Reflexive Pedagogy: A Candid and Mordant Gaze upon Teaching and Teacher Identity

Interrogating assimilated educational perspectives succumbing to unsettling accommodations

Are we witnessing the decay and death of teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System?

Bequeathing to our children and posterity an education that is centred on human welfare, particularly in times of rapid economic and social change – is easily the central concern of government officials, social innovation practitioners, social entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, as well as students who would like to contribute to the common social good.

 

The promise of Education, ostensibly demonstrated in the levels of learning and captured by influential reports such as the  World Development Report 2018 (WDR 2018), the twelfth Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2017: Beyond Basics) and the National Achievement Survey (NAS) November 13, 2017 by NCERT, indicate a consistent and coherent pattern of a all-round ‘decline in learning’. Has the ‘decline’ in India anything to do with the teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System?

Decrying the ‘decline of learning’ among the school going cohort the World Development Report 2018 (WDR 2018) - LEARNING to Realize Education's Promise, the first ever devoted entirely to education, unequivocally declares the decline as a ‘moral and economic crisis’.

Charting the decline of learning among learners subscribing to Public Education in India, particularly upto the secondary level, has become routine. The routine findings of earlier ASER and its latest the twelfth Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2017: Beyond Basics) and the National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted throughout the country on November 13, 2017 for Classes 3, 5 and 8 in government and government aided schools by NCERT, fail to elicit even the most muted of surprise or emotion. The diagnostics and prognostics have embarrassed and urged those employed in the Public School Education Sector to pull up their socks – mercifully in a tropical climate such as ours … ‘colonial attire’, shoes and socks were never in fashion. The cleverly crafted and bandied images of bare bodied and discalced teachers of yore clearly indicate that these ‘men’ and their ilk had little or nothing to do with the fine art of weaving or curing and fashioning leather for either practical and or ornate use. One is left to surmise that their ‘teaching’ had more valuable import.  

Who were / are the revered icons of India’s tradition of public intellectual engagement from of yore to the present day? Who were / are the intellectuals who enjoyed and enjoy a status as the ethical lodestar of our nation’s life? Current findings pertaining to the recent history of teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System, shows how often, and how profoundly, it has fallen short of the ideal.

With neither a best-selling author nor any meaningful research that examines the troublesome phenomenon of teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System, we desperately need a critical review of its current manifestations vis-à-vis India’s tradition of public intellectual engagement.

We need a critical examination of how teachers in the Indian Public School Education System have succumbed to unsettling accommodations. Who are the nation’s scapegoats for a new generation of public intellectuals? The need to identify and engage with those possessing an intimate knowledge of the teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System is urgent, first to lament the degradation of teaching and teacher identity, and second to question the value of that class at the best of times.

Reflexive pedagogy while drawing parallels and mixing reminiscence with analysis, calls for a characteristically candid and mordant gaze upon teaching and teacher identity in the Indian Public School Education System of today.

Reflexive Pedagogy: Researching Teacher Education

Education and being educated are intrinsic to what people associate with being able to live a full and fulfilling life yet, ‘researching education’ or more specifically ‘researching teacher education’ today is predominantly and myopically focused on the ‘practical’ and ‘useful’, and is far removed from understanding, questioning or contributing to debates about how we can understand education ‘now’, of what happens in education from a ‘reflexivity perspective’, of what education is or ‘could be’. Research that is neither philosophically sophisticated nor engaging divests the field of any meaningful and sustained disciplinary work.

 

Surrounded and smothered by the technical and technocratic, the time spent talking and worrying about research income, quality, accountability, ‘outputs’ and ‘impacts’, never seems to be enough. Not surprisingly, the ‘endless worrying’ deflects most researchers from making regular investments and locks up their best energies in just trading on the interest. Most researchers end up digging in the same quarry of ideas, year on year to meet the requirements for the mandatory ‘research performance exercises’.

 

A performance driven quest founded fallaciously on the idea of ‘individual merit’ misses the point about developing research together, being part of ‘a community of scholars’ and thrashing out a ‘generative research programme’. Have researchers in education and teacher education, reached a stage where they can’t see much point in much of what they do anymore, and more perniciously have they gotten so very good at pretending in an elaborate game playing charade?