At What Price? The ‘Terms of Inclusion’ that Mobile Communities Face in Attending School

By Ann Monk,

MA Education and International Development

I step out of the scorching sun into the kindergarten classroom of the Mor Village^[1] school, which is packed with children despite the 45° heat. The wobbly ceiling fan brings little relief, yet their enthusiasm is unwavering as they trace the letters on their alphabet worksheets. I spot Raniya’s father sitting on the floor, a student perched on his lap, and I can’t help but grin. I recall my first week of teaching here, when I met Raniya’s parents during a home visit. Her 14-year-old sister had just been pulled out of school to help with housework and “prepare for marriage.” I asked about Raniya, and her mother replied that she also planned to withdraw her once she reached age 14. Yet today, 16-year-old Raniya is still in school, and her parents not only tolerate her educational aspirations but actively promote them. In fact, her father now helps at the school when it is too hot to work as a mahout.^[2] When I first began teaching the oldest girls at this school, my dream was to “convince” their parents to keep them in school as long as possible. Yet the more time I spent with these families, the more I realized the flaws in my approach.

In the international development community, there is a tendency to assume that low enrollment and attendance rates arise from parents’ ignorance as to the value of education. Thus, the premise is that ‘enlightening’ parents about the benefits of schooling will lead them to prioritize their children’s education. Yet such an approach assumes that formal education is inherently empowering and any reasons for resisting ‘inclusion’ in schools are unfounded and irrational.

Instead, I found it more fruitful to investigate why some parents were hesitant to enroll their children or keep them in school past a certain age. Caroline Dyer (2013) offers a useful analytical framework based on ‘terms of inclusion’, meaning the conditions that families must accept (and the trade-offs they must make) in order to participate in a particular education initiative.

The families in Mor Village saw schooling as beneficial for young children because it also functioned as free childcare. But as children grow older, there are more and more ‘opportunity costs’ associated with schooling. There were no ‘direct costs’ at this school because tuition, books, and uniforms were free. However, there were opportunity costs, meaning opportunities forgone by attending school, such as earning money or helping out in the home. Many parents did not believe the school was teaching relevant and practical skills to improve the lives of students and their families. As a result, they insisted that the older children help support their families rather than continue their education. In other words, a ‘term of inclusion’ for attending school was sacrificing opportunities to support the family in order to obtain an education that did not provide tangible benefits. Clearly, then, the solution was not to ‘convince’ parents that schooling was a worthwhile investment for their children. Instead, we needed to tailor our students’ learning experiences so that schooling was actually worthwhile for them.

For example, rather than requiring students to learn multiplication tables through rote memorization, I started teaching math skills with coins. Not only did students learn more quickly through this hands-on approach, but they could more readily apply their numeracy skills in their everyday lives. None of the parents in the village could count so, when they shopped in the nearby town, they would hold out a handful of coins and hope that the vendor would take only the correct amount. But by learning math in an applied context, the students became adept at quickly calculating sums and counting out the amount owed, ensuring that their parents were no longer overcharged. As parents saw the value of their children’s education increasing, they were more inclined to prioritize their education over other duties because the relevant curriculum made the trade-off for schooling more favorable.

Formal education represented another ‘term of inclusion’ for my students in that the Mor Village school followed a regimented curriculum on an annual cycle and required regular school attendance. This expectation presented a significant challenge for my students. They migrated back and forth, more than 900 kilometers, between Mor Village and a village in another state that did not have a school. Dictated by their fathers’ ability to find work, my students’ movements were unpredictable and often last-minute, and they could be away for just a few weeks or many months at a time. Students struggled to catch up when they returned to school, and those with multiple, prolonged absences were re-enrolled at a lower grade. The latter often dropped out within weeks of their return, due to the stigma associated with being older than their classmates.

It proved a challenge to teach varying levels of learners at the same time. I was determined to help returning students catch up on missed work, but I did not want my teaching to be repetitive for the more advanced students in the class. One strategy I employed was to reduce the amount of instructional time and focus on individual and group activities. This technique promoted greater student engagement and critical thinking than acquisition-based teaching methods, and it also enabled me to provide individualized support to students. Group activities proved particularly successful when I paired recently returned students with those who were further ahead. Not only were the advanced students able to help their peers who had fallen behind, but these students also found that explaining the learning materials helped to deepen their own understanding of the lessons.

Students work in pairs to complete a multiplication worksheet.

A final ‘term of inclusion’ that my students faced was the increasingly Hindu nationalist curriculum. As Muslims, obtaining a formal education required subjecting themselves to Hindutva narratives that framed “all non-Hindu communities in India, but especially the Muslim community, … as separate, second-class citizens” (Lall, 2008, p. 104). The school curriculum has been revised substantially since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party political party came into power in 2014. The revisions omit many references to Islamic historical events and “to downplay the role that Indian Muslims have played in shaping contemporary Indian society” (Lall, 2008, p. 114). By selectively rewriting history, the national curriculum becomes a critical tool for forming national identity and creating an ‘imagined community’.

The role of formal education in (re)producing national identity is a legacy of colonial rule, when schools were used to foster a pro-British political orientation and when “religion [first] emerged as a central factor in political claim-making” (Kadiwal and Jain, 2020, p. 13). With the advent of Hindu nationalism, being Hindu has become the central ‘term of belonging’ to this ‘imagined community’. The ‘other’ is defined as “non-Hindu, with Muslims in particular being excluded from the new national identity of being Indian” (Lall, 2008, p. 105). This example illustrates the potential violence that formal education can inflict, and it highlights the dangers of assuming that schooling is an inherently positive and empowering experience.

For my students, being subjected to these Hindu nationalist discourses was a highly unfavorable trade-off for obtaining a formal education. In an effort to mitigate this ‘term of inclusion’, I developed supplementary teaching materials on Indian Muslim historical figures and events. I also included history and religion lessons from around the world, and I encouraged students to suggest topics that they wanted to learn about. My most successful initiative involved transcribing stories that students told me about their own experiences, such as celebrating religious holidays. The stories were typed, printed, and distributed to my students, who expressed great joy and pride in seeing their own realities reflected in the learning materials.

A student reads a story she helped to write about how her family celebrates Eid al-Adha (an Islamic holiday)

A supplementary worksheet I created for my students about Sikhism, another marginalized religion in India

For students from mobile communities and other marginalized groups, it is crucial to understand the factors that affect enrollment and attendance from the perspective of the students and their families. By considering these issues through the lens of ‘terms of inclusion’, policymakers and educators are better able to address learning barriers and to develop initiatives that offer learning relevant to students’ specific lives and circumstances.

 

References

Dyer, C. (2013). ‘Does mobility have to mean being hard to reach? Mobile pastoralists and education’s ‘terms of inclusion’’, Compare 43(5), pp. 601-621, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2013.821322

Kadiwal, L. and Jain, M. (2020). ‘Civics and citizenship education in India and Pakistan’, in Sarangapani, P. M., Pappu, R. (Eds.) Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia: Global Education Systems, pp. 1-27, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3309-5_44-1

Lall, M. (2008). ‘Educate to hate: The use of education in the creation of antagonistic national identities in India and Pakistan’, Compare, 38(1), pp. 103-119, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057920701467834

 

^[1] All names have been changed for anonymity

^[2] A mahout is an elephant rider, trainer, and caretaker