Education

Education and pedagogy have been one of the important foci of Anveshi since its inception. We have carried out research that has challenged the assumptions of mainstream disciplines, and some of our early publications – We were Making History and Women Writing in India have found a place in curricula in India and other parts of the world. Savalaksha Sandehaalu, a health handbook for women, found a place in scores of community health education initiatives.

The impetus for our work with school education was an international seminar that D. Vasanta and Aditi Mukherjee organized at the Department of Linguistics, Osmania University in the late 90’s on research and practice in literacy. Subsequently a study group was formed with Jacob Tharu, Vijaya Vanamala, Rekha Pappu Asma Rasheed and others. Anveshi supported their initiatives in organizing public lectures (e.g. Prof. Krishna Kumar) and worked on small scale research projects involving research assistants who studied in government schools and belonged to marginalised communities. Each of them brought in their specific insights to look at the complexity of school education from their respective disciplines in conducting the unique research study on Curricular Transactions in Government Schools. Between 2000 and 2002 this study documented the processes underlying curricular transactions among children from marginalized communities, studying in classes VI, VII and VIII in ten different schools in and around Hyderabad. The research team not only examined both central and state schemes and policies for school education during the project period, it analysed textbooks and guides, recorded classroom transactions and collected data from 300 school children (a majority belonging to marginalized communities), 120 parents and a small group of teachers and school administrators. The findings stressed the need to examine the impact of the curriculum and normative values that it embodies on children’s self-worth and aspirations. The reasons for children’s inability to attend school seem to go beyond the often-cited poor teaching on the part of the teachers and forced child labour on the part of the parents.

Our work on school education has pointed to the contradictions between the values and assumptions that underpin public education and the everyday lives of children from marginalized communities. The social setting of the school, teachers’ attitudes and the curriculum alienate children for whom work is integral to familial survival. Poor – largely Dalit, backward caste and Muslim – children’s efforts to stay in school and to succeed are routinely thwarted by factors that are rarely addressed in educational policy, institutional structure, textbooks or teacher training.

In 2004, some members of the research team were invited to be a part of the discussions on the National Curriculum Framework (2005) especially on work and education, gender and education, special education as part of the sub groups initiated by the NCERT under the directorship of Prof. Krishna Kumar. It strongly advocated for a rethinking of the idea of child labour as inimical to the growth and educational progress of the children from underprivileged background. It pointed to the inadequacies of the curricular material in which the children’s lives were not reflected and total lack of any reading material in the homes of most of these government school children   This study paved the way for shaping the next set of studies and projects Anveshi took up during the later part of the 2000s.

In 2005, we embarked on the project titled Different Tales: Stories from Marginal Cultures and Regional Languages through which we sought to collate a series of alternative stories for children that will reflect the plurality of experiences that constitute children’s lives in India. The reading and fieldwork for this project threw up a number of interesting questions: How can we find stories that reflect different lifeworlds and that speak to different childhood experiences? Are there local, regional or trans-national narratives that will disrupt the nationalist framework that is all-pervasive in children’s literature? The project examined contemporary feminist, Dalit and minority literature in order to find material that can be adapted for children. The project culminated in the publication of a series of eight storybooks in Telugu, Malayalam and English which over years became part of curriculum in several departments of education in the country. To see a full report click here.

The books have continued to have a very active life. In 2015,  Eklavya, the well known educational group from Bhopal took interest in translating and publishing them in Hindi. It has published five books till now. In Kannada, reputed author and translator Sukanya Kanarelly took up the task of bringing them into publication. While the translations were completed in 2012 itself, the books are currently under publication by Abhiruchi Prakashan of Mysore. M.A. Moid and many translators from Hyderabad completed the translations of these books into Urdu which are awaiting publication.

In 2015, in the aftermath of the Delhi gangrape incident and the subsequent recommendations of the SAKSHAM report to introduce gender sensitization curriculum into colleges, a nine member team from Anveshi prepared the curriculum on the request of the Telangana Collegiate Commissionerate. The team consisted of Susie Tharu, A.Suneetha, Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda, D.Vasanta, Deepa Sreenivas, Vasudha Nagaraj, Asma Rasheed, Gogu Shyamala and Rama Melkote. As this curriculum and the concepts had to be taught to a wide spectrum of students without any social science background, it used popular films, television programmes, short stories, poetry, cartoons and many other easily accessible materials to discuss unfamiliar concepts such as gendered socialization, consent in male female relationships, viewing history from a below, gender spectrum among others. It was published by the Telugu Academy of Telangana as Towards a World of Equals in December 2015.

The research and writing team worked with at least a thousand teachers from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (Hyderabad) which introduced the course over the next few years to facilitate the teaching of the book in the classroom. It sought to emphasize that in teaching this book, which was specifically written to be read aloud in the classroom, the teacher needed to adopt the role of a facilitator, like a television anchor. The teaching should aim at enabling students to think rather than to write an acceptable answer in the exam. The team introduced different kinds of engaged assignments to the students rather than an end semester examination. 

The book was subsequently prescribed as a mandatory textbook in all undergraduate colleges of the Telangana State, irrespective of the nature of the course. Azim Premji University, BITS Hyderabad and IIIT (Hyderabad), University of Hyderabad too have used it or are using it in their classrooms. Many non governmental organizations currently use the chapters for their workshops. An updated textbook A World of Equals oriented towards the national undergraduate students would soon be published by Orient Blackswan. 

Research articles based on these projects have been published in journals such as Childhood, Contemporary Education Dialogue, Feminist Theory, Himal, South Asia etc. 

---

Completed Projects 

Feminism Today: Course Material and Reader (2019) 

The reader offers a map of the contemporary terrain of feminism and its history in the Indian context that could be used as teaching material for students at the post-graduate level. An objective of the reader is to introduce a new generation of readers to new issues and discussions in the women’s movement.

The reader draws on a wide range of texts — from film songs to matrimonial columns, from popular television serials to chat-room discussions — so that it can speak to a larger audience interested in understanding the experience of gender in India today. The reader is divided into three sections: Growing Up, Body and Relationships. Some of the questions it seeks to engage with are: how have sexuality, the politics of intimate relationships, the opening up of the singular category of ‘woman’, or the gendering of public spaces become crucial issues in the feminist debates in India today? What are the inter-linkages of feminism with the caste question and communalism? The feminist reader has been edited by Dr. Navaneetha Mokkil and Shefali Jha.

This project resulted in the publication of Thinking Women: A Reader, published by Stree Samya, Calcutta in 2019 

Theoretical Approaches to Women’s Studies: Concepts and Categories (2002)

Several members of Anveshi were involved in designing the course material for a postgraduate diploma in Women’s Studies for Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad.

Towards an Archive for Contemporary Feminism, 1830-1950 (1998)

The project, coordinated by Susie Tharu, involved the collection of texts from English and four regional languages in an attempt to understand how the women’s question has been articulated and institutionalized in India over the last 150 years. The research associates who worked on this project were Vidyut Bhagwat (Marathi), Jharna Dhar (Bengali), Vasanth Kannabiran (Tamil) and K. Lalita (Telugu). The Indian Council of Social Science Research funded this project.

Miscellaneous Projects 

Locating Caste in the ‘Progressive’ Educational Spaces of Kerala

This project looked at the caste experiences of children through an assessment of the role of teachers, school atmosphere and the peer group. It examined the factors that work to inculcate, interpret and negotiate with caste in the secular context of Kerala. The study involved interviews with children and teachers and observation of classroom interactions of teachers and students. Children and parents from different castes and classes were interviewed outside the classrooms. K. P. Girija worked on this project.