The Social Context of Learning in India

Achievement Gaps and Factors of Poor Learning

Manoj Kumar Tiwary, Sanjay Kumar, Arvind Kumar Mishra, Manoj Kumar Tiwary, Sanjay Kumar, Arvind Kumar Mishra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032646091
• eBook ISBN: 9781000874549
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Why are children from disadvantaged and minority communities overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts? This volume engages with this question and examines classroom learning as a process that involves a multitude of actors situated in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.

The volume covers an interdisciplinary spectrum of educational processes, contexts, educational ambitions, and limitations of low-caste, working-class, and middle-class students from different Indian communities and regions. The volume delves into the problem of academic underperformance from a social identity perspective and probes into social context-based variability in classroom learning, systemic disadvantages in the form of negative stereotypes, and the family as an under-studied social group in all discussions of schooling. It also examines the teachers' perceptions and attitudes towards Adivasi students and other minority groups in primary schools and their effect on children's classroom engagement.

The chapters in this volume provide insights into unresolved and critical research questions that require the attention of teachers, school management, educators, and policymakers alike. This book will also be useful for academicians, policymakers, teacher educators, pedagogic practitioners in India and abroad, and state and central government institutions working on school education, educational psychology, policymaking in education, learning methods, and research on educational enhancement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Classroom Learning: Psychological Tools Approach to Education
• 2 The Power of Collective: Responses to Systemic Disadvantage in the Educational Context
• 3 The Family–School Relationship
• 4 Enabling Environment for Learning and the Middle-Class Advantage
• 5 Samaj and Sangat: Parental Construction of Children’s Poor Educational Attainments in a Caste-Based Segregated Settlement
• 6 Textbook ‘Proposes’, Teacher ‘Disposes’: Marginalising Textbooks and Teachers’ Strategies of Subversion
• 7 Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Adivasi Students and Their Effect on Children’s Classroom Engagement
• 8 Understanding Comprehension: Classroom Problems with English for the EWS Child
• 9 Unequal Access to Learning in Bihar: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives
• Index