This article examines the ways in which child-centred education programmes in rural South Indian government primary schools have sought to reposition teachers’ work. Drawing on teachers’ accounts of their professional and social contexts, the article offers insights into the complex negotiation of working with educational reform in India. I explore how ‘being a teacher’ in current development contexts is constituted by multiple social, institutional and reform-programme expectations. Mapping the at times conflicting aspects of teachers’ work, the article sheds some light on the social contexts in which policy and reform imperatives are reshaped in schools, often in unintended or unexpected ways.
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