed, and all are directly related to the socio-economic stability of the middle class. In the absence of these, the teachers adapted and compensated.

It appears that teachers tacitly recognize that future opportunities depend on family, social networks and the school, and that under the circumstances, this is what they could hope to achieve. Would we be willing to accept this as the responsiveness of the teacher to ‘diversity’ of life-worlds and life opportunities, or would we read the teacher’s work as basically operating from a deficiency perspective and hence them lowering expectations (the belief that children are going to essentially not complete schooling) and effectively depriving children of the possibility of succeeding in the mainstream? How would the acceptance of diversities of childhood interplay into an education system that is not designed to value different outcomes and is quite convergent in what counts as success?

Beyond Attitude

In the earlier two studies, there was little recognition by the teacher of ‘difference’ or ‘diversity’ within the classroom. The main difference was between the teacher and the children—all the children were perceived by the teacher as being similar to each other in that they were all poor. She did not note or notice other ‘differences’ between them—such as of mother tongue, or caste; they did not seem to constitute or manifest in the classroom. The teacher-herself and her own children (who were not poor) were a constant source of comparison, contrast and self-reflection.

I will now examine the third and fourth studies that looked at teachers’ experience of ‘difference’ within the classroom.

The third study was conducted by a team of researchers from RV Education Consortium (RVEC) and Seva-in-action (n.d.) who looked at inclusion as understood broadly from a social justice perspective and including not only children with disabilities but also gender, socio-class, and language and religion/community. A survey of teachers’ perceptions of ‘diversity’ conducted as a part of the study suggested that teachers by and large did not ‘perceive’ any differences in learning on account of gender or home language background. What they experienced in the classroom was ‘learning difficulties’—children’s lack of interest in studies. What they noticed was the diversity of intellectual ability of children, more specifically noted as a differential ability to cope with schooling. Teachers knew the caste background of children and had a general knowledge of the parents’ occupation. They also knew those children whose home language was not Kannada—the medium of instruction. However, social group identity was not the basis of differentiation in the classroom; children were viewed as ‘individual learners’. The differences the teachers perceived were ones of learning, and they were not attributed to or interpreted in terms of ‘diversity’ or differences in childhoods. The key difference noted between children was of learning differences—slow learners stood out. Differences on account of irregularity and older children stood out as challenges for which there were no pedagogic solutions or responses. In general, it was the poverty of parents and their lack of interest in the schooling process that emerged as the chief educational concern; if only the parents had the economic means and took an interest in the child’s education, the children would be no different from other learners. The study noted that this was an expected commentary from teachers who are not enthusiastic about their profession, are uncreative and not-constructivist, and are not innovating in their classrooms. But I find it useful to remember that these teachers had not ‘given up’ on the children on account of their community or caste. They were trying to teach and get the children to learn, and they were experiencing ‘learning difficulties’ that seemed to arise from the home of the child, and which were unavailable to them for transformation through pedagogic work.

The fourth study is Mariappa’s (2014) study of a progressive, small English-medium school in a metropolitan city that was implementing an RtE-like inclusion of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds into the school. Students in this school came from a wide range of backgrounds, parental occupations, linguistic groups and socio-economic classes. The school also included children who were diagnosed as having learning difficulties. Mariappa noted that teachers in this school were all very positive towards, knowledgeable about and interested in all their students. The school had a varied curriculum with a range of learning, including scholastic academic subjects, sports activities, drama, art, crafts and music. The teachers were sensitized, and they had autonomy and flexibility to alter and adapt what they were doing. The thematic organization of the curriculum adopted that year had the scope to bring in a range of resources from the students’ own surroundings and milieu, catering to their choices and differences. Yet, when it came to inclusion on a day-to-day basis, she noted that this was a rigorous task for teaches when it came to the academic subjects. In areas of the curriculum such as music, sports or school governance, this was not noticeable—all children had agency and voice, and achievement and success. In academic learning, children from lower socio-economic groups disproportionately experienced difficulty. Teachers speaking about these children described them as follows ‘They seem smart, but they are lazy, they need home support. They need more language; they have language issues. They need to work hard’. From their observations in the school, teachers felt that the children were all socially well integrated and included, but they had not been able to achieve academic inclusion. They needed the pace to be lowered and needed far greater attention from teachers to ‘keep them on task to achieve the same requirements and comparable outcomes. In catering to this difference, the teachers felt they were ‘simplifying and wondered if this [was] too much and how much to do’. They felt the need to impose external regulation, insisting on task completion and persistence, as well as a narrower range of standards to be met. Under these circumstances, the ‘participation’ they were expecting was becoming tokenistic. In the face of students not achieving as much as their peers, the teachers often asked themselves ‘have I done enough? She/he has been with me for two years and is still struggling to read.’ These deficiencies were not dissolved by attending to ‘difference’; highlighting the difference of milieu and incorporating it into the curriculum did not lead to ‘deficiencies’ dissolving. Instead, they seem to crystalize around the core and basic skills and the ‘study habits’

In spite of the positive attitude and the extensive opportunities for inclusion, children from non-middle-class backgrounds faced difficulties in the core academic curriculum. As in the case of the government schools’ teachers in the RVEC-seva-in-action study, these were being experienced by the teacher as problems in coping with academic learning that they were not able to address or dissolve by catering to these differences in curricular innovation, such as including children’s milieu and experience or dialogic pedagogy. The children from these groups did not lack voice, agency or confidence; this was visible not only in the corridors, art room assembly and playground but also in the ‘academic learning’ spaces. Rather, teachers found the pedagogic response required from them to lie in pacing, enabling children to stay on task and meet standards—effectively a pedagogy of ‘personalized tutoring’ to compensate and make up for these ‘deficiencies’. They felt that these were issues that they could not ‘solve’ or overcome in the school; they lay in the child’s home culture, the availability of home support for schooling and in-home socialization, constituting lower ‘educability’, that is, the capability of responding to and benefiting from academic instruction in school settings and of achieving ‘age appropriate’ learning outcomes as defined by national curricular standards.

The core of academic curricula—the skills of literacy and numeracy, and the ‘habits’ of persistence, postponement of gratification, ability to engage with abstract tasks, staying ‘on task’ and be supported to engage with tasks in the absence of intrinsic motivation, and the ‘seriousness’ attached with attending school, all recognized by Gramsci as middle class, bourgeois values and habits—became the core differentiating criteria between children from middle-class homes and children whose home milieu was ‘different’—the key and core ‘problem’ for pedagogy. Pedagogy and curriculum in the core academic areas, even when innovative and flexible, could not do without the basic assumption that these would be available traits for children, and the absence of these lead to both students and teachers experiencing difficulties that could not be overcome through innovation and positive recognition of difference.

One could take the view that the teachers and the school were not doing enough to recognize difference, and that they were still operating within the dominant cultural ideology in which difference would always only be understood in terms of deficiency. But it may also be the case that within the framework of academic learning and achievement, which ultimately all modern schools are expected to work towards, these differences do amount to deficiencies—even when the school is ‘alternative’ and ‘progressive’ and is recognizing and affirming the child’s identity. This may have to be regarded as a normative epistemic basis of the part of school learning that is not amenable to being reframed in the face of ‘diversity’. The only legitimate response would be to compensate for the deficiencies to enable greater educability and to achieving success in relation to the criteria defined by the framework.

These criteria may have once been regarded as arbitrary, following the new sociology of education, and offering the tempting possibility that they could be reformulated and contextualized (Young 1971). But today we are more willing to acknowledge that these criteria have epistemic grounds and are essential as the ‘powerful knowledge’ that is the job of the school to cultivate (Rata, 2012; Young’s [2008] recent reworking of his 1971 position).

Conclusion

The four studies presented in this article together indicate that the core implication of recognizing multiple childhood is a ‘recognition’-based inclusion rather than the stronger claim and hope that this recognition can be the basis of reviewing and reworking norms, standards and epistemic choices and can lead to curriculum and pedagogy catering to ‘differences’ rather than ‘deficits’. Without a larger political push for ontological shifts in society and conceptions of the life worth living, state-sponsored education and state-mandated compulsory schooling systems and teachers cannot aspire to do differently.

Unfashionable though they may be, we may need to retain concepts of educability, deficiency and compensation in the education of children from non-middle-class backgrounds, whose childhoods are different, specifically where mainstream academic learning is concerned. The conception of diversity in childhoods draws our attention to recognize as legitimate the various ways and life-worlds in which children grow up, the need for a liberal democracy to respect all of these life-worlds, and the political and psychological need to recognize and respect them. Positive attitudes and acceptance of differences in childhood is a sine qua non of good teaching.

However, this acceptance is not adequate as a basis to engender achieving equality of outcomes in school academic learning. Even positive recognition of ‘difference’ does not enable teachers to achieve equal outcomes in learning literacy, numeracy and academic achievement. Students’ differences manifest as ‘deficiencies’ that need to be compensated for through personalized tutoring that enables resocialization into habits of study and re-norming towards the value of school outcomes in a modern society to ensure the ability to benefit from instruction—in other words, to enhance educability and equality of outcomes within the contexts of difference. Rather than be seen as ‘problems’ that children bring, it needs to be seen as an ‘epistemic’ feature of the nature of school learning and an essential cultural capital that needs to be devolved in order to overcome the potential of being marginalized on account of being different.