Untitled

“This study of power as imbedded in and as shaping the structure of school
education in India is invaluable; few studies take this approach. The innate
radicalism of questioning power will come as a jolt to everyone interested
in Indian schooling. The author has contextualised his approach in the rel-
evant literature and in the Indian situation and then gone on to make orig-
inal connections between what we observe around us and how we should
deconstruct this reality. This book fleshes out many contemporary studies
of Indian school education.”
— Prof Nita Kumar, Brown Family Professor of
South Asian History at Claremont McKenna
College, Claremont, CA
Power Dynamics in Education
The educational domain provides a platform for social mobility and social
change. This book investigates the new National Educational Policy (NEP)
to understand how it can bring social justice and transform education in a
meaningful way to match the imagination of students from diverse groups.
The author discusses matters of emotion and authority in education and
argues for the need for educational psychology which takes into account
the self-conscious emotions of students and teachers. The book reflects on
important topics such as critical pedagogy, dehumanization, power in edu-
cation through bricolage, and legitimacy in education, all within the con-
text of critical educational psychology. Through research and observations,
it discusses the socialpsychological aspect of stereotyping, othering, and
prejudices in the educational domain.
The book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers work-
ing on education, school education, sociology of education, and educational
psychology. It will also be useful for academicians, educators, policymak-
ers, schoolteachers, and those interested in the politics of education.
Chetan Sinha is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the OP Jindal

Global University, Sonipat. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology of Educa-
tion from ZHCES, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Power Dynamics in Education
Shaping the Structure of School
Education in India
Chetan Sinha
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Chetan Sinha
The right of Chetan Sinha to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-13670-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-45701-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-37829-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To my parents
Contents
Preface and acknowledgement xi

List of abbreviations xiii
Introduction: schooling and the power dynamics 1
PART I
Contextualizing Power in Schools 15
1 Power and educational policies: rethinking NEP 2020 17

2 Understanding power through bricolage 33
PART II
Power and Identity 53
3 Emotions, authority, and education 55

4 Stereotyping, prejudicing, and othering 74
5 Violence in education 96
6 Dehumanized identities and empowerment 120
PART III
Decolonizing Educational Psychology 141
7 Marginality, aspiration, and choice: an implication for

educational psychology 143
8 Critical pedagogy, curriculum, and social justice:
reflective educational psychology in action 171
Index 199
Preface and acknowledgement
The agenda of writing this book is to critically address the social psycho-
logical challenges in the Indian education system in the current gearing up
of the NEP 2022. The vantage point of idea provocation is the social psy-
chology of education that anchors and positions the argument. Some of the
arguments of this book are based on my post-PhD work in Vidyashram-the
Southpoint school, Nirman, Varanasi, and my interaction with students,
teachers, family members, and school principals. This is an amalgamation
of theory, general observations, discussion with my longtime friends, and
teachers.
Researchers stated that government bodies and policymakers only
believe in numerical data, and they rejected something which looks sub-
jective and qualitative. Now we are in the time that these numerical data
need to be integrated with the subjective experience of people for efficient
policymaking. Here, I discussed different avenues of power in education.
My agenda is to prepare our children, teachers, and policymakers to under-
stand the psychology of education critically. I provide arguments which are
necessary to bring into attention the challenges faced by the marginalized,
working class, or any students who had faced the wrath of faulty education.
Chapters 7 and 8 are modified and extended version of the published arti-
cles which made the case for democratic educational psychology through
the perspectives of underrepresented and marginalized groups.
This journey of writing the book was possible because of the consistent
support and encouragement of my family members. I am thankful to my
teachers, professors, and colleagues in the universities I studied and worked.
I am very grateful to Professor Arvind Mishra, Yashpal, Mohit and San-
jay with whom I had wonderful discussions and critical engagements on
varieties of issues. Special thanks to my students in different universities
I taught. Their engagement in the form of classroom inquiries and critical
approach was immense. The support of my spouse Monika both intellec-
tually and emotionally throughout the writing has less words to express.
The stress of writing this monograph was relieved with the frequent and
xii Preface and acknowledgement
innocent intervention of my three-year-old son Shravak, otherwise it would
have been a daunting focus. My parents, brother and his family are the con-
sistent source of unconditional love and good memories. I like to mention
Kavya for her inquisitive mind. This work is possible through the support
of team members of Routledge India. I am deeply thankful to Lubna Irfan,
Shloka Chauhan, and Shoma Choudhury for their help in the production
of this book.
Abbreviations
BBBP Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao

CCE Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation
DNTs Denotified tribes
DPEP District Primary Education Programme
DSE Department of School Education
EFA Education for All
GAM General Aggression Model
NCF National Curriculum Framework
NEP National Educational Policy
NPE National Policy on Education
RTE Right to Education
SCA School Chalo Abhiyan
SDO Social Dominance Orientation
SES Socio Economic Status
SSA Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan
TEI Teachers Educational Institutions
UNDP United Nation Development Program
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization
UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
WHO World Health Organization
Introduction
Schooling and the power dynamics
The advent of the industrial revolution and the dominance of industriali-

zation led to the shaping of the institutions and educational systems where
cognitive ability, marks, and exhaustive competitions override the mean-
ing of education. In one way, a new modified form of Galton’s Eugenics
has shaped the picture of education where institutional violence overpow-
ered the democratic educational spaces. The constructive dissent, critical
dialogue, and consciousness were discouraged and put to the anvil by the
state-driven oppressive, disguised as, a therapeutic system. This is not to
say that educational policies do no good but the conjectural limitations
and the control system in the name of authority and forced legitimation
hijack the freedom to learn and the will to offer a critical argument. Power
relationship among different social groups also depends upon the norm set-
tings shaping the schools’ context (e.g. Reynolds et al., 2017; see also Sinha,
2021; Sinha & Mishra, 2015; Tiwari, Kumar & Mishra, 2017). If the norm
is of nurturing aspiration, respect for diversity, dignity for human beings,
acceptance of others’views, and social justice, power relation will be more
democratic and sharing. In the case of identity and cultural dominance, the
power relation shall be facilitated to the exclusion of the oppressed. Keep-
ing this power relation in mind and act, an attempt is to help to understand,
interpret sophisticated texts, and identify arguments which may further
gear up the understanding of the nature of power and critical consciousness
together with the understanding of activism learning and group solidarity.
The attempt is to explain the nature of social influence such as voluntary or
forced obedience, leadership, and justice in the educational settings, which
seems to have relevance for all domains since power and formal education
have inevitable and forced influences on our lives. We will be engaging in
the questions like, “are educational institutions the place for building new
social order which creates future leaders who represent the group, realise the
group goal and reflects upon the current individual, social and environmen-
tal situations”? This may provide additional benefit to understanding the
meaning of collective human resources which comprises collective mindset,
consciousness, social interaction patterns, and intentionality. These are not
a neutral conglomeration of philosophical concepts but are embedded in
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-1 1
2 Introduction: schooling and the power dynamics
one’s experiences, and cultural and social context and one can derive the
deep critical meaning of one’s and other’s actions in an educational setting.
Overall, to understand the context under which humans, as sociopolitical
beings are associated, are framed in the power structure, and politicized in
a different form either as an activist or as conformists. For example, one of
the examples of power in education is the exam system and the deceptions
prevalent in the system where students instead of engaging and getting scaf-
folded by the experienced other are finally assessed on their memory and
institutionalized form of ideology. Students nowhere are seen outside the
power nexus and neither the condition is created where power dynamics
are made fluid and student-oriented. Further, a marking system is simply
an assignment of a number as a marker of students’ ability and knowledge
to standards decided by the curriculum designed by the authorities. Even
the test must be engaging and help the student to keep their dignity. Marks
and tests also humiliate. Segregation based on disability, different cogni-
tive ability, and then the designation of tests to show them sympathy will
not help students in the long run. The problem is in the context of power
hierarchy and not the student. We need to question all this since nowhere
it is clear that the given school knowledge is final knowledge and most of
the time this gives and takes of knowledge is constructive based on matura-
tion. It also doesn’t mean that schools are not important, since they provide
meaning to the students’ and teacher’s academic life. According to Kumar
(2014),
Education is the field of domination par excellence. Education is a prac-

tice that defines the boundaries of truth, establishes the authenticity of
the chosen areas of knowledge, and selects the methods for the knowl-
edge to be taught and learn. It would be really difficult to make a case
for any system of education as not being based on power as it defines,
selects and establishes these areas and procedures.
(p. 150)
Power dynamics, identity, and education

Power is not a pure entity laden within the individual but a relational con-
cept (Reicher & Haslam, 2015; see Rich, Mavor & Webb, 2017; Sindic,
Barreto & Costa-Lopes, 2015). As a political concept, power is primarily
an influence process either as a challenger or procuring maintenance of
the already established structure. Specifically, it is something which has
control over the outcome and actions of another person (e.g. Thibaut &
Kelley, 1959). Power materializes either as personal power or social power
but it is linked together reciprocally. In the context of policymaking, the
agenda generally is to empower and regulate the behaviour in the necessary
format. The choice of schools by the parents to prepare their children with
the required skills can be called empowerment but it also equips students
with a sense of personal power. This personal power implies perception and
possession of some legitimate and preferred resources such as the ability
to inflict pain or pleasure, having any position gained through competi-
tion or ascribed dominant identities, knowledge, and expertise (see French,
Raven & Cartwright, 1959). Social power can be interpreted as more rela-
tional where there is a dynamic of dominance but also the notions of group
empowerment. Guinote and Vesico (2010) presented how social power is
prominently understood from three interlinked vantage points. These are
quantitative capacity views where the amount of power one possesses.
This is also a dependency-based view which shows an asymmetrical accu-
mulation of power. For example, landowners, capitalists, and dominant
castes which has considerable power over different groups. The next one
is the consent-based view which is a subordinate’s endorsement of power.
Through this view, we can infer how in history some identities and ide-
ologies occupied the people’s awareness and socialization patterns. This
view connotes stability and potency since the possession of power is taken
as legitimate. The third view is identity-based where the process of social
identification is a major force of social power. Here the shared social iden-
tity is the creator of power through the social influence process, unifying
needs and interests and gaining an ability to act (see Turner, 2005). Social
power is not always controlling but has the potential to be a creative and
constructive force for the group’s wellbeing. The investment of identity to
enhance social power has a positive influence on the group members (Simon
& Oakes, 2006); however, this does not seem as a universal process if the
sociocultural influence is also utilized in the understanding of power.
In some sociocultural terrains, possessing an ascribed identity led to
the forced preoccupation with the stigma and threats associated with it
(Breakwell, 1993). For example, the research on stereotype threat indicated
towards the social powers due to possession of one’s dominant identity
which has a remarkable negative impact on the subjugated identities in the
everyday social space where the latter are forced to adjust. This is an inad-
vertent display of one’s subjugated identity in the categorized social space.
In the Indian educational domain, the introduction of a new National
Educational Policy (NEP) with substantial political intervention is pro-
grammed to change the structure of education by bringing a novel solution
to a current political agenda and also to cover students with a new kind of
pragmatism. Idea is to equip and empower, the intention is to go beyond
this to bring uniformity in scientific thinking, ideology, and preferences for
self-sustenance. Here the role of power as an acting political force influences
the prominent institutions which are in everyday association with the peo-
ple’s life. It is interesting to point out that the power influence is immense
in the construction of history. History is about interaction, communica-
tion, and also the dominant discourses in the ambit of power relationships.
These discourses emanate from the everyday meaning-making between
institutions (e.g. schools) and different stakeholders who are emotionally
associated with them (e.g. students, parents, teachers, and community).
School education has always been the zone of thrill and anxiety for parents
and students. In times of rising neoliberalism and expensive education, the
everyday discourses on achievement, cognitive abilities, and linguistic skills
have become more pronounced. The meaning of education has shifted to
excellence, competition, and comparison. Recently, an attempt to redesign
school education through the NEP intervention 2020 is welcomed by pol-
icymakers, school administrators, teachers, parents, and people in other
government and private sectors. Research and talks have happened in the
forums on how to regulate and shape the student’s behaviour and thoughts,
improve schools’ infrastructure, and improve and standardize curriculum
and pedagogy, bringing equality and equity in education. The efforts are
parallelly made to boost wellbeing and mental health. The holistic move-
ment to cover all the requirements efficiently is a new vision for educational
improvement.
In the Indian context, marginalized students mostly belong to Dalit
groups, tribals, religious minorities, and oppressed genders. In the post-
colonial period, the mission of democratic education is still a distant aim
(Kumar, 2014). The dominant discourses which occupied the educational
domain are built upon powerful identities with little space for the marginal-
ized. The urgent need to decategorize these divisions requires rigorous inter-
ventions through upliftment and greater investments. However, this looks
like a homogenous appropriation of one’s roots and may lead to the vicious
cycle of fitting into the social dominance and justification. Eventually, the
chances are high to be discriminated against under the garb of homogeneity
and imposed uniformity. It is the diversity acceptance and nourishment that
will give a sense of equality. Decategorizing may be a short-term program
but generally, people are reluctant to lose identity and their sociocultural
roots. The process of amelioration must be made more meaningful and
decentralized. When schools’ intervention for equality is programmed, it
makes sense when the power is shared in terms of decision-making, dissent-
ing rights of the voiceless stakeholders, expressions of emotions, and cocre-
ations of a healthy educational space. When the agenda of policies is to
make education systematic, there are also possibilities of more controlling,
continuous monitoring and coercion in the disguise of accountability. To be
systematic is to believe in the received knowledge, legitimize it, and com-
municate it through various agents. The agents need to be authentic but
not necessarily hold much power. The power which affects the mind of the
regulated has a forceful influence on these stakeholders’ emotions through
these agents as mediators. The power comes from the institutions nurtured
by certain perspective and authenticity that is qualified to systematically
occupy the everyday understanding of people. Any form of dissent to that
perspective is meaningless till the time it makes a persistent minority influ-
ence (Moscovici, Mugny & Avermaet, 1985). Schools become important
when it addresses the need of students and staff rather than inciting toxic
emotions and overgeneralized understanding about the underrepresented
and prejudiced group.
Addressing false consciousness

Power is linked to other variants straightforwardly such as status quo,
institutions, social norms, policymaking, status quo, hierarchy, authori-
ties, God, knowledge, education, hegemony, officials, and nation. Overall,
with various evidence (French, Raven & Cartwright, 1959;Lukes, 2005;
Reicher, 2016), we can see power is a relational concept and not some
essence within an individual or qualitative content but its presence is deci-
phered in a social context, interaction, silence, and hegemony and so on.
People cannot identify power on its own but in actions and reflections.
Here, one of the methods of dialogue makes sense when people experience
it allows them to understand the power’s true meaning. Next, we will dis-
cuss “what power is not” and how education in its varieties imbues the
power relationship. Here we will be using the empirically derived meaning
of power evident in various policies and group relations in the space of insti-
tutions. As discussed earlier, power is an influence process and not a fixed
entity. Its nature changes in terms of perception when there are shifts in the
equilibrium of structures and resource possessions. This objectified relation
also, for example, resource, as power commodity, is questionable, as it is
not always necessary that resource possession is individual possession. It
can be group/community possessions too where every member feels equally
responsible and rightful over the resource, but it is problematic when there
are strict divisions between holders of resources making them powerful
and others powerless. It is a matter of concern about the dominance of the
group and its members who believe their authenticity as a true marker of
possessions of commodities and resources. Possessions and ownership can
be a space where the memory of dominance is associated, it can be present
where social, economic, and cultural capitals are in control only to regulate
the weak “other” or oppressed. So, power is not where the situation seems
neutral or political, power is not where the situation is ahistorical or there
are no engagements of the past in the present.
Power is not a struggle for identity construction or self-exploration, but
it is the imposition of already concretized identity in a social space over
others whose identities are defined as nothing by the former. Power when
used for the establishment and maintenance of social hierarchy is suppres-
sion and subversion of devalued others. Power is nurtured in the domain
of ingroup and outgroup, dualities, and antinomies. Power is not liberation
but confinement and contraction if it categories human agencies and iden-
tity as fixed. Power has dominant space, it constructs the space through its
language of dominance, which is a comfort zone of the oppressor. The lan-
guage of power needs to be deconstructed, its language has to be redefined
and re-nurtured, and its domain of interpretation must be liberating. But
the deconstruction may make the dominant powerful holder of resources
uncomfortable and threatened. So, what can be done? What is the future
of power relationships? Two perspectives about the power relationships
seem essential here: (a) power display, imposition, and its defence by the
powerful or the sense of being powerful in the present and future and the
existential anxiety about losing control over the other, and (b) power in
the mind, action, and discourse of the powerless. Since power itself doesn’t
have any liberating theory, so, the defence of power imposed by the power-
ful, rationalizing it and succumbing to it may be the only option left for the
controlled, regulated, oppressed, or powerless.
The language of the powerful is a communication tool entitled to have an
impact on the powerless, in disguise, luring them with their unintelligibil-
ity, through fascination and fancy. In an ideal sense, this pattern of deliv-
ering is nothing but power dominance, quite prevalent in the institutions.
Institutions rupture the diversity and dominate it with the language of the
powerful. The future course of events may either enhance the powerful
idealism or change the language through its heightened criticality, through
the dialogues for the creation of a better society where both the dominant
and dominated become one, not in the sense of past dominance but a new
form of liberation.1 Sometimes these power relations are so subtly embed-
ded in our social system, and the power makes its impact, so legitimate, in
our everyday life, that it is hardly noticed or reflected upon. The context of
power seems to be leading to the same result of dominance and control in
varieties of situations. Considering the institutions such as schools and uni-
versities, power works in an autocratic manner. The institutions are spaces
that make the people conscious of their roles and identities and here power
has its effect. Freire (1970) discussed the anti-dialogical scenarios of these
institutions where identities and roles are never questioned for the action in
the dominance.
Recently, in his book “pedagogy of dissent” scholar and philosopher,
Ramin Jahanbegloo discussed a pedagogical approach to freedom and dig-
nity (Jahanbegloo, 2021). Providing space, acceptance, and empowerment
seems to have a remarkable effect on the people’s ownership of their destiny
and mind. The establishment of institutions, schools, programmes, and ide-
ologies have been found to engage in controlling way to the people’s minds.
Controlling, though is one of the tools to shape and design the sociality
and hence education. The concern of this book is how much the agenda of
improvement and therapeutics does good to the wellbeing and ownership of
students belonging to the oppressed and marginalized group in our society.
In the last few decades, educational psychology has blurred its disciplinary
boundary; alternatively, critical movements and reforms have given research-
ers a new perspective to theorize on behaviour and thinking in the school
context. But still, educational psychology in India is under the custody of
reductive metatheory inadvertently nurturing the research consciousness.
That implies regulating and fitting into the given model which defined
social categories in absolute or monopolistic terms rather than differentiat-
ing (see Allport, 1954). In the background, it is people who are involved in
the policymaking in education, designing of the research program, entries
of interdisciplinarity, and adoption of an approach to curriculum design
and pedagogical practices. The educational system in India, particularly
school education, is mostly directive and emphasizes disciplinary control,
self-regulation, and dependence. It is often observed in the research in edu-
cational psychology which deals with the model building in which the stu-
dents, teachers, and schools, in general, are forced to fit. As we will see
how educational psychology and its neutral models are not a-contextual,
rather they are driven by ideological forces like methodological individu-
alism and as Michael Apple called “conservative modernization”2 (Apple,
2012). Since it is circular to emphasize individual enhancement and, at the
same time, discriminate based on belongingness to the social group. In the
case of marginalized students, it is paradoxical to talk about meritocracy
and upliftment when there are fewer avenues of socioeconomic mobility.
The resistance towards affirmative action on different avenues, such as fees,
books, right to good education, and resources to attain skills like their
better counterparts belonging to privileged groups, demonstrates the sys-
tematic alienation and sociocultural exclusion.
Power surrounds us and socializes us in such a way that we have taken it
as an unchangeable reality. Any attempt of the minority or authentic indig-
enous group to problematize this power relation, because they have experi-
enced the domination and they have their vocabulary of resistance, is taken
as antisocial, anti-structural,and anti-national by the dominant majority.
The most prominent method like dialogical understanding through dia-
logue between powerful and powerless will act as levelling ground for both
groups in terms of understanding, power-sharing, and exchanges. Here the
powerful is no more powerful and the powerless are no more powerless.
Both have liberated themselves and become free. This, however, rarely
happened as the powerful method to dehumanize the oppressed has given
him the status of being authentic. The term dialogue has been reduced to
the term “reconciliation” which is a buzzword of the dominant identities
to show the international audience their move of sympathy and develop-
ment. In the educational domain, power dominates in a more literary sense.
The holder of power works in a systematized and institutionalized manner
where their acts of subjugation are taken as legitimate, despite many inci-
dents of students’ protest. As Freire (1970) showed that students are not
considered to have any value by the administrative authorities, they are
considered disorganized and irresponsible. Their image is more like some
animated box where discipline must be stored with some kind of knowl-
edge. They are considered machines of the future that are designed in some
way to serve the legitimate and the powerful.
The works like “The pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 1970), “The
pedagogy of hope” (Freire, 1992), “Education for critical consciousness”
(Freire, 2015), “The school is dead” (Reimer, 1971), “Deschooling soci-
ety” (Illich, 1971) have touched the critical side of human consciousness
but became side-lined in the neoliberal context where family, job, money,
house, and land become the prime motives. The abovementioned books
talked about equality and liberation which has a reductive and narrowed
meaning which is easy to see without any attention to the wider social
contexts. Power ventures in the history of education through its institu-
tions. The formation of institutions is mistaken as an uncritical govern-
ment enterprise, where land is acquired, department and official spaces are
designed, people are recruited, the core value is decided by the group of
people, and particular philosophical assumptions (e.g., neoliberalism) regu-
lates all. This is another matter that this land was acquired, may be forcible;
evading the memory of the people living on that land; mainstreaming phi-
losophy and cultural values; and developing a system not representative of
oppressed, powerless, and diverse. We can see how power manifests in the
power relation and dehumanize the oppressed, in the disguise of welfare,
nationality, and neutrality. This psychological-historical analysis results in
the interpretation that doesn’t lie in the past but is interpreted in the present
(see Thapar, 2014). We can infer that history is not black and white but
colourful. Its image is vivid and comprises varieties of experiences some
documented and preserved and many undocumented, ignored, and sub-
dued. Psychology has a deep relationship with history and often we specu-
late whether the psychology of people is the result of historical edifices or
history communicates the tone of psychology. However, neither history nor
psychology has any meaning in itself unless loaded with the interrelations
of people, the role of education, and power differentials in terms of identity
dominance, accumulation, and distribution of resources. If it is not inter-
preted but taken as it was documented, it loses its nature and becomes rigid
and regulatory. History is about the past documentation of power relations,
culture, and way of life but its stagnancy is questioned in the present. Power
is not a-contextual and its meaning is developed in a situation, through
active discourse where one group controls the other without any intention
to lose its position or resource. Power in itself can’t be defined unless its
nature is interpreted based on its dependence on some entity or artefacts
such as political situation, capitals, social networking, historical position-
ing, or dominant social categories. So, if one holds some influential posi-
tion, the person has the resources, or she/he belongs to some influential or
dominating social group, the nature of power is evident. This is in one-way
disempowering the people at the other end or whom the powerfulness and
impositions of the dominant group occupy their everyday consciousness.
It’s a coercive imposition of one’s superiority over others. This imposition
of one’s group value in the name of authenticity and expertise on others
completes the picture of oppression in which violence has always the posi-
tion to emerge anytime during the offering of any kind of protest from the
other side. As per Freire (1970), this is not freedom, liberation, or love. This
is dehumanizing and against the value of true humanity.
Power is not only in what we search for in any entity, whether meta-
physical or material which is assumed to have control. Power seems to be
in the activities which snatch the memory, space, and time or, more appro-
priately, it is a systematic erosion of the time of the victim with the time of
the oppressor. If in the educational domain as Biesta (2013) problematizes
learning discourses flourishing in the neoliberal times overpower our con-
sciousness and lead to the era of “learnification”. This further led to the
question of what to do? Shall we drop the discourse of learning? This looks
absurd and beyond the logic of educational change. The discourse of learn-
ing is an ever-expanding phenomenon that needs to be studied along with
the various disciplinary advancements.
Structure of the chapters

This book takes the critical educational psychology vantage point to ven-
ture into the power structure embedded in the educational settings. It ima-
gines educational psychology which actively situates its boundaries out of
reductive silos and derives its assumption from the work of protagonists
who imagined and strived for all forms of equality in education. Their activ-
ism offered a critical perspective on the modern liberal state’s approach to
controlling, providing therapeutic cures and predicting aspirations. Their
focus was on emancipatory nurturing (see Williams, 2013). Eight chapters
are dealing with interconnected aspects of power dynamics in education.
The theoretical approach which mostly became the basis of the chapters
corresponds to social identity, critical pedagogy, and cultural-historical
perspectives. The metatheory of social identity impelled us to reflect upon
the issue of power and policies, bricolage, emotions, prejudicing, violence,
dehumanization, marginalization and choice, and critical pedagogy. The
chapters are divided into three broader themes. They are (a) contextualiz-
ing power in schools (Chapters 1 and 2), (b) power and identity (Chapters
3–6), and (c) decolonizing educational psychology (Chapters 7 and 8).
These themes situate agents of education in a social context. Agents such as
teachers, policy designers, administrators, scholars and educationists, stu-
dents, and parents are driven by certain responsibilities. They are also the
active agents who construct their identity and act on it. These constructions
and acts are political roles which give meaning to the idea of education.
Themes through its discussion show the goals of education, changes, cur-
rent politics and marketizing trends, and the role of educational psychology
in the future.
The first theme aims to contextualize power relationship in education.
Chapter 1 discusses how the therapeutic educational psychology regu-
lates the classroom engagements. An emphasis will be given to the NEP
to understand how it can bring social justice and transform education in a
meaningful way. An attempt will be made to show the crisis in the educa-
tion system and how power relation thwarts or facilitates social cognitive
justice. Here it becomes important to understand how policies in the edu-
cational domain can be empowering and addressing to the psychology of
change rather than becoming agents of the status quo and unrealistic high
expectations. Next aim of this theme is to discuss how pedagogic engage-
ment can become democratic,matching the imagination of students from
diverse groups. Chapter 2 aims to show the meaning of power, promote the
need to bring the indigenous way of understanding discipline and develop
a sense of resistance to the power hidden in various formats through the
approach of “Bricolage”. Here the new solutions are created by effective use
of resources and identities already existing within our collective conscious-
ness and experiences. The idea is to see how power relations have been
transcended with the emergence of active, radical, and non-deterministic
views. The chapter also argues for the imagination which is congruent to
the reality of the oppressed rather than the powerful, however, at the same
time, advocates for identity sensitivity and dialogue.
The second theme situates education in the ambit of power and identity.
Chapter 3 looks into the matter of emotion and authority in education and
argues for the need for educational psychology which takes into account
the self-conscious emotions of students and teachers which directly con-
nects to their social identity. The rejection of basic emotion by the author-
ity as irrational also rejects the lived-in collective emotions as irrational.
Chapter 4 ventures into the social-psychological aspect of stereotyping and
prejudice in the educational domain. Research and observations showed
how stereotyped and prejudiced beliefs against any group led to systematic
exclusion, discrimination, and othering. Further, it addressed these iden-
tity issues as one of the major tasks in the shaping of the school structure.
Chapter 5 elaborates on violence in educational settings such as schools.
Students from minority and disadvantaged groups are also the victims of
both physical and cognitive violence based on their social category. The
trend of the education system to regulate the cognitive and social space of
students is a new form of epistemic violence. The educational domain pro-
vides a platform for social mobility and social change. This chapter takes
the social psychology of power perspective to explore the construction of
educational spaces which either facilitate or interrupt violence in schools.
The role of authentic educational leaders and their transformation of power
into empowerment will be understood in the context of schools. The effort
is to highlight the mechanism of accountability to translate power into
nurturance and empowerment for students from different backgrounds.
Chapter 6 discusses the context of dehumanizing experiences of school
agents from marginalized social identities. The dehumanization of students
from the historically oppressed background whose social identity is objec-
tified and interpreted from the stereotypical lens is addressed. We will also
be understanding resistance in the educational domain through construc-
tive inclusion. The chapter will conclude on the current model of education
where the dehumanization of minorities and lower classes of students can’t
be denied and which is quite influenced by the enactment of governance. It
is imperative to bring equality in both the methods of education whether
offline or online but a lack of resources and proper mechanism to impart
efficient education to the marginalized students is itself an act of dehuman-
ization and mismanagement of power in the educational domain.
The third theme constructs a debate on decolonizing educational psy-
chology which usually provides systems to regulate and control children
behaviour. Schools have become the hub of shaping the psychology of stu-
dents in one direction rather than bringing multicultural experiences in
teaching and learning. This unidimensional approach emanates from the
powerful identities which ultimately benefit their own kind. Doing educa-
tional psychology based on the homogenized understanding of cognition,
development, and experiences has perilous impact on the social mobility
of historically oppressed. Chapter 7 highlights the role of alternative and
critical education which addresses the social class and power disparity in
the educational domain. This approach reorients the students into coopera-
tive learning, new meaning-making, and collective participation for greater
equality rather than creating ability-based divides. In the Indian context,
where students are studying in different categories of schools, government,
semi-government, Madrassa, alternative schools, and private, it can be
argued that social class, choice, and commodification of education have
a diversified impact on students and parents, as in the neoliberal time’s
upper-class schools cater to the need of the student to survive in the future
competition as compared with the students from lower classes. Seeing the
circumstances of the pandemic, the students of marginalized groups living
in slums or scattered in different parts of the country without any resources
are very much affected in terms of their education, health, and social exclu-
sion. Thus, the chapter will also present “a contemporary debate reflect-
ing the conditions of education in the time of Covid-19”.Lastly, Chapter 8
makes a case for educational psychology as a politics that imbibe the
spirit of sensitive and critical pedagogy in the teacher’s leadership and
activities. How educational psychology can be social as well as critical?
The current scenario of educational psychology is department-based and
aloof. Its theorizing is based on the search for something which is within
the human agency such as ability, aptitude, and creativity thus facilitating
the idea of meritocracy more strongly. There is no room for understanding
or collaborating with the scholars of critical pedagogy. If any approach to
integrating with other disciplines happens, it is limited by its metatheory of
individualism. The need is to work upon educational psychology in India
to be critical, social and constructively innovative. To bring movement in
better understanding and empowerment shall be an approach for social
change.
Conclusion
The imagination that schools bring to the student is excellence and socioec-
onomic mobility. There are many hurdles when it comes to the fulfilment of
students’ career aspirations. These are located in their socioeconomic situ-
ation, caste-based backwardness, and gender-based oppression. The resist-
ance offered by the victims of these historical and socioeconomic hassles
becomes faded and vanishes if there is no social and political support for
their imaginations. The resistance to liberation and survival from the dom-
inance of identity-based subjugation in the schools needs immediate atten-
tion. The present book utilized a systematic approach to substantiate its
argument through the experiences of different agents of schooling. Since
educational psychology needs to be pro-diverse and integrated with critical
social science it manages to show how power when shared with others has
a remarkable impact on critical learning and scientific thinking. This is
an effort towards social change pedagogy.Educational policies need to be
understood within their context, goals, and feasibility to be implemented.
The perspective under which these policies will be addressed is their abil-
ity to fit into the experiential model of marginalized students. Policies are
important but their feasibility to be applicable for inclusive and sustaining
properties needs to be rigorously checked. The agenda here is to bring in an
inclusive approach to policymaking in education and transform the mean-
ing of power.An effort is made to analyse the policies to show the mani-
fested status quo and power. In the Indian educational context, some of the
authors aptly bring evidence where marginality, oppression, and coercion
are clearly shown. This book will critically define the meaning of power
and how it is interwoven within the ambit of relevant social psychological
domains which policies shall loudly imbibe and situate in decision-making
accountability, which are anyway followed without much reflection on it
by the school administrators and teachers. In all the cases, it is the students
and teachers who are in the immediate power relationship but are broadly
influenced by the macro-level features. The democratic form of education
in the Indian context will be dealt with from the social justice framework
comprising representation and the right to education. Its agenda has to
be conceptually and pragmatically understood. Schooling and education
have positive features which prepare students for the future along with
skill learning and ethics. The book envisages our school education shall
address the limits imposed on the varieties of imagination which becomes
redundant to the imposition of dominant learning and pedagogical culture.
School is also a platform for critical thinking and one of the important
spacesfor nurturing emancipation and collective learning. The idea is to
integrate the macro with the micro to humanize educational psychology
rather than let it be limited to the dominant discourses about abilities, mer-
itocracy, neoliberalism and stereotypes related to one’s social groups.
Notes

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Part I
Contextualizing Power
in Schools
1 Power and educational
policies
Rethinking NEP 2020
Policies are social constructions and are framed within the ambit of the
power domain. One of the threats of some policies directed towards educa-
tional change is their singular way of understanding school. Their attempt
to reform the schools seems to be a therapeutic exercise for a cure. This
process promotes the dominant educational psychology and retains the
academic achievement divides in the school, further stereotyping students
from diverse backgrounds. The policies showcase uncritical acceptance
and controlling agenda of the state. Contemporary research in the social
psychology of education and education, in general, has brought a critical
understanding to improve the situation of schools. It catered to the require-
ment of students from the marginalized but was not very successful at the
policy level where the biases and the worldviews of policymakers inter-
vened formally.
Gerth and Mills (1953) pondered on the ascriptive property of power as
an influence process where the conduct of “other” is regulated and con-
trolled and even against their will (p. 193). The present chapter is designed
to understand the psychology of power relations in an educational context.
The objective is to build up an intellectual capacity to be reflective and
critical of the dominant educational trends where power and politics are
rampant in the name of neutrality and value education. It is not a myth
that power relations shape and design our consciousness which we consider
reality. Though we may either succumb to it or get critically aware of its
neutrality politics through our everyday interactions and the various alter-
ities we are exposed to. The construction of the objectified reality of soci-
ety and education due to a continuous exposition of the power structure
around us through various social agents makes the nature of power rela-
tionship taken for granted. This objectified reality of society and education
is not the scientific positioning of some artefacts where reasons for its exist-
ence are simplified and reduced, but it is a process of making complex ideas
more simplified, unfamiliar, and more familiar for the sake of certainty (see
Moscovici, 1984). The notions of power seem to have two broader perspec-
tives, one which is objectified, taken for granted, certified, structural, and
the second is critical, socially constructed, and anti-oppressive. The first
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-3 17
18 Contextualizing Power in Schools
perspective of power limits the idea of social change where new ideas and
criticisms are taken anti–societal, and the second one seems to be progres-
sive to viewpoints of powerless and make them empowered. Freire’s (1970)
notions of conscientization referred to the second perspective where mar-
ginalized and oppressed groups become aware of their rights which is one
of the essential markers of social movement (see Prilleltensky & Nelson,
2002). They don’t take for granted the imposed values and marginalization
and offer resistance to building up a new social identity.
Policies and power

Easton (1953) opined those policies are some imposed values in the context
of power. Further, policy is both text and discourse (Ball, 1993). As a text,
policy is the process of interpretation and translation of policy through
which school actors enact policy (Ball et al., 2011; see Weaver-Hightower,
video on What is education policy?). As discourse, policy is “the ways in
which teacher subjects and subject positions are formed and re-formed
by policy and are ‘invited’ (summoned) to speak, listen, act, read, work,
think, feel, behave, and value” (Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996, p. 10) in
particular and specific ways (Ball, 2015). One of the locations of power
in the educational domain is a policy from which power displays its legit-
imacy. In the last couple of shifts in the political regime, the school has
become the place of anchoring ideologies. Power works in a group context
to sustain and endure one’s historically acquired position. The therapeu-
tic project as implied in various educational policies is important in terms
of state-sponsored formal literacy but it also exploits and regulates (see
Williams, 2013). Though it sounds unsystematic, policies under the garb
of power relations reproduce identity distancing (Williams, 2013). The
approach of critical social psychology is to empower the people rather than
to fall into therapeutic control of the powerful educational system. During
the interaction with the teachers,1 who are earnestly working for the chil-
dren of labourers, weavers, and other working classes, the Director aptly
stated:
Yeh bache bahut danger mein hain

Enke gharo mein haaath se kaam hota hai jaise silai kaa kaam,
butcher shop, majdoori, yeh kaam pushtaini kaam hota hain
Hum log chahte hai ki yeh log working class ke bandhan ko todh ke
middle class me pravesh karen
Yeh actually bahut mushkil hota hain… jo duniya me bahut kum
bache kar paaten hain
[These working-class children are in danger
Usually, manual work happens in their house, for example, sewing,
butcher shop, manual labourer
These works are ancestral
Power and educational policies: rethinking NEP-2020 19
We wish that these children should break the bondage of being in
working class and move to middle classes
This is actually very difficult where children rarely able to cross the
boundary]
Ek acchi cheej yeh hai ki en bacho ne bahut ache se padha hain
Problem inme nahin hain
Problem hain hum logo ko planning se hain
Kis tarah se plan banaya jaye
[There is one thing, that these children had studied well
Problem is not in them
Problem is there in our planning
How best to make the plan?]
Inn bacho ko koi bhi support nahi mil raha hain apni family se
Pyaar milta hai
Woh bhi sabko nahi milta hai
Bahut se problems hain
Unko emotional security mil bhi jayee lekin arthik, shaikshik, sama-
jik, manovaigyanik sahyog nahi hai
[These (working class) children have no support from their family
They get love…but this is not with everyone
There are many problems
Even if they get emotional security but they are deprived from finan-
cial, academic, social, psychological support]
Empowerment is to make the people equipped with their agency to the full-
est where education works at best. It is not always about the skills. Skills
don’t decide the education. If educational leaders mobilize the equipping
of skills as education which also empowers, it is an important step but it
is not education. It is simply a skill. The definition of education gets con-
structed in a sociocultural context. The children of peasants and farmers
learn the skill to work directly in the field, and it is passed from one gen-
eration to another. However, the outliers are also there. The learning of
skills and technologizing may come under the domain of capability (e.g.,
Nussbaum & Sen, 1993) but does it nurture and empower in the power
context? The skill learning has to be rephrased by taking into account the
politics of social class and how skill learning and reproduction of skills
nurture the social class distancing. For example, the learning of farming
skills by the children of peasants or learning of computer skills, software,
by the children of a computer scientist is simply not learning as such and it
is not holistically education in itself. Learning skills are acquired through
various indigenous/local practices or with the aid of formal schooling. Cul-
tural reproduction is quite evident and other research showed its link with
identities and contexts. Skill learning is good for the sustenance of living
in the time of crisis or to avoid the crisis but it doesn’t empower. Paulo
Freire (1970) in the “pedagogy of the oppressed” discussed the authenticity
of pedagogy which brings insight and develops critical consciousness into
everyday discourse and understanding.
Do policies emerge from the powerful or it is the result of the need of
the people? The study of power involves a focus on the securing of dis-
crete and observable policy outcomes in a specific decision-making process
(Scott, 2014). We can assess the utility of policies under five possible
conditions:
1 Power relation turns around into empowerment and the rejection of

the policies which seems to be regulating and feeding to the benefit
of regimes. For example, political parties in power regulate various
ministries to amend the policies or bring new policies spending huge
amounts of public funds.
2 Policies affect different groups differently. If policies are directed to
provide access to the resources which were needed by the people from
deprived and disadvantaged groups, it fits to the criteria of a meaning-
ful policy. If policies are imposed to gain political benefit it is simply
disempowering.
3 The policymaking, committee formation, and representation of mem-
bers from different social groups.
4 The link between education and poverty has to be detailed. Expan-
sion of education, freedom in education, cost of the education, and the
encouragement of indigenous skills which is not an education broadly
but can be promoted to the dignity of people.
5 Policies are not made in a vacuum. There are issues connected to the
social identities where commonality of interest is accommodated into
the plan of action. If the culture and identities are represented by the
people, it seems representative, otherwise, it becomes valueless.
Why not the grand theories and policy help in the eradication of inequality
at the system level, other than acting as a token to offer help? Do policies
fulfil the function of education and make the students skilful equivalent to
students who studied in expensive schools? How can the act of policymak-
ing feed into the status quo ideology and be translated into dialogical pro-
grammes? The very act of policymaking and the state-level movement for
implementation is straight away linked to a one-way flow programme, reg-
ulatory, mechanistic, and overpowering. These attributes of power inherent
in the policy and its implementation seem to be hidden. It works in a hidden
manner under the umbrella of social change, mass upliftment, and crea-
tion of human capital. One of the biggest threats of some policies directed
towards educational change is its one way of changing perception and tak-
ing it as the best therapeutic exercise. The critique of educational policies is
their uncritical stance and fulfilling the state political agenda. Policies have
utilitarian value in the long run. An empowering policy may at the outset
look like a result of the power domain but may have emancipatory touch.
For example, the policies like “right to education” work as a fundamental
right under which students enrol in school and get a formal education.
There is also a provision of mid-day meals, school dress, and books for the
children. This is one step towards empowerment. What matters most is the
actual empowerment happening feeding positively into the subjectivity of
the students. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, these children suf-
fered even in securing their basic rights, deprived of education as compared
with the higher classes. Their parents who are mostly poor migrant work-
ers, labourers, and domestic workers were unable to secure daily needs
which were provisioned in the school such as mid-day meals. Also, the chil-
dren of the lower middle classes suffered the brunt of the pandemic which
affected their wellbeing.
In one way, it looks like the creation of an efficient choice system for
working-class parents and students to opt for school education for their
future social mobility and change. This is an effort by the government to
carry forward the agenda of formal education where students have the free-
dom to go to school and take their education. If we take an alternative view,
students are in the situation of compulsion to go for the formal education
system. There are possibilities of a culture clash. As a form of policy impli-
cation, students enrol in the education programme most of the time not as
a choice as such but as an immediate need-based approach. This is logically
clear that these approaches are not intrinsically driven movements to learn.
If the choice is not intrinsic then the possibilities are that this is driven by
some external factors. As per the critical pedagogy and the movement for
critical consciousness, it is the same appropriation of intelligence and cog-
nitive enhancement methods in the name of educational development. The
policies are usually constructed by people in a powerful position and this
process is not decentralized. The details of policies are based on observation
by the researchers and officials. It will be helpful if more representations of
people working at the ground level and stakeholders who are generally oth-
ered such as underprivileged community members, parents, and students
from the socially marginalized group are included. The display of stereo-
types and prejudices at the subtle levels has the possibility of being part of
policymaking. This attempt may offer better help to reshape the structure
of education from the rampant therapeutic exercise of controlling others
who are generally labelled as cognitively deficient. The dualistic model of
education, as succinctly shown by Guru (2002) as a theoretical brahmin
and empirical shudra seems to apply here, where the privileged and pow-
erful control the mind of the powerless. It is a live example, wherever we
see that power relation has shaped the history of humanity and not the
humanity shaping the power and bringing meaningful relationships in our
sociopolitical and economic world. This stamps the presence of the hierar-
chical reality of our social space, often questioned, but re-emerging often
even in the most representative sociopolitical systems like democracy. The
current argument is not to place democracy as a nurturer of hierarchy in a
subtle way, but to question the legitimacy of some identities in a democratic
representative system.
The debate between absolute and perishable or in a more different way
axiomatic and questionable is not new in the educational system. Cartesian-
dualism 2 differentiated the universe into two substances, the immaterial
mind and material body, where the former is connected to absolute, unques-
tionable, and does not follow any physical law, while the latter makes trajec-
tories into time and space, perishable, and regulated by the physical law. In
the dominant theology, dualism always persisted and some may extend this
concept to the various sociocultural entities such as caste, race, class, and
gender and concretized it. Returning to the current argument about edu-
cational policies and power relationships, the idea here is to identify more
concretely the problematic aspects of policy prevalent in an educational
domain in India and its regulatory aspects. How do the power influences
occupy the classroom through the policies? Educational policies to educate
students from marginalized backgrounds have one of the mechanisms of
controlling through the syllabus or curriculum. The design of the curricu-
lum and its uncritical pedagogical utilization has many consequences. First,
it deskills teachers and students at the same time. Skill is a matter of expan-
sion and association with the context and not just uncritically embarking
on the same method. A space where students are from diverse backgrounds
needs to have a syllabus that informs the subject in a multicultural way
which requires flexibility. As Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Villaverde (1999)
noted that most school works on memorization principles rather than con-
necting education to the lived experience. They explained further about the
uncritical pedagogy and use of imposed curriculum, driven by a banking
system of education marked by drudgery and repetition where isolated stu-
dents work on joyless and meaningless lessons painfully tied to their devel-
opment level (p. 238). Is there any scope for students and teachers to contest
the established knowledge together? Knowledge and ideas are meant to be
challenged rather than absorbed and reproduced. The idea here is to make
education (1) inclusive, (2) equitable, (3) empowering, and (4) grounded.
The role of educational policies must be:


Revisiting educational policies

New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 seems to be offering an approach to edu-
cational reform. At the same time, it is based on the criteria and mandates
which shows the inherent power dynamics which occupied the educational
discourses. These power dynamics connect to cultural inheritance, history,
identities, and marginalization. How do policies integrate, regulate, sys-
tematize, and marginalize? This will be the agenda in the next sections.
For the sake of brevity and avoiding complexity, the current discussion
broadly is based on criteria such as how much the policy is representing
the need and concerns of children from a marginalized group, and in what
way it is empowering and liberating. The broader agenda of social justice,
development of critical ability and scientific understanding, an association
of knowledge with one’s self and observation will be covered in the above
three criteria. If the above criteria are fulfilled through the policy in ques-
tion, the given agenda is attained or has the potential to be attained in the
future. Conversely, if the criteria are not fulfilled through the given policies,
the agenda is not fulfilled and the power dynamics show the regulatory
and forced form of approach in education. Policies are made by humans
who live their identities and have a different status in society. It is also
important to note who is powerful in different domains in the majority of
cases and how their cultural values affect the designing of policies. Whose
perspective or combination of perspectives has maximum influence in the
policymaking and what is the role of democracy? Since effort is made to
critically analyse the influence of dominant educational psychology in the
decision-making, how policies are taken by different stakeholders and how
much it matches with the people’s experiences and thought processes. Do
the people of marginalized sections who hold certain views about schooling
and education matter to the dominant policymakers? Questions like this
may be used as a critical vantage point to dive deeper into the authenticity
of the policies and the future of education in India. Power is everywhere and
manifested in the forms of different kinds of relationships (see Vescio &
Guinote, 2010). Education is everyone’s area so it must be represented well
in the policies to make it equitable.
The psychology of education has got a new dimension, trespassing the old
rules. The Covid-19 times have influenced the idea of education that was
normally prevailing in the pre-Covid times. The interface of students and
teacher interaction has changed but does it also change the power dynamic
of school-teacher-students? Through various mechanisms, the tight rela-
tion between provider and consumer is sustained, where policymakers,
government, and schools give education and fulfil the need of students and
parents. Though this relationship is not as linear as it seems. The coming
of national educational policy 2020 during the Covid-19 times seems to be
pathbreaking for many educators and educational leaders. It talks about
value education based on a balanced amalgamation of traditional and
modern knowledge. Though it nowhere mentions the role of the mediaeval
period in the making of education and culture.3
The phases of history contain different periods with different sociocul-
tural memories. The educational policies can encounter historicism with
the diversified understanding of the culture of different social groups,
instead of homogenizing them into one way of understanding. The his-
torical amnesia can be resolved through the deconstruction of inscribed
power relations (Popkewitz, 1998). The policies such as NEP 2020 give
the aura of progressive, liberal, and egalitarian education. In one way
these are imaginations of people who longed for liberating education,
non-imposing, and giving forward to democratic learning space. How
these imaginations are going to be in place if it is formulated and made
formal? It is also important to note how the imagination of students is
met with the imposition through the policies constructed through the
adult imagination.4 The rush to do fixing and correcting may be con-
trary to the idea of everyday meaning-making and taking into account
the collectivities of children. However, this effort to see the feasibility of
NEP 2020 in the changing times needs to be discussed along with other
policies which were in the debates. For many decades, education which is
a social science has become the playing ground of policies. Education has
been formalized and enumerated in the terms of policies. The rise of the
counting culture may have its merits when it comes to the formal educa-
tion of students from all sections especially the deprived ones. Even the
current policies talk loudly about the sociocultural aspects in education
where it prioritizes the role of culture in the children’s behaviour with-
out much emphasis on the development of a critical approach towards
what has been forced to learn through socio-educational channels. The
agenda is also to have meaningful education which nurtures an ability to
scientifically approach any problem with a deep appreciation of people’s
agency. The culture has its importance if it infuses a capacity to be criti-
cal but it can also be a paradox where to be critical cannot go along with
blind acceptance. Education is regulated by marks, ability, and aptitude
which are the hallmarks of mainstream educational psychology which in
some way essentialize something natural within the person, but under
that garb, something is taught through training or therapeutic education
which goes contrary to be critical towards object and beliefs which have
graded people into different categories.
An effort to put education as per the child’s need has also invited storms
of an idea from different thinkers. Some homogenized the child’s needs
and advocated for policies that facilitate didactic education, common test,
cognitive hierarchies, and school as an agent of recognizing abilities. Few
democratized the pedagogy for the children’s needs and longed for giving
freedom to students especially from diverse groups to systematically under-
stand the subjects as per their abilities without creating hierarchies and
self-stereotyping. In both the cases, one thing was common, that is, the
relationship between teacher and students got moderated or regulated as
per the administrative interventions of policies. India has a history of poli-
cies from colonial to post-colonial times. This was done to bring coherence
to society. During colonial times, policies were motivated by the need of
the state or government to train people according to their administrative
purpose. The agenda of social reforms seems bleak in front of the govern-
ment’s needs. Though it is an irony that some of the educated people looked
inward for the socio-educational reforms and that was inadvertent. Still, in
the post-colonial times, the agenda is motivated by the state-driven purpose
but social reform as per the need of students consciously comes into the
picture. The shift was also towards equality and inclusion in education.
The agenda for quantitative expansion was earlier also, however, in colo-
nial times it was limited to a few social categories, for example, males from
the upper strata of society. From the post-colonial times till the present
which included the NEP, sarva shiksha abhiyan (SSA), and right to educa-
tion (RTE), it was financially regulated by the central government with the
help of the state government to have a maximum enrolment of the students
(see Kumar, 2018). Earlier in the colonial times, the choice was limited to
a few in comparison to the present whereas the choice to have quality edu-
cation is still less for most of the parents and children from marginalized
sections, the overpowering policies prioritize maximum enrolment. In the
Covid-19 times, the situation of the students from the marginalized section
who cannot afford the quality online education shows the disenchantment
of the agenda just meant for increasing enrolment rather than providing a
good education. These are the right of those children to have equality in
education.
Teachers and school administrations are expected to treat students in a
controlled manner. The mechanism of control is dictated through the pol-
icies and pedagogical practices. We often get the impression that teachers
are reprimanded if they are not able to control students. Controlling is
expected through strict teaching methods, regulation of behaviour through
the marks, taking disciplinary actions against the students, or sometimes
treating students in an objectified manner where their needs and cognitive
diversity are stereotyped under one schema, which is framed from the power
perspective. Some of the protagonists of policies take the pro-government
stance and stick to their idea of bringing homogeneity, and uniformity to
education, which is assumed to be possible through state intervention in
the form of the policies. The irony in the democratic state is that it expects
uncritical acceptance from the citizens which comprises diverse groups and
any form of oppositional take is rejected as antigovernment and undemo-
cratic. The current emphasis of policies such as NEP 2020 is to build up
the character which seems to have been lost in the humdrum of fast life (see
Patil & Patil, 2021). The symbolic meaning of any text also emphasized
the structure formation. The use of signs and symbols in constructing the
meaning of the system is strongly indicated in postmodern research. How-
ever, the choice of signs and symbols from history and adamantly persis-
tent on them to revive the old history or construct something in the name
of novelty is seen in the current line of educational policies. The current
educational policies try to portray themselves as a regulatory force for new
India. Under the influence of present political and institutional regimes,
the current educational policies may delink itself from the past educational
reform but the process which was formed through the socialization of past
policies and interventions of different stakeholders whom themselves got
educated or versed in the past ways of education cannot be denied. New
policies go into the discourse through these stakeholders. To break some-
thing which was in the linear process through new interventions also needs
powerful influence.
NEP, educational structure, and cultural identity

The current trends in policies emphasize more on behavioural control
through cultural intervention. In one way, this is a shift in controlling
through the arrangement of power which actively involve infusing in the
students the acceptance of tradition and critical towards the ideas which are
not local. NEP has both political and cultural insinuations through which
the idea is to construct a sense of indigenous identity with the set of given
social practices. However, the understanding of indigenous can be flawed,
as in a true sense indigenous are the people who were historically deprived
and disadvantaged with the rise of different kinds of cultural colonialism.
The emphasis on the development of critical ability is not neutral or unbi-
ased. It’s coming into the policies though without much clear-cut guide-
lines that need to be contextually understood within the available power
relationship. Popkewitz (1995) noted, “various interpretations to critical
research…are not only about the knowledge …to be valued; the stances
towards research ‘tell’ of the social relations and conditions of power in
which critical traditions are formed” (p. xvii). The ability to think critically
has to be relooked from the perspective in which alternative and unsystem-
atic way of pursuing reality is located. This will be from the experiences of
people who are a minority and marginalized. If these minority experiences
are not counted the education system implies an undemocratic stance of
representativeness. Even critical thinking is pro powerful if it embraces the
perspective of powerful identities and away from the openness to counter
oppressive regimes. Of course, if teachers and students together oppose the
policies which somewhere discriminate based on cognitive superiority or
identity superiority, their voice may not be of much value to the powerful
who manufacture the policies. If their stance is an uncritical acceptance
of what is given or imposed, they will be a part of a majority group that
lives in the belief that what is there in front of them is fair, legitimate, and
justified.
Critical thinking is also a political practice having two sides, one is built
on faith towards the powerful where people are critical of the past regimes,
and the second is more direct towards the regime which is powerful and
in operation. In the second case only, true criticality is developed which
has the potential to bring social change. The NEP 2020 emphasized the
development of advanced cognitive skills such as critical thinking along
with social skills and ethical dispositions. However, what they scratched
out was the deep-seated psychology of the people which is embedded in
the traditions and past. Traditions and pasts are interpreted and lived in
the present. Past is difficult to define and the present is the best option to
explore one’s internalized self that goes side by side with the political, cul-
tural, and social practices. Reviving the past is an elusive stance since it is
the present political purpose and stance that derives the psychology of the
people. NEP didn’t itself critically deal with what is promised or pulled out
from the aforesaid past. What comes out is revivalism, reestablishment of
what got shaken by the critical or opposing, and prejudices under the guise
of social change.
In the NEP, the restructuring of 10 + 2 to 5 + 3 + 3 + 4 is done to promote
inclusiveness in education. Earlier many dropouts happened before the com-
pletion of primary and elementary level schooling. However NEP facilitate
students to be in the educational system till they attain all the requirements
of education. This starts from the play learning to discovery learning to
synthesis and experiential learning to choice-based learning. It shows the
promise to bring the dropout children back to school. However, any suita-
ble mechanism is not clear except for some sets of bodies that will regulate
at different levels. NEP makes a bold statement with an eclectic outlook
towards education where everything seems to be fitting in one flow. It par-
adoxically emphasizes regulatory mechanism and at the same time empha-
sizes critical thinking and deregulating education. It seems to be a good
play of words somewhere denoting outcome-based education. It is not clear
whether the outcome is value education, skill learning, discovery learning,
etc. If its outcome is to produce students who have values, what kind of val-
ues it tries to infuse is not clear. At the same, if the idea is to have a discovery
learning approach, what will be the process of that discovery. Though NEP
also emphasizes quality teachers and enriching the teacher education pro-
gramme. Do teachers have that ability to go for discovery learning? Since
the emphasis on discovery learning is situated at the second level of the
proposed educational stage in school, what is the guarantee that all stu-
dents will have an equal opportunity to learn those skills? In anyway, NEP
doesn’t direct how the dominant paradigms of ability and the identity-based
stereotype associated with it can be tackled in its grand move. The research
shows that situation plays an important role in neutralizing the negative
ability-based stereotype prevailing in the educational domain. This is also
called a stereotype threat or social identity threat (e.g., Steele & Aron-
son, 1995) which is a situational predicament in which the person is at
the risk of confirming the negative stereotype linked to their social group.
How does NEP 2020 help students in tacking these situationally produced
stereotypes against one’s identity and ability? Research also showed that
infusing or having a fixed view of cognitive ability or intelligence reacts
to failure very differently than people who view their intelligence as mal-
leable (Dweck, 1975). If students hold a fixed view of their intelligence,
then on failure give up and assume that they don’t have that ability (see
also Aronson, 2002) as compared with those who hold a malleable view
as they relate failure to lower effort applied rather than anything like fixed
intelligence. NEP’s outlook seems to be more political with all the decora-
tive elements starting from cognitive performance, improving educational
space, and making students prepared for the job. If observed closely, more
layers are added which looks unnecessary and redundant. Some studies
showed how schools can be a motivating ground for students from diverse
backgrounds. It was shown that despite living in conflicting zones, stu-
dents in Palestine had great faith in schooling. Schooling as a platform for
educational nourishment is also a zone of neutralizing the prevalent preju-
dices in our society. The NEP though hinted at the diversity (caste, gender
and tribes, including the native languages), the address of rampant stere-
otypes and prejudices was not sufficiently touched upon. Since the policy
is prepared by the human being, it is also important that a proper effort
should be made to have inclusive and diverse groups to have a healthy
dialogue on the subject matter. One study showed how the inclusion of
people from diverse groups in jury meetings helps in more pro-diversity
decision-making. The presence itself makes the judges listen to the group
member from different racial backgrounds. Though NEP 2020 advocated
for neutralizing the regulatory forces with a new form of regulation where
committees and boards have members from different backgrounds with-
out any external influence, the representatives of people from oppressed
groups and gender were hardly mentioned.
The developmentalism in education has a far-reaching impact on policy,
even in the case of policies claimed to be progressive. It seems that NEP
relies heavily on constructivism as an approach to dealing with learning.
In its agenda, developmentalism is paramount. It strongly believes that age
determines higher cognitive development and rationalities. In the previous
year, students will be encouraged to explore through play and discovery.
However, this is somewhere similar to the earlier approaches in the edu-
cational policies. It assumes that the development of children follows the
universal pattern as we see in the Piagetian approach.
No doubt, it is the commonsensical cognizance of Piaget’s (2002) con-
structivism that had to overpower the conscience of policymakers. It is the
genetic epistemology as promoted through the Piagetian approach that still
reverberates the policies. The rise of alternative education, as it assumes
to deescalate regularization and power, seems to rely on more progressive
assumptions about the children’s ability to learn with the help of capable
adults. This is scaffolding and quite prominent in the Vygotskian tradition.
Though NEP 2020 in its eclectic interface talks about quality teachers and
the mechanism through which quality learning can happen, the pedagogi-
cal interventions are still elusive. One of the explanations is giving freedom
to the teachers and school administration a free hand to deal with class-
room learning. The bag full of progressive terminologies doesn’t guarantee
representations, empowerment, and liberation. As observed, it’s a paradox
to have on one side words like empowerment, de-regularization, and free-
dom and on the other side full intervention to infuse values, regularize
standard curriculum, and creation of committees without mentioning the
representatives both from the teachers and students side.
The prominent terminologies used in NEP 2020 such as “cultural
preservation”, “critical thinking”, “knowledge and an employment land-
scape”, “technology”, “affordability”, and “private philanthropy” are
constructed ones and they don’t reach any concrete or substantial mean-
ing. Though designers of NEP 2020 seem to be aware of critical traditions
in the field of education, the state agenda cannot be denied when it comes
to cultural revivalism. Under the garb of state-sponsored politics, NEP
2020 is as political as any other policy. However, the intention is to show
the incomplete picture of NEP 2020 where all the prevailing terms and
terminology which show diversity and progressivism are explicitly stated
but their meaning to the general audience and mediators is not clear. The
context in which critical thinking develops is also important for scien-
tific progress. The role of educational leaders at different levels of educa-
tion can provide a meaningful approach to understanding the diversity of
learning, oppression, and state quo. NEP 2020 can be tested at the pilot
level to see the impact on the educational domain. More diversified views
shall be taken to see how the idea of true education shall not be sidelined
or misinterpreted in the times of neoliberalism and ideological interven-
tions. Norm-governed schooling, the norm of social justice, excellence,
achievement, social norms, or normative influence matters in the student’s
approach to learning (McNeill, Smyth & Mavor, 2017), the context of
schooling, indigenous people, and their representations in the curriculum
design. How does the NEP 2020 address these questions? In an interview
with Frontline, Krishna Kumar (2020) noticed how norm matter in school-
ing. In the case of RTE where the comprehensive child-centred curriculum
infused new hope of representativeness and availability to all children, the
NEP may offer a scheme which can deprive children of that hope. 5 In the
current times, the rise of online learning through various interfaces and
portals such as learning management systems and commercial sites such
as Byjus classes and Unacademy has captured certain populations who can
afford education of their children in a more enriching manner. Conversely,
the rise of these systematic online learning interfaces is also creating an
academic achievement gap between students from different classes. This
rise of online learning has also created a forceful competition and anxiety
to stay updated with the new courses for the social classes who have the
potential to afford the new demands of education. This power disparity
can be addressed by the NEP revision through the free allocation of the
instrument, internet, and online portal for education with regular moni-
toring and update by the agents. The agenda must go beyond the circu-
larity of policies to make it more representative, addressing the needs of
children of displaced workers, and affordable good education at all the
levels guaranteed by NEP 2020.
Conclusion
This chapter critically addressed the mainstream conception of compe-
tence, ability, motivation, and dominant culture reflected in the policies
is discussed through the critical lens. The agenda is to differentiate two
histories of the educational journey. First, educational psychology which
is therapeutically embedded in the mainstream pedagogy, curriculum, and
policies and second, critical educational psychology which is emancipatory
and caters to the need for diverse social identities. Chapter advocated for
the latter one which directly addresses the concern and needs of students
and teachers in the creation of the educational design. The proposed design
needed to nurture their choice and agency as intrinsic as well as related to
their experience. The idea is to translate power into dialogical programmes
and not simply in a vacuum. The question about making the education
more dialogical and collaborative among all the stakeholders in the schools
will be addressed in the next chapter.
Notes
1 During the fieldwork in Nirman, Varanasi (a society comprising academician,
Vidyashram – the Southpoint school, centre for post-colonial education) a
focus group discussion happened between the director and school teachers.
These excerpts are part of those discussions held in the direction of helping stu-
dents of marginalized groups to have meaningful education. The steps towards
enhancing their educational skills, socioeconomic mobility and moving beyond
the demeaning work that was done as ancestral work.
2 Rene Descartes’ extending perishable body and absolute mind formed the
essence of dualism. This very idea has had occupied the society and its various
intuitional domains.
3 NEP 2020: High on rhetoric by T.K. Rajalakshmi, Frontline, August 28, 2020.
4 Prof Nita Kumar: https://nirmaninfo.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2019-
08-26T23:38:00%2B05:30&max-results=7&start=21&by-date=false
5 Krishna Kumar, 2020, interview to the frontline on NEP 2020. https://frontline.
thehindu.com/cover-story/it-offers-more-of-the-same-remedy/article32305017.
ece
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2 Understanding power
through bricolage
Previously, we addressed the issues of power relationships and new educa-

tional policy and made the case for transformative educational psychology
through the approach of critical pedagogy and social justice. However, the
attempts to address the crisis in educational psychology are not like a piece-
meal system but require a complete overhauling. The power dominance in
educational space and educational psychology provided a control mecha-
nism to discipline and regulate students and teachers. It has not led to any
social change except for those students and teachers who either became the
victim of unhealthy globalization and capitalism or the supporters of cap-
italism at the cost of value education which cater to the diversity and envi-
ronmental needs. The rise of neoliberal values and market-oriented learning
has led to burdening on students to innovate and create in terms of the
market. This is nothing but embracing power and status quo to the extent
that students internalize it and take it as part of his/her self. Attempting to
understand the shifts in the power relationship through new methodolog-
ical diversity of bricolage is a need of modern schools in India. Bricolage
as a methodological process was discussed by Denzin and Lincoln (2000).
Though it was earlier actively used by Du Bois who was one of the design-
ers of critical pedagogy in the context of racism.1 He employed diverse
research strategies to develop better engagement campaigns for social
actions and emancipation of the oppressed. Kincheloe expanded its horizon
in the process of critical pedagogy which has a broad connection to edu-
cation. It is more or less about open inquiry and action research by freeing
oneself from dominant perspectives prevalent in the educational domain
about ability, deservingness, meritocracy, ownership, and culture (see
Kincheloe, 2001, 2008). The idea is to decentre and deescalate to re-emerge
something invisible, unnoticeable, and discounted. This is done to break
the powerful forces that have hegemonized the consciousness of people
both in the school and in the larger society and habituated them into fixedly
using the symbols and artefacts. When the process of bricolage is promoted
by freeing oneself and others a new way of seeing the world emerges and
has the potential to change the sociocultural dominance with better space
for learning.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-4 33
Transformative schools and bricolage
Bricolage, according to Kincheloe, doesn’t exclude even the “monological
methodology”, as it is itself “an act of subversion”. The routes to understand
something depend upon the situation under which schools are embedded.
During the time of crisis and mass uncertainty, schools with clear-cut pro-
grammes and manifestos were able to bring order to the life of students.
Schooling also provided a sense of belongingness and identity to the stu-
dents. It was noticed that societal power relationships affected the teaching
and learning process and some can negotiate with it as compared to others.
In the case of students from the marginalized section of society, school is
a place of excessive demand to prove their ability and many times students
despite having the capacity to excel are excluded. The rising competition
and demands for creative and innovative education have also weakened
the democratic school and pupil relationship, especially in the case of the
marginalized. In one of my discussions with student2 from the weavers
community group which is a marginalized occupational class, he stated,
Kabhi insaan haar maan jata hai

Apne se pressure aata hai
Phir kaam karne kaa mun nahi karta hai
Mentality ho jaati hai ki toot jaate hain under se
Phir humse… acha… koi kahen ki isme nahi usme jao
Under se lagta hai ki hum ab hum yeh nahi kar paye to who bhi
nahi kar payenge Mentality bun jaati hai ki hum isme achieve nahi kar
payen to usme bhi nahi kar payenge
[Sometimes human give up
We feel pressurized
Then it doesn’t feel like working
It becomes a mentality and feels like broken from inside
And then if someone says to go to some other domain
From inside it feels that if we cannot do this so neither we can do that
It becomes a mentality that if we cannot achieve in this domain, so
we cannot do in some other domains also]
The best design and innovation warrant inclusion of all students in an effi-
cient manner, but the rising neoliberalism has widened the gap and hence
the prospects of future for the marginalized students. The power relation-
ship in the school system is systematically embedded in the unquestionable
routines and formal rituals, such as time in and time out, syllabus, exams,
marks, dress code and hygiene, attendance, spoken language, promotion
of certain types of discourse, seating arrangements, and so on. These types
of behavioural markers situated in the context of schooling are observed
in most of the schools, especially coming under the range of middle to
upper classes. They also depict the sign of prestige, social class, history,
Understanding power through bricolage 35
and culture. In other schools which are situated in slums and ghettos and
also to some extent the much criticized government schools where fees are
less and the schools are at the mercy of government funds, attention to
the aforementioned behavioural markers is less. Students in the latter case
are taken for granted and it is already assumed that they will continue
with whatever work their parents were doing. To some extent, this can be
the case in upper-status schools where the parent are from the high-status
group and expect their children to contribute to those traditions. Here is
the belief that school can facilitate their aspiration for their child. The aspi-
rations are there in the parents also and they see a school with hope but
the power dynamics which are derived from the deep-seated sociocultural
system act as a hidden marginalizing force.
How the bricolage may help in surfacing these power dynamics in both
the categories of schools and in society generally? Can this continuity of
inequality be diminished? What are the deconditioning forces that help
break this power relation taken for granted and create better transforma-
tion? These are the questions much debated upon and change is seen in the
consciousness. The children and parents from the lower class are becoming
more aware of their rights and a form of radicalness is seen in their dis-
courses. On the other hand, if not radicalness, a sense of guilt is observed
among the higher class. The need for bricolage may bridge this gap to the
extent that equal availability of high-quality teachers, infrastructure, and
extra push for the student from the marginalized section may infuse a sense
of esteem and efficacy which is needed for the future. However, not all
students need to be prepared for the same kind of prestigious jobs valued
in Indian society, the perception to equally see all kinds of occupations
with dignity and respect shall also be the main agenda of schooling. Here
bricolage can play one of the important purposes to defeat this deep-seated
attitude and stereotype towards jobs and identity. The idea is not giving any
first-hand blow to the middle-class notion of aptitude and interest, because
in most cases students from marginalized sections and to some extent from
the middle-class struggle with career choice, where the former accepts what
is imposed and the latter look for some pathways to attain what it wants. It
is not clear how much people are successful with their interests and career
choice in the case of the middle classes but it is obvious that children from
marginalized groups and lower classes are deprived of their ambition and
choices. These circumstances for them are infallible without much hope
for their mobility and material consequences to accept some rebelliousness
towards their destiny.
Bricolaging, emancipation, and justice

Is justice natural or socially constructed? The historical debate led us to the
discussions. Some posited justice as a social construction and some posi-
tioned that justice is natural and seated in everyone’s conscience. In one of
the discussions on social change with the teachers, one aptly stated, “we all
want to be transformed and wish for social change”. That was true in her
spirit to bring change both in the transformation of self and to the limited
world in which we operate in our capacities. Justice has a foundation and
it follows certain pathways. In the context of schooling, it is evident that
schools have the potential to raise the students’ academic performance and
future success by adopting student-oriented programmes and interfaces.
There are studies and observations which showed the contrary picture,
where students are dropped out, unable to cope with the school demands,
showed disidentification and devaluation. In the latter case, many studies
adopted the deficit model to explain the students’ low achievement and
underachievement. Though it is the matter of perspective adopted that
directs the nature of explanation. As we saw in the earlier chapter that
policies are driven by certain assumptions constructed in sociopolitical
conditions. The pathways adopted are influenced by the “neo-positivis-
tic and reductionist model of evidence-based research” (see Kincheloe,
2012a). The way education is imparted, the rush to complete the syllabus
or just as tokenism without much human engagement of students and phe-
nomenon is the normative plight of today’s education system. What we see
are the rush and anxiety. These are not at least the marker of education
which was imagined. Here the typical mainstream psychology dominates,
something esoteric to know oneself but in a limited manner in terms of
cognitive ability, creative potentiality, and accumulation of degrees includ-
ing the certificates offered. No doubt education seems to have a direct cor-
relation with the fit into the job market. With lots of debates and writing
in the educational domains, it seems that education for the future got its
pathway with all the necessary and substantial elements situated. These
aspects are prominently mentioned in the lectures, policies, educational
debates, newspapers, everyday discourses, new applications, and so on.
Despite showing the cloud of progressive concepts and to some extent
materializing through the pedagogical interventions, the linear progres-
sion seems to be on the track of neoliberal assumption. During the field-
work in Vidyashram, Varanasi, one of the parents (Markendey)3 who was
white washer by profession expressed his feeling about the school in which
her daughter (Prema) was given opportunity to study in English medium.
He expressed:
Nahi Naukri mile nahi sahi, lekin hamare bacho ko padhna aa gaya
Yeh koi nahi kahega ki yeh unpadh hai
Koi nahi kahenga ab hume
Pehle aise hi sub kehte rahe
Hum hindi medium nahi padha paate, English medium kaa to sapna
hi nahi tha
Mohalle mein ache paise waale bhi nahi padha paate
Bhayanker English me padhai hoti hai
Madam kitabo ke beech mein rahti hain
[Even if they don’t get job, my children know how to study
No one will say that they are illiterates
No one will say this to us now
Earlier they use to say just like that
We were not in the position to teach in Hindi medium, teaching in
English medium was not even in the dream
In my locality even who are earning well doesn’t have the capability
to get this kind of education
Teaching-learning happens in (excellent) English
Madam (Director) lives among the books]
To equip the student with so much information and certificates who can
afford this and make them ready for facing the insurmountable barriers of
the job market. Even if they are not able to advertise their worth, at least,
they already have gained the skills to create their independent startup. This
is what happens with the students of lower classes also but through differ-
ent terrains. They may take the education, of whatever capacity that their
school provides, and then they continue with what was already in their
visual field, for example, their parental activities. It is the task of the teacher
to infuse interest among the students, but actually, it is sparked in very few
students from the lower classes. Markendey further expressed that:
Jaun shiksha aur gyaan dusro ka dukh dard samajh naa paye woh
kaun kaam ka?
Main apne bacho ko achi shiksha doonga taki who yehi kar paaven
Teen raste hai, teacher, doctory aur afsar
Doctory aur afsar to croroepati ke bachen hi jaate hai agar who
sapna dekhen
Woh jayen Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, Bombay
Yahan to ek din ke joota ke polish ka hisabh naahi hau
[Any education and knowledge if facilitate understanding the pain of
others of what use it is?
I will give good education to my children so that they can do this
Three pathways are there, teacher, doctor and officer
The children of billionaires become doctor and officer, if they dream
They shall go to Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Bombay
Here we have not even the account for one day shoe polish]
However, he showed hope with the education. It is the student’s identifica-

tion and interest to excel in education. He used example from his profession
that he doesn’t paint by fearing the building height. Parallelly he was real-
istic about his present socioeconomic and structural limitations. He gave
example of his daughter who wishes to do well in her studies and get a bet-
ter and meaningful job. It is the school and efficient policy which may help
these parents and students from the depressed and working classes to cross
the barriers of the socio-structural boundaries. He conveyed as follows:
Aadmi ko himmat nahi harna chahiye

Aagar hum building dekhi ke haar jaye ki yaar itna uchaan kaise
hoga to hum upar nahin chadh payenge
Kar ke dekhna chaiye
Shauk hain, jajba hai, kehl mein nahi padai me busy rehna pasand
karti hain
[Person should not lose courage
If we give up after seeing the building that how this much height be
done then we can never go at the top of the building
One should try and see
Interest, courage derives my daughter. She is interested and busy in
studies and not in play]
His daughter Prema stated4 (both English and Hindi) that his father gets
rashes and ulcers on his finger and foot and she wants to study and get out
herself and family from the demeaning and unhealthy situation. She stated:
[My father think that my child should not struggle like this
My grandfather didn’t make him study
One should concentrate on studies
Chaale pad jaaten hain [suffer with sores and rashes]
It is not a good work
No one in my family studied, but he will help and support
But one should stand on their own]
Studies showed how students and parents from the working classes in the
Indian context identify with the schools. This is done to transform their
current socioeconomic position in the future. Students see themselves
standing at some point on the socioeconomic ladder and take education
as a bridge for transformation and doing social good. This is hope for
social mobility which gets materialized as per the given circumstances of
education. The question is whether this hope is materialized. What are the
complexities and inner educational mechanisms that give students a plat-
form to fulfil their expectations? Schools in general follow certain patterns
of teaching and learning which are universally applied to all the students.
In some cases, schools assign low performing students to special classes
or put extra load of tutorials. It is a progressive attempt till the students
are stereotyped as low ability because students deem unfit on the ability
based normative school climate. However, studies also showed that stu-
dents’ identification with schooling is a matter of honour and commu-
nity emancipation but the structure of schooling and other socioeconomic
repercussions act as a barrier to their future educational pathways. As
Cook-Gumperz (2006) noted, “classrooms are readily associated with the
transmission of knowledge, both the official curriculum of academic sub-
jects and the unofficial, or ‘hidden’, the curriculum of cultural values and
social norms” (p. 197), the value which schools, in general, communicate
in its hidden form is mostly mismatching for the students from the diverse
background.
Pedagogy, power, and bricolage

The power structure of the school systematically arranges the relationship
between teachers and students. In one way, all the members and agents of
schooling are aware of many possibilities of teaching and learning but to
sustain the power relationship, they discourage an eclectic approach. Usu-
ally, the mainstream pedagogical process is uncritically taken forward. It
also gives a sense of standardization and certainty to all the stakeholders
in the school system. Principal gets the reason to systematically run the
school to answer the parent anxiety and future consequence, teachers
get the reason not to take pain to be creative enough to engage students
directly with the phenomenon under study and the students get the stand-
ard curriculum and pedagogical style to have a clarity of format for their
future purpose. Alternatively, there are school members and students
who are excluded from this normalizing process of pedagogy and cur-
riculum. The eclectic approach and method to understanding the social
process of teaching and learning together with the engagement with the
subject collectively have the potential to enhance justice and fair learning
in the school. In the standardization process, if not carefully understand-
ing the cultural experiences and identity of teachers and students from
the deprived and marginalized sections, then the agenda of schooling
as a democratic platform for justice and social emancipation will not be
fulfilled.
The avoidance of monological reductionism (see Kincheloe, 2012a,
2012b; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2007) is one of the main agendas to sustain
the democratic, ethical, and participatory school climate. One of the ways
to venture into the terrains of experiences of teachers and students is the
creation of a democratic space where the awareness of deep social structure
and the complexity of everyday life is allowed to be in the conscious space
of all the agents of schooling. One of the examples is how teachers crossed
their boundaries and engaged with the students in enriching their under-
standing of discrimination against people of colour. In one of the classic
approaches, a teacher named Jane Eliot did the classic classroom experi-
ment to demonstrate the meaning of discrimination through one’s colour
of eyes, Blue or Brown. It was aired as a documentary in 1970. She demon-
strated how the behaviour of children changed when they were either told
that brown eye children are superior to blue eyes and vice versa in a week.
Though this information communicated by the teacher was not true, it was
just to make the students realize the feeling of being discriminated against
based on colour. This experiment by Eliot showed how children can also
understand what discrimination is and how it feels. Eliot said somewhere
that much is talked about race but what is more important is to realize
and be mindful, to practically understand the plight of the oppressed. This
approach to understanding collectively ourselves and how much we are
biased towards any social group is an authentic exercise that is only possi-
ble in school, where teachers and students of whatever age group negotiate
the meaning of social category. Similarly, this is possible in other instances
also such as environment and climate, respect for all jobs, avoiding blind
race behind the marks, and respecting people and their agency. School
with its able educational leadership provides a platform for demystifying
and delegitimizing some of the dominant upper-class knowledge. Schools
can provide a meaningful platform to students without burdening them
with knowledge and policies based on the adult imagination. The parent,
Markendey, aptly situated his views as:
Isme karmathi vyakti chaiye padne wala bhi aur padhane wala bhi
Koi kaa mehnat kharab hone wala nahi hai
Dono safal hoga
Hum peeche peeche lage rahte hain dakha dekar ki
Chalo…yeh aage badhti rahen…hamari jeevan ka do...chaar, panch
saal aayu badh jayega
Shanti tabhi milengi jab koi tarakki kar lega
Bachho ka ban jaye
Aur nahi… to jis tarah naali kaa kida hai …wohi tarah se rahenge
[School needs hardworking and able people, both as teachers and
students
Nobody’s hardworking will be at stake
Both will be successful
I am always push and act as a support system
Let her achieve. My life will be extended to four to five years more
with her achievements
I will be in peace when anyone will be successful
Let my children get what they want
Or else, the way we are insects of gutter...we will be like that]
Padhne likhne se kya hoga
Kya hoga bataiye
Usse kya hoga
Phir wohi tarah sub chele jayenge
Saab bekar hai
Sab narak hai chalo
Yeh to paise wale kahte hai ki santosh karo…chalo santosh karo
Waise bhi sabhi garib santosh karte hain
Usme kaun si nayi baat hai ?
[What will happen after taking education
Tell me what will happen
What happen with that
Again they will go like that
Everything is worthless
Ok, if everything is hell
Actually, rich people ask us to be satisfied and content…be satisfied
Anyway, all poor people try to be content of whatever they have
Is there anything new in it? (Laughs)]
Markendey indicated towards the value of strife and social support. Chil-
dren from marginalized aspire to do better and schools are the provider
of the valid context and space to materialize their aspirations. In a society
based on caste, gender, and social class hierarchy, it is common to notice
that people from the better classes advice or expect the poor to be content.
However, from his response, it is evident that in the struggle for survival
it is important that proper standards and reservations must be provided so
that the aspiration of children and parent from the oppressed community
should not fall to the dominant power divides that has occupied our society.
Paulo Freire’s (1970) approach to going beyond the banking system of
education can be similar to what Ivan Illich advocated for de-schooling soci-
ety. A society that is based on caste, class, and gender hierarchy needs to be
schooled with the help of a teacher who should be empowered to help students
in building up leadership to make society a justifiable and egalitarian space.
Observing the working of an alternative school, Vidyashram, Varanasi it
was evident that schools are important and can be a meaningful educational
spaces. However, schooling from the perspective of students from oppressed
backgrounds matters. In other words, researchers have proposed to build
“strengths-based school–family–community partnerships” making way for
democratic collaborations and partnerships (Bryan & Henry, 2012; Henry &
Bryan, 2021).
In recent times, many debates and discussions happened in the school’s
situation about the relevance of different approaches in pedagogy. The
knowledge has different forms and the emerging idea doesn’t come from
anything but has a base. That base can be a well-established knowledge
commonly communicated through different mediums. Sometimes the
medium itself acts as a creative scaffold that gives way to novel solutions.
In the current times with the advent of superior technologies, the same
knowledge base is given a new turn for effective learning.
Bricolage is a process that gives way to unsystematic, less prevalent, or
minority knowledge new energy to collaborate with the mainstream and
empower the views of diverse groups (see Sanchez-Burks, Karlesky &
Lee, 2015). It is not that what is already established knowledge was always
the same. It may also be the result of the continuous collaboration of dif-
ferent knowledge. However, the knowledge which is relentlessly situated
as hegemonic and regulated by the historically powerful identities is coer-
cive or forced knowledge. Bricolage in educational psychology was always
a rare event and those protagonists who took sociocultural facets into
account together discounting cognitive ability as the dominant model of
students’ assessment were themselves a minority group of critical educa-
tional psychologists. Their contributions were in minority and taken as
anti-development. Since development is based on the economic approach
in terms of cost-benefit and monitory profit, doing critical educational psy-
chology was taken as unsystematic and contrary to the knowledge which
helps in giving jobs or creating one. Indian society is diverse in many ways
but homogenized into a dominant value system where deep caste and gen-
der-based identities are entrenched into the human mind. It is to be noted
that whatever structural social categories we live in, which include, caste,
gender, and social class, “cannot be assumed as given, but are themselves
categories that are historically constructed within power relation” (see
Popkewitz, 1995; p. xix).
Critical understanding and transforming power dynamics

In the Indian context, a power relationship is seen in the schools where one
form of knowledge construction emanating through monologic practices
between the knower and learner is encouraged. Learners’ curiosity is reg-
ulated by the knowledge that the knower delivers. The reciprocity of the
learner is corrected if it deviates from the knower and is appreciated when
it conforms to the knower signifies the tradition of the teacher-student rela-
tionship or Guru-Shishya Parampara. Though the new educational poli-
cies and curricular framework also encouraged the role of critical thinking
and students’ participation in the classroom, the systematic evaluation and
the exam-oriented culture worked paradoxically against these suggestions.
Schooling is often substantiated by the assessment of the knowledge of the
students. Its success depends upon the pass percentage of students in the
examination. Schools compete among themselves by showing the ability
and capacity of their students to pass the examination, achieving high per-
centages and creating records in popular domains like science, mathemat-
ics, and technology. This lures other prospective students to join that school
as it systematically portrays itself as high achieving domain creating high
standard students. The schools which encourage learning in a collaborative
manner, where marks and competitions are kept secondary, are observed
to work for the students from the marginalized community. Since children
from the marginalized community find it hard to be included in high-status
schools, they either find a place in the government schools or alternative
schools. In the former, education is formally encouraging but with less
infrastructure. In the latter, however, infrastructure is limited except for
the diversity of learning tools and methodology. These schools may have
limited space as compared to big private schools or government schools.
The children’s aspirations are not fulfilled by these schools unless the aim is
to get an enrolment or learn English or teachers and staff of these schools
can reach out to the students. The agenda in these types of schools is to
learn in a diversified manner and offer a challenge to the mainstream way of
schooling and parental aspirations. Bricolage as a methodologically plural-
ist approach to understanding any phenomenon offers a superior platform
for knowledge building. However, the agenda of mainstream schooling
limits the career aspiration of students and parents from the middle classes,
which requires a set way of learning. It is based on the cognitive marker of
one’s agency along with the crude discourses prevalent in our society ema-
nating from the influence of neoliberalism and the rise of managerialism
(see Piper & Sikes, 2015). As we may infer that the dominant discourses
shape policies and school practices, they may also subscribe to the ideo-
logical biases that exclude people from the marginalized sections. What is
the use of great knowledge and expertise in science and social science that
aid and facilitate prejudices? Promoting bricolage through the diversified
learning programme may widen the horizon of knowledge of students as
compared to the focused learning programme. The cost can be the delegiti-
mization of the competitive learning method to deep learning which is both
pragmatic and emancipatory. Bricolage seems to be based on the following
assumptions in the school context:
1 Education is the freedom to learn what one wants to learn.

2 The school has the potential to provide a space where children can
understand what is taken for granted in their everyday life.
3 What happens when students are marginalized based on their iden-
tities, both at the macro level and the micro level? It shows that they
are the victims of exclusive pedagogy and the dominant cultural value
system.
4 Research showed that group-based discrimination has socio-emotional
and health repercussions, parents who are less educated have to face
many problems at the social, economic, and health levels and so do
their children. Bricolage is the inclusiveness and involvement of the all
stakeholders such as parents, and community members in changing the
discourse of the dominant learning system in education.
Encouragement of bricolage signifies stability (Carstensen & Roper, 2021)

and actors keep the institutional logic intact. This means bricolage is a
psychological process of gaining knowledge via emergent methods making
their institutional presence in the current paradigms. Schools in India have
differentiated among themselves through their social status. The same kind
of curriculum is dealt with in different ways as per the demands of parents
and the student’s career choices. The low-status schools which are composed
of students from lower socioeconomic groups don’t face many demands
from parents and students. Students in these schools can learn and move
forward with their imagined careers but become victims of their disadvan-
taged social position. This further affects their self-esteem and self-efficacy
to work on building their career choices. As compared to low-status
schools, middle- to high-status schools are composed of students who are
in the position to make their career choices and have the necessary more
than sufficient resources. Their parents are educated and have better and
structured work affiliation. The parents in the case of lower status schools
are less educated and mostly work in an unstructured work environment or
at a subordinate position in the organizations. The system of education and
curriculum engagement in these different categories of schools varies to the
advantage of students from a better socioeconomic background. The power
influence is observed in both the scenarios of schooling, whether high sta-
tus or low status. Other contextual features have a powerful influence on
the schooling processes such as belonging to the social groups which are
historically oppressed, for example, being from the minority caste, reli-
gion, and gender. These are the social categories that form the structure of
Indian society and it is well placed into the psyche of people, in their actions
and rituals. Even the schools and higher education systems come out with
reports about caste and gender-based discrimination apart from the soci-
oeconomic influence. Bricolage emphasizes critical understanding of the
presence of different stakeholders in the classroom and the diversity they
enact. The way they make sense of the situation and how their approach to
understanding classroom activities are matched and mismatched. At this
point, the role of teachers will be to understand the classroom dynamics
as a competent researcher. The debates in educational psychology revolved
around different ways to impart conceptual knowledge to the learner.
The national curriculum framework and the current new educational
policies though advocated for activity-based learning, however, even dur-
ing the learning and teaching mechanism, the systematic and implicit influ-
ence of biases are reported. This rise in complexity of power relationships
from simple pedagogical influence to multiple interventions in the class-
room corresponds to the different educational programmes and policies
which influenced the school dynamics. Though upper-status schools tar-
geted students’ achievements in terms of marks, sports, and other activities,
the lower status schools’ influence is limited by the teacher-student discon-
nected relationship. The power influence is systematically present in both
the cases of schools, though in some cases its direction is moderated by the
school climate and the context. Howarth and Andreouli (2015) indicated
the connection of macro sociopolitical context, meso local context, and
the micro context of social interactions where they advocated for the best
practice models to address the local issues. According to education in itself
provides a micro context, the broader sociopolitical context also matters
that design the educational system. Students’ inability to pay attention in
class is assumed to be their problem and teacher may generalize this as
inattentive behaviour. I remember when I was a student, I was not able
to understand the lessons and the teacher called my presence in the class
unfortunate for the classroom process.5
“hamara durbhagya hai ke aise chaatra kaksha me shiksha ke liye aate

hai”
[Unfortunately, this type of student comes for education in the
classroom]
The process of categorizing students as durbhagya is not new but it was

narrated widely by the students. Students in the classroom become the vic-
tims of the dominant ideologies and it happens mostly with the students of
minority groups. Though in the Indian educational system the role of teach-
ers from time primordial was one-sided dictation to the students which
they further carried on to their students. The activities in the learning pro-
cess comprised serving the teachers and being a good listener. The school
engagements in the current times can also be the result of deep-seated par-
adoxes embedded in the history of education in India from pre-colonial to
post-colonial times. The times of Vedas are still reflected in the psyche of
teachers and students in some or the other way. During the Vedic times,
education was imparted within the realm of sacred texts. There were no
intersecting or interdisciplinary approaches as such but the students were
socialized to the systems of knowledge derived from the cultural practices
and the scriptures. The education of students depended on the approval
of the teacher and there was no letter grading system as such. Even the
dialogue and discussion among the students were only possible once the
students had attained a certain level and appropriated by teachers. It was
in most cases an all or none effect of education, that is, the students were
either considered fit to take education or not. The markers and benchmarks
of fitness of taking education depended on the social positioning of the stu-
dents who usually came from upper varnas.
The story of Eklavya and Dronacharya shows the hierarchical structure
of the society and caste divides in ancient times, though this situation often
emerges in contemporary times in various domains. Schools, universities,
and other organizations have witnessed caste-based atrocities in the current
times, showing how deep-seated is the dominance of social hierarchy. Some
scholars highlighted that the Indian social system prefers hierarchy and
that’s what makes them adapted to the system. The family culture itself
corresponds to the hierarchical relationship where the role of father and
mother shapes the expectation of children from different people in different
gender roles, even if they are occupying the authoritative position in any
domain, such as principal, teacher, manager and, so on. Modern education
in India has a link with the past and it also reflects the continental philoso-
phy of education. Blake et al. (2003) stated that schooling was mostly based
on the notions of childhood and maturity, which means that maturation
implies the child’s moral and cognitive development. This kind of develop-
mentalism in the school context was prevalent in the Indian school systems
especially due to the influence of colonial powers in education. Earlier, as
the varied accounts narrate was the paramount influence of teachers in
shaping the virtue of obeisance among students. We may speculate that
the power influence through the Guru-Shishya relationship in India was
well adjusted to the expectations and norms of society, where one makes
students well versed with the available knowledge and at the same time
students needed to be part of that custom of power relationship.
Pedagogical design and democratic educational psychology

Bricolage is a new pedagogical design for democratic educational psychol-
ogy. Bricolage, as we infer from the premodern times, was not to offer criti-
cism to the power of knowledge but to systematically engage in the dialogue
to bring new avenues to the existing knowledge system. We can see several
schools of thought emerges in different period or co-existed together in
different periods but what became prominent created a new system not
by breaking the already existing but by parallelly operating in the same
sociocultural space. The preferred guidance strategy for the teachers in the
Indian context is neither minimalist nor approving but engaging and disap-
proving to the extent it is uncritically to the designed criteria of evaluation
and curriculum (see Joyce & Showers, 1985; see also Beaman, Wheldall, &
Kemp, 2010). The critical inquiry has become a buzzword, though its dis-
play seems to be usually horizontal. Indian educational system portrayed
a sense of didactic teacher-student relationship without preference given
to questioning or contesting what the teacher was dictating. Bricolage as a
process of including the alternative way of inquiry in the mainstream learn-
ing processes presents a logic from the minority perspectives. The way chil-
dren learn science in the elementary classroom is more textual and syllabus
driven. Promoting bricolage is like bringing in the children’s perception of
the physical world together with their attempt to understand the dynamics
of the objects existing in the environment.
The preferred and non-preferred knowledge in the classroom has created
ample learning and pedagogical divides. Some students do well in recalling
and recognizing the received knowledge, however, the classroom is also
comprised of students who are average but have a better understanding
of practical knowledge. Though theory practices go together, still it is not
very clear how theory is understood by the students. Either it could be
memorizing, relating to the experience, or critically taking into account.
To engage in a critical inquiry, students need to be given space to reflect
upon their experiences along with the students who may not do well with
the received textual knowledge. As we can accurately assume that there is
nothing like zero knowledge and we also know that every little knowledge
that we may have if properly channelized can contribute to the understand-
ing of the problem. Similarly, seeing students as a participant and creating
a space of engagement to cultivate a barrier-free contribution of whatever
capacities the students can also be called bricoleurs (see Denzin & Lincoln,
2000; Levi-Strauss, 1966). Students at the different levels of schooling
have both formal and informal experiences, which are derived from the
different types of parenting styles (see Bowlby, 1988) and teachers’ inter-
ventions. Parents adopt different methods of engaging with their children
and further it depends upon their practices and styles where parents use
specific behaviour to socialize with their children and at the same time
generate an emotional climate. Most of the studies homogenized the stu-
dent categories engaging or disengaging with the school activities. Schools
add further formality to the child’s behaviour through disciplinary incur-
sions. As Bricolage is the innovative method of meaningfully adapting chil-
dren’s understanding of the phenomenon along with the teacher’s guidance,
it also creates deep emotional bonding and trust. This emotional affinity
has a long-term effect on the children’s efficacy and self-esteem. Vygotsky’s
sociocultural approach integrated social to the developmental approach as
the latter was dominant and added to the historical and commonsensical
understanding of the child’s learning process. While engaging in the class-
room process, children are active agents in the transformative agenda of
the schools. The children are also an activist for social change by situating
their cultural experience to the classroom experience. In this context, there
is a need for more empathic teachers who don’t create a homogenous kind
of space through the ability divides.
What is suitable in the classroom process and the ease of pedagogical
practices with less disruption has become an agenda of classroom proceed-
ing eventually producing students who lack the critical ability and scientific
enthusiasm. Most of the schools in India are based on models which are
uncritically forming a backbone of school education, that is, maturity and
cognitive capacity. This is linked to the Piagetian model of constructivism,
however, the general trend in our society to see and expect a child in terms
of age sequence was also criticized as incomplete and common-sense under-
standing. Even the child’s rebellious act is taken as abnormal and undisci-
plined. It is an influence of parental and school power that give legitimacy
to formal education and the culture of acceptance and obedience.
There is large scale evidence that uncritically shows how formal and
received knowledge shapes the student’s mindset. For example, Dweck
(2006) showed how a fixed mindset towards intelligence is regressive and
rigidifies the progressive agenda of education. Scholars showed how adopt-
ing a growth mindset helps in self-affirmation and crossing the barriers of
self-handicapping. This progressive thinking and situational intervention
enhance identification with schools. The understanding is that students
and teachers who form an essential social group in the learning process
are also meaningful and active agents who experiment with the received
knowledge. They are activists of their experience and give a new edge to
the knowledge.
The process of bricolage gives meaningful space to these agents to form
a collective understanding of the phenomenon under observation. It’s like
a rainbow with different combinations of colours. Schools in modern times
have seen both regimental influences together with the influence of pro-
gressiveness. In the regimental context, schools systematically offer a cur-
riculum bounded education with set patterns of evaluation of children’s
knowledge. This further led to the ability-based stratification where some
students are average, few meritorious and few low achievers. The agenda is
to scale students based on normal probability distribution. One can situate
its direct link with the social morphology of intelligence and achievement
in the Indian society, where there are ample divides in terms of rural-urban,
social classes, gender, castes, and tribes. The bell curve designed to appro-
priate the social structure of ability was also reflected in the school systems.
Somewhere schools carried forward the objective of society to sustain the
segregation as compared to the schools that provided a space for inquiry
and tried to include diversity, clear guidelines for promoting equality, and
developing an ability to engage in collective inquiry towards the ability and
identity-based segregation. Progressive schools follow mostly Deweyan’s
(Dewey, 2004) approach of pragmatic understanding of what is happening
around us. The advocates of progressive schooling believed in observation
and empirically situating the ideas. Progressive education imbibes the spir-
its of critical thinking and also encourages dissenting of the unscientific
knowledge which emerges from the majoritarian views. It is the politics of
social change in education through the introduction of alternative voices
which usually don’t fit into mainstream education. Though progressive
education offers critique to the power strongly defining the educational sys-
tem where students take education formally to enhance their skills and get
fit into the ability dominant society.
Conclusion
Bricolage is one such approach where the concept of multicultural educa-
tion is more pronounced and liberating for students of diverse backgrounds
(see also Parekh, 1986). This chapter showed that it is a representative ped-
agogical design that is authentic to the idea of value-based education. The
future of bricolage is in the activities of bricoleurs, where the decoloniality
of people directly corresponds to their desires and experiences. In one way
it is the process of understanding a child as a responsible being. The soci-
etal understanding of maturity and morality, maturity and cognition, and
hence the responsibility is based on the flawed understanding of the agency
of the child. Children are also responsible for a representative of their will,
however, the societal and schools’ impositions of capable adults will only
restrict the children’s activities in the social space. How the regulatory
system in schools privileges particular methods of pedagogy and learning
along with the examples from one alternative school that debunked the
power influence of authority and gave freedom to the students to construct
their pedagogy and classroom activities. Some prominent educationists
from pre-independent India, for example, Gijubhai Badheka (2009) intro-
duced the Montessori system of education in India, equivalent to Vygotsky’s
approach (Vygotsky, 1978) to address the power dynamics and his idea
worth in shaping the school structure. Transforming power through brico-
lage implies a progressive approach to educational psychology which had
dominantly shaped the school environment. In the process of educating,
it also matters how the outcomes of education affect a child and his/her
community. Education emphasizing learning through cognitive metaphors
considered the child as a passive learner to reproduce knowledge uncrit-
ically. Prominent progressive theorists of education added to democratic
educational psychology by considering a child as a responsible being and
an activist to explore his/her curiosity. We need more empathetic educa-
tional psychology that enhances justice and empowers students and parents
beyond the boundaries of the formal environment of schools. Collective
attempts in this direction will make education inclusive through efficient
bricolage and removal of unnecessary power influence in the classroom
practices in the name of nurturing culturally based stereotypical expecta-
tions based on gender and caste-based roles.
It is important to identify the perspective or dominant models deriving
classroom practices and how the activities create a shared space for the
students and teachers. Some of the interesting approaches have the poten-
tial to nurture the introduction of bricolage in the classroom. For example,
the balance between minimal guidance and guided instruction, the discov-
ery of learning and culture of education, multicultural education, bringing
interdisciplinarity and special education need (Macfarlane, Macfarlane, &
Mataiti, 2020; Riddell, 2003). It is also important to decategorize the
dominance of ability-based success and failure through active participa-
tion in understanding the meaning of discipline and how children learn
discipline, reducing cognitive load and emergence of the culture of dia-
logues. Students’ and teachers’ engagement in the critical understanding of
gender, caste, race, and suppressed sociocultural experiences. The success
of bricolage is possible through social, emotional, and instrumental sup-
port which will remove the gap based on power removing the hindrance
to true learning and nurturing classroom as a civically engaged and safe
space (see Ehrenworth, Wolfe & Todd, 2020). These social psychological
aspects which get shaped in the context of power will be further elaborated
in the coming sections. The next chapter will investigate how emotion is an
essential psychological force affecting the schools’ everyday consciousness
and meaning making.
Notes
1 Du Bois (1899) in his book “The Philadelphia Negro” used bricolage to form
critical pedagogical movement to address the Black emancipation from slavery
and colonialism.
2 During an interview with the students and parents in Varanasi, the role of
schooling, success, and change was discussed. The students were studying in
the same class. Intezaar belong to the family of weaver community who are
usually marginalized and live with the continuous socioeconomic burden.
3 Markendey does white washing and lives near the Luxa area of Varanasi. He
has lots of hope from schools which care for his children and provide education
in a true way.
4 Prema described the hardship faced by her family member and narrated the
influence of schooling in achieving her future goals. The democratic and
student-centred schooling had equipped her with the skill to speak in English
proficiently and hope to do better in the career of her choice.
5 One of the incidents was cited based on my memory when I was student.
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Part II
Power and Identity

3 Emotions, authority, and
education
Emotion is a somewhat neglected topic in the domain of educational psy-

chology. Though somewhere there are hints towards the emotional regu-
lation of students and teachers in the educational space. Emotion in itself
is not considered as an issue to be taken seriously in the formal structure.
Further, it is taken as a domain of psychologists and counsellors whose
approaches are themselves driven by the therapeutic assumption about
human behavioural control. As the current research depicts that emotion
is an essential aspect of any organization and schools are not apart. The
demarcation of emotions into basic and self-conscious has to be looked into
along with the collective emotion.
I remember when I was working in a school, the director called me and
asked me to bring detail about one child. This boy was seen as disruptive
and disobedient. My task was to understand that boy, talk to his family and
friends around, and see what is the reason that makes the boy did not adjust
to the school system and logic. It was challenging and curious for me to get
to the roots of the problem. I went to the boy’s house along with him, met
his family and friends, and roamed around his locality. I found that the boy
was living along with his other brothers and sisters and parents in a small
room where there was no space for studying. Parents were daily wagers and
didn’t have much control over the child’s academic development. There was
a small television in that room and some programme was going on. People
were talking and eating food, there was no space to keep a book and it was
lying on the floor. I went to the locality where the boy usually visits his
friends. I talked to his friends, passed some jokes, and roamed around near
the Ganges and that’s it. I noticed the little boy was holding my finger and
showing me the way and taking me here and there…. It was an emotional
moment for both of us, where I was earlier seen as a teacher and the boy as
a student but as I explored the boy’s space, the boy became my friend and
assured me that he will not be disruptive in the classroom.
Why this boy who belonged to a lower caste was not able to adjust in
the classroom? Did he not value education or found the company of other
students in the classroom not friendly as compared to his other friends who
were not part of the school? The assumption that school is a platform that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-6 55
56 Power and Identity
homogenizes students’ experience, especially their informal way of under-
standing something under the formal system of schools, is both flawed and
meaningless. When I interacted with the boy informally, went to his house,
and talked to his family member, the negative emotion which the boy felt in
the classroom resulted in liking. The everyday humiliation of being from a
different sociocultural experience and the adoption of anger as an emotion
of rejecting others who don’t understand his experience is not a new obser-
vation in schools. Though this school is considered to be based on demo-
cratic values and all the students are treated well, equally, and with full
teacher-student engagement. The instruction of the director to involve me
in bringing more triangulated pictures of the boy is unique for this school.
There are many schools, both government and private which doesn’t go
beyond the boundaries of formal teaching and learning and, further, create
barriers to bringing education to its emancipatory level.
Emotion and schooling

The students’ disobedience and lack of motivation to engage in the class-
room activities results in reactionary responses from the school authorities.
In one of the incidents, it was reported that the schoolmaster hanged a
student upside down from the first floor of the school. This kind of puni-
tive and violent action is both against the right of the students to express
themselves and against the agenda of learning. This is one of the most sys-
tematic, coercive, and violent displays of power and emotion in the school.
Some of the views from people when they heard about this incident were as:
“Either you should control your anger or leave the profession”

“May he be a small boy otherwise students of higher age might have
reacted back”
“Punishment is necessary but not to the extent it crosses the limits of
student-teacher relationship”
“Punishment till class eight is prohibited”
“In another incident, it was reported that schoolmaster holds a thick
stick in his hand and call students to report on the ground where stu-
dents were severely beaten”
“Long time back disobedient students were severely punished and
sometimes mercilessly”
In the teacher-student relationship, emotion finds its way. Emotions usually

didn’t find much space in the formal school context. Teachers’ display of
emotion towards the students and vice versa can be taken as irrational and
unsystematic, however, other times it often finds its way into the expres-
sions. Teachers’ displays of anger or students’ expressions of happiness are
the common emotional responses. The benevolence of teachers towards the
students is also a combination of power and emotion which also was less
Emotions, authority, and education 57
reverberated in the educational domain, especially in the Indian school con-
text. The role of the teacher was not seen in the universal attire but within
the categories of social identities the teachers held. Female teachers, male
teachers, upper-caste teachers, and Dalit teachers were more pronounced
in the classroom proceedings. The power hierarchy was just not limited
to the roles but also the identities. Similarly, for students, the way they are
categorized according to their social class, gender, caste, and other social
categories has created a culture of category division. Social categories imply
emotions that further give meaning to the context. Emotions define the
identity of the students (see Jogdand, 2018).
In the classroom, emotional suppression is the result of formal teaching
and learning environment. It creates a climate of fear and unwanted evalu-
ation with which children are burdened. Fear is one of the most regulatory
emotions that children have to undergo, whether it is an evaluation or the
threat of being a low performer, prevalent stereotypes in our society based
on ability are linked to gender, caste, race, disability, and social class. Emo-
tion is not simply an individual response to various events but also a social
process that is shared. Belonging to a particular group that had been his-
torically oppressed and stereotyped from the side of dominant knowledge
systems has confirmed those notions. As Tiedens and Leach (2011) showed
how “social situations frequently generate emotional episodes”, it is aptly
fitted into the children’s presence in the educational space. Even in the times
of pandemic (Covid-19), it was evident in the online classroom proceed-
ings where students had to do regular classes, the students whose socio-
economic situation refrained them from getting their education continued
during the pandemic, they felt a systematic humiliation of being excluded.
The emotions of fear and humiliation are observed during the classroom
processes for the students belonging to social groups which are prejudiced.
In this process of teaching and learning, power is displayed in the enaction
of pedagogy, microaggressions, blaming and gossiping, stereotyping based
on ability, group belongingness, and predicting the future of students. The
school system in India is hierarchical and influenced by a bureaucratic
design of control. Though some emotion displayed by the authority is con-
sidered legitimate like anger towards the people in the lower position and
the students, the expression of emotions such as feeling humiliated by the
excessive control seems to be invisible or not encouraged. The question is
how the emotion of the powerful is considered legitimate and emotions of
the powerless were never cognizant in the school systems. When the plat-
form of experiences is based on hate and admonitions of others’ identities
and this hate is recognized in the school systems, the emotions will be more
downward looking rather than egalitarian (see also Heaney & Flam, 2015).
School is itself an arena where varieties of emotions can be imagined and
so the control mechanisms are strong under the systematic rules and reg-
ulations. Discipline training is an essential aspect of schooling whether it
is the training of conduct, building of character, or academic socialization.
The sources of emotional experience in schooling can be systematic regu-
lation of the children’s freedom, their choice of interests, motivation, and
representations in the classroom activities. Camacho-Morles et al. (2021)
showed through a metanalysis of 68 studies that achievement emotion is
linked to academic performances. Activity-related emotions such as enjoy-
ment, anger, and boredom have different kind of impact, where enjoyment
of learning and academic performance has positive relation; anger and
boredom have negative relation. In this case, we can infer that the school
context may create the situation of enjoyment, anger, boredom, or hopeless-
ness. Chomsky (2003) described the prevalent school system in terms of the
indoctrination system. He stated, “the entire school curriculum, from kin-
dergarten through graduate school, will be tolerated only so long as it con-
tinues to perform its institutional role” (p. 233). The school’s emphasis on
discipline, control and regulation. In one way these aspects of schools gave
meaning to the existence of schools. Society and its units whether parents,
teachers, or legal agents always want children to be well disciplined and
law-abiding. Any divulgence of the societal norms may prove antagonistic
to the established ethics of the society. Society is a cultural system under
which all the stakeholders operate. Even the political culture is in a way a
manipulation of morality and the established social ethics.
The school acts as a signpost where students get directions to move in
a particular direction. Chomsky narrated how a school in the post-indus-
trial revolution seems like a factory where students were taught discipline
and self-regulation based on the model and assumption of the assembly
line system. The Indian school system disciplined students to be part of
the sociocultural system and be fitted into the structure of society. The
modern Indian education system though emphasized diversity, creativity,
and criticality in the classroom, the idea was to develop students for lim-
ited career options available, especially, based on the values of the middle
and upper-middle classes. These systematic changes happened in the school
system which created ample divides between different categories of schools.
Some schools were well-equipped to answer the needs of middle-class par-
ents and students and some schools were under-equipped. The availability
of resources in schools significantly relates to the students, taking admis-
sion from different backgrounds. There is little indication that parents who
can afford education admit their children to low-resource schools. How-
ever, parents from lower socioeconomic status (SES) don’t find any oppor-
tunity to admit their children to more resourceful schools. The mismatch
of educational attainment and socioeconomic divides are systematically
placed within the social structure. Even there are fewer subsidies allocated
to the schools to make them resourceful and inviting for the people from
underprivileged classes. Though NEP 2020 strives for the long-term future
of education conducive to all, the matter within its implication zone is cir-
cular and not clear. For example, the development of critical thinking abil-
ity among students is hard to be accountable for and possibly regulated by
the power dynamics of school and maybe the meaning of critical thinking
is given a different token of understanding as compared to the development
of scientific acumen against the majoritarian common sense.
The movement to equip schools with required resources tried to attain
equivalency in education for the students who were coming from the low
socioeconomic status background. This is one example of the structural
divide based on social class positioning, affordability, and accessibility. The
channelizing of students’ emotions is also a matter of how they perceive
their social position and hence their ability. Observation indicates that the
students from the lower SES background who are admitted into schools
experience a kind of collective emotions which are either directed towards
the privileged others such as anger or directed inwards in the form of shame
when compared with the former. The emotions of the privileged correspond
to pride and guilt, however, this can also be observed among the underpriv-
ileged when any of the group members cross the socioeconomic barrier and
achieve any success. The pride of achievement for the underprivileged is also
linked to the self-affirmation which further acts at the collective level. This
means that the struggle of students to survive in academics and perform
well is a matter of honour and pride for their community. However, many
students from the marginalized section become underachievers in their
struggle to survive in schools, which was further noticed gravely during the
pandemic times when online education was affordable to some students.
In the Indian context, where maximum representations of students in the
highly resourceful1 schools are from a high-status upper-middle class, any
achievement from the students from the underprivileged social class and
gender group can be an achievement emotion and a matter of self-esteem
perseverance or enhancement.
Control of emotions in schools

School can also be a critically reflective space where identity, power, and
emotion had an integrative role. This is what is experienced in the teach-
er’s association with the schools’ authority and the students in the class-
room (see Zembylas, 2014). It is well stated that the powerful are less on
perspective-taking and emotional recognition of the powerless. Sometimes
the objectification of emotion is a matter of power dynamics where the
powerless is not able to generate an authentic recognition of their emotion
which usually emanates from the oppressive sociocultural and sociostruc-
turally driven contexts. Schools are one of the units of the sociocultural
system where under the umbrella of didacticism, therapeutic education,
discipline and control, and the broader discourses are laden in power and
identities. The current enforcement of various policies especially NEP 2020
to develop certain values among children is also an indication of a new
kind of colonization of the children’s minds. As the research suggests that
emotion and cognition are interlinked, the impact of value colonizing on
the marginalized students is also a denial of emotions the children experi-
ence. The role of emotional engagement in education adds to the knowledge
and understanding of the social relationships in schooling. As we saw in
the earlier chapters where power is understood and transformed into inte-
grative function is a collective emotional process that helps in the build-
ing of new knowledge (e.g., Cliffe & Solvason, 2020). The importance of
emotion in cognitive thinking has been explored in the last couple of years
(Schutz & Pekrun, 2007) where the case is made for the role of emotional
context in the educational space. They aptly stated, “an educational con-
text is an emotional place, and emotions have the potential to influence
teaching and learning processes (both positively and negatively)” (p. xiii).
The recognition of emotion as irrational, if the child deviates, devalues, or
discounts education through disobedience and disidentification, the school
system systematically either neglects the student or develops a therapeutic
programme to control his/her emotion and behaviour.
The current research on the educational context and emotional spaces
has the potential to open up a new dialogue in the educational system
of India. Greenberg (2012) stated that the process of emotional change
involves novel experience and understanding. In the case of students whose
emotions are regulated by the school system, too much control will devoid
these students of creative thinking, forming healthy social relationships
with diverse groups including teachers, and involvement in collaborative
thinking. It is to be noted that being overwhelmed by emotion is contrary to
the wellbeing of the students and the progressive philosophy of education.
In the Indian context, the progressive and heterodox schools of philosophy
emphasized the balance of thoughts and emotions.
The idea we derive is just not to regulate and control emotion as irra-
tional but to create an efficient design of schools to neutralize bias and
cater to the emotion of students and teachers. This is possible as Greenberg
(2012) suggested that emotion should inform one’s life rather than control
them. Also, the school intervention in controlling emotion or labelling it
as psychopathological breeches the universal idea of transformative eth-
ical practices (see Niesche & Haase, 2012). It also shows responsibility
towards the students’ ethical self-actualization, right to be reflective, and
their belongingness to the sociocultural experiences. The discourses in
schools where only one kind of value system is popularized directly indicate
the powerful control of others’ experiences and denying their sociocultural
rights. As observations suggest that emotions are a primary meaning-mak-
ing system, action tendency, and communication system, it is important
to see their adaptive function rather than controlling (see Greenberg,
2012). The mechanism of controlling emotions is a systematic avoidance
of students’ ability to adapt to the context and thus putting a barrier to
the construction of a new meaningful connection with the education. The
agenda of schooling is to create a good citizen vis-a-vis work better when
schools channel the students’ emotions towards participatory citizenship to
justice-oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Westheimer and
Kahne (2004) noted that the personally responsible citizen acts responsibly
in his/her community, work and pay taxes, obeys the law, and volunteers
during the time of crisis. Further, the participatory citizen becomes actively
involved in community work, organizes to help promote economic devel-
opment, involve in cleaning effort towards the environment, have sufficient
knowledge about civics matters and government bodies, and engage in
strategies for collective tasks. In comparison to the first two citizens, justice-
oriented citizen engages in critical thinking, abstract forms of morality,
logically engage in dialogues, assesses social, economic, political and cul-
tural norms of the society, put effort to address the areas of injustice, and
have tolerance towards diversity. They have a positive understanding of the
social and collective movements needed for social change. The schools in
India and most of the cultural context prepare students to be good and law-
abiding citizens. Through the routine classroom, uniforms, weekly designed
curriculum, and co-curricular activities designed to develop the citizenship
consciousness, schools’ shapes and homogenize the collective conscious-
ness, and hence regulate emotions. The art of being critical and thinking
at the abstract level is considered to be a matter of maturity. The school’s
assumption of critical thinking development or engaging in logical and fac-
tual analysis is limited to the subject till the point students are engaging in
some discipline-related problem-solving. Going beyond the texts and the
disciplinary boundaries, questioning the school structure, or the hidden
assumptions about the imposed policies is out of the imagination. However,
students and teachers make sense of the structure and its regulatory agenda
under the name of reforms. Confirming to them is important for their aca-
demic survival.
Emotion, education, and rationality

The education system in school is to cultivate a sense of pride in their
national identity along with the emotions related to one’s achievement and
academic outcomes. It also generates a sense of collective and conscious
emotions depending upon the school discourses. If the dominant discourses
in the school are about ability, achievements, and competition, the emo-
tion of the students is standardized accordingly. For example, the student’s
capacity to take others’ perspectives, understand others’ states of mind, and
be empathetic is standardized under the larger context of achievement abil-
ity discourse. So, the students’ emphasis will be to succeed, gain power and
status, surpass others, and live based on the given dominant social stand-
ards. In the classroom, as we discussed in the previous chapter, students’
experiences matter to the extent it is facilitated through efficient educa-
tional design. Students are also autonomous agents and not simply the car-
rier of what is taught. They are not the shaped entity out of the dominant
discourses too. They are an entrepreneur of their experiences, interests,
and emotions. If the schools attempt to standardize their emotion to the
will of the powerful authorities, it simply doesn’t neutralize the subjective
emotions that one has accumulated through the varieties of knowledge sys-
tems and just not the schools. The idea is to get off from the boundaries of
deep-seated social divides which has been centred in the schools and despite
the students’ performance overpowering their historical identities. The
attempt to build up one’s individuality beyond the given standards is also
the marker of the students crossing the boundaries of conventional systems
and reaching the new model of thinking which requires an abstract and
critical view of understanding society and the received meaning of one’s
self. Harre (1993) stated the general meaning of our socially constructed
actions as
the fact that people are created by other people and that their actions
are in essence joint actions does not mean that the actions people
perform are socially caused. People, as we construct them, are built
to be capable of autonomous action, to engage, usually with others,
in the reflective discourse on the possible course of action, and to be
competent in the discursive presentation of and taking up of personal
responsibility.
(p. 3)
When the students utilize their ability to question the legitimacy of a school
authority or in other words cross the stage of standardized expression
of emotions, he/she is going beyond the social construction of the given
identity.
The dominant discourse of achievement and ability is the social con-
struction students achieve in the discursive space of the school. Students
with different experiences when meeting school authorities they engage in
the inhibition-confrontation process. They either inhibit their emotions due
to the authority’s influence or confront it. This occurs especially during the
case of negative emotions which dominates their behaviour in the schools.
If students feel humiliated because of identity-based subjugation, he/she
may avoid and inhibit it because of the fear of impunity which may have
long-term negative influences affecting their health and ability to cope with
the novel situation. Some students confront and reappraise their felt emo-
tions due to the influence of authority and imposing academic relationships
like peer pressure. The development of critical ability among the students is
an enactment of felt autonomy that students from the minority group gain
due to long struggles in the social and educational world. Sometimes facil-
itation of critical thinking among students is a matter of the right to think
and express and just not facilitation.
Historically humiliated students in the school conform to the values of
dominant castes and standardizing their will to the dominant norms in
the name of pride development is paradoxical enforcement of regulation.
Some psychological model of emotion observes the emotions of others,
label them in terms of basic level feeling, and individualize them. These are
the popular models of emotion which are felt by the individual and taken
as personal without giving any reference to the sociocultural context. In
a similar context, some psychological model observes emotion as a social
process with three levels of sociality such as interpersonal, intragroup, and
intergroup (see Tiedens & Leach, 2011). Further, scholars observed emo-
tion as a situated self, a meaning-making system that makes sense of itself
in the continuity of cultural context. For example, Jaggar (1989) not only
elaborated on emotion as an intentional entity but also as a social construct
situated in the history of groups, in the active social engagements and some-
times regulated by the authority. The way emotion is taken as an individual
behavioural marker, it is at the same equally social. Social, however, is an
umbrella term in which all the three levels of sociality operate within the
ambit of power dynamics.
Emotions and identity

Social psychological models of emotions state either how an individual feels
about in the given circumstances or how society is emotional. Jaggar (1989)
noted about conventionally unacceptable emotions or outlaw emotions as
experienced by people who are subordinated by the status quo. School sys-
tems are the reflection of the status quo and people adapt to it at the cost
of their health and wellbeing. She aptly gave interesting examples, such
as, “people of colour are more likely to experience anger than amusement
when a racist joke is recounted, and women subjected to male sexual banter
are less likely to be flattered than uncomfortable or even afraid” (p. 60). In
the school’s situation, we can infer that if the student from the marginal-
ized section is the victim of casteist microaggression, it may be normal for
the people from the upper caste, but that student will feel humiliated. If
schools standardize the emotion of the upper caste’s everyday experiences,
then imposing will cost the wellbeing of the marginalized students. In this
context Jaggar (1989) stated “when unconventional emotional responses
are experienced by isolated individuals, those concerned may be con-
fused, unable to name their experience; they may even doubt their sanity”
(p. 61). Feeling pride as others are feeling, or getting angry as one peer group
are given way to more paradoxical emotions and hence impressions about
one’s ability. If the female student sees her female peer excelling in the task
usually stereotypical seen as a male domain, will show pride. This pride
differs from the standardized one or which fits the display rule sanctioned
by the schools. In the case of Dalit students in the classroom, the everyday
casteism in varieties of forms (explicit and implicit) has generated a series of
emotions among the students from shame to anger. However, this shame,
humiliation, and anger felt by students are the result of the collective histor-
ical process which is individually seen as an individual response.
The invisible power which regulates people’s life and any of their emo-
tional expressions is taken as the victim’s lack of obedience and hence lack
of potentiality to become a good citizen. This is ironic that the schools don’t
provide space for identity expression. It attempts to construct an identity
that is meaningful to a privileged few but not all. Schools in India may
cater to the need of diverse students, however, schools for different socio-
economic classes of students are different and the very idea of promotion
of diversity within the schools itself is ad hoc and unfulfilling. In the songs,
dramas, books, and curricula, the actual presence of students from differ-
ent backgrounds is a missing factor. Emotional diversity hence is also miss-
ing in the schools or constructed through the dominant discourses. The
question can arise whether emotional diversity is a matter of one’s identity
or anyone can face varieties of emotions. The answer to this kind of ques-
tion depends upon how the meaning of emotional diversity is understood in
the sociocultural space. The social identity of students seems to take many
pathways. One of the pathways is socialization through cultural values, for
example, caste and rituals. The direction and intensity of emotions also
depend upon the social context. In any social system, different emotions
are nurtured and nourished depending upon one’s social position. Even in
the context of teacher–students formal relationship, the social hierarchy
situates the emotions of different stakeholders. For example, there were
instances when teachers become the target of anger by some of the upper
caste majoritarian groups, if teachers adopted a critical approach towards
the oppressive history. Any attempt to factually correct the dominant his-
tory and critically looking at the received knowledge had invited intense
emotional feelings. Also, if any student from a marginalized caste or reli-
gious group attempt to correct the teacher holding a prejudiced view, that
students become the target of aggression and mockery. This anger is the
result of deep seated prejudices towards the oppressed and marginalized
groups which may be the result of faulty socialization. Similarly, if teachers
feel embarrassed along with the students against the student from a tribal
group calling for economic expansion through the special economic zone
as a move by the government and industry to create more jobs, this emo-
tion has a different context compared with the first one. In both cases, the
expression of the emotion of anger is directed towards the person belong-
ing to the historically oppressed group. It is also demeaning to the emo-
tion and experiences of students and teachers from a marginalized group.
Indian psychology is diverse however the way it is portrayed as systematic
and homogeneously designed under one kind of framework contributes
to its paradoxical understanding in academics. Its presence is seen in the
school systems also. The psychology of people is also hegemonical where
the everyday culture has an overriding influence on the activities of people.
Falling into the paradoxes of theory and practice is living under chaos and
it is human nature to resolve that dissonance (e.g., Festinger, 1957). The
school system standardized the student’s emotional display, the inherent
paradox where education standardizing the experience is difficult to resolve
unless the problem is addressed at both the societal and educational levels.
One can elaborate on the meaning of diversity as the presence of students
(male and female; different castes) in the classroom but the diversity is also
uplifting and representations of students from underprivileged, representa-
tive, and underinformed groups. Diversity corresponds to equality whether
it is about admission in the school, scoring marks, playing with the peer
group, eating tiffin, or respect for emotions. Any misfit to the above-stated
factors limits the movement of diversity. The schools in India are diverse in
their domain depending on the classes it represents and the fact is that most
of the students in the classroom are from lower castes. This is not diversity
as per the affirmative action and representative programme but the system-
atic segregation of schools. From the Indian context, the schools in India
provide unrepresentative and uncritical space. The structural diversity and
representations carry the deep feeling of discrimination only to be accepted
and adopted as per the wider social norms.
Schools that attempt to bring in diversity get limited by the broader soci-
etal structure. If the school opens its space for all categories of students and
lowers the fees or funding to sustain the students’ academic and survival
needs, the chances are still low that the agenda of diversity will be ful-
filled. There were cases where parents from better social classes attempted
to admit their children into the alternative schooling system. However, the
reason was the low fees but at the same time quality teaching and proper
engagement with the students. These schools work on the holistic develop-
ment of children and try to promote diversity and democratic feeling; they
fall short of facilitating the competitive structure needed to survive in the
fiercely competitive world. The overall development of children is a mis-
stated phrase as if students are helped to be part of the school, participate
in school activities, bring their socio-cultural-emotional experience, and
engage with the academic task in more collaborative but could not fit into
the red zone occupied by the dominant schools catering to the ambitions of
a privileged group of the society.
The Trishanku model of schooling where the teachers and students either
plunges into the disciplinary discourses or insightfully comes out from the
shackles of the traditional Guru-Shishya model is ironic. Trishanku model
gets back to the mythology where the protagonist Trishanku was stuck
between worldly affairs and heavenly affairs. He was neither belonging
to the earth nor heaven and got stuck in between (See Kumar, 2017). This
can be located in the statement “man is not only a multidimensional being,
but he is also an ambiguous being” (Chattopadhyaya, 1991). The duality
of practice and thoughts was persistent in the Indian schools where the
reason is not that reasonable when it comes to emotions and identity. Fur-
ther, the social context gives meaning to the self and identity. One can
logically defend his emotion or feel guilty for acting emotionally, in the lat-
ter case, his approach towards being emotional is derived from rationality-
irrationality bipolarity. When questioning power and authority, the emo-
tion of the questioner is derived from his identity and accumulated meaning
of self and directed towards the powerful. His emotion is logical to him and
is expressed through the vantage point of his activated social identity. Here
emotion which is derived from his subjectivities is meaningfully connected
to a similar kind of social identity which is critically questioning the pow-
erful others. For example, if the students collectively feel that their concerns
or needs are not met by the schools, they may launch protests or write on
social media. Here the need of the student is transformed collectively which
further engages them collectively. This may have both emancipatory and
non-threatening consequences. In the first case, the authority might under-
stand the student’s concern and acts accordingly or the authority might feel
uncomfortable with the student’s movement and take disciplinary action.
The conformists may be included and rebellions may be expelled or pun-
ished. Here we can see the interplay of power and emotion in the zone of
schools. Sibia and Misra (2011) noted that emotional regulation is virtue
and devotion (Bhakti) in the Indian context. Though there is a deep psy-
chological paradox in being and behaviour, the model cultural templates
such as whom to respect, how to behave, the role of teachers and elders,
expectations from students, and worship of the received education have
deep emotional significance in the Indian social system. When there is a
difference in identity, emotion, and expression then there will be a dis-
tortion of the self. The notion of good citizenship behaviour has also its
emotional significance. Sen (2005) indicated the epistemological limita-
tions in the choice of action which may be linked to the derivative force
such as emotion. This force becomes logical for the actors when the latter
connects it to his identity. They derive meaning out of it for the sustenance
of themself. In the educational space, the meaning of identity has an emo-
tional significance that can be understood in the students’ responses and
behaviour. In the standard environment of the school, students’ emotions
are not eliminated but they find a way in another context. The students
who faces discrimination or prejudice in the school may not express anger
in the school’s standard environment but it may have a long-lasting effect
on their interaction with others, everyday interpersonal relationships,
health, and coping with similar kinds of systems. They may disidentify
from schools and education, and due to lack of representation, they feel
alienated. This directly implies the outcasting process where instead of
Maitri or friendship creates separation and clashes of communitarian
identities. In this clash, the victim is always the historically disadvantaged
minority students. Though different emotions are experienced by people
the dominance of few emotions based on identity is a frequent demeaning
of one’s sense of agency. This frequent presence of aggressive remarks,
microaggression, and humiliation are not the mark of oversensitivity but
deep-seated prejudice prevalent in our society against the disadvantaged
group members (see West, 2019).
Understanding emotions in a cultural context
The emotion of fear which had grappled our society finds its location in
the “what if” analogy, where the fear of wrong training spoiling the child
is very prominent among parents. Fear has uniquely dominated the emo-
tional space in educational spaces. The responsibility of training, citizen-
ship socialization, and schooling of children had been taken by the schools
which also includes the skill development to make children prepared for
future jobs. The rise of online education at an exponential rate is provid-
ing an enriched platform where technology and learning are effectively uti-
lized to prepare students for the next level of a competitive world quite
advanced as compared to the earlier generations. These hubs of education
are emotionless and the students are the passive recipients of knowledge,
though there are platforms for asking the question, however, the questions
themselves may be directed to clear the misunderstood concept. There were
other kinds of questions that take the discipline forward from the critical
point of view where students’ questions are at the levels of the idea, taken
for granted assumption, or faulty premises. The neutralization of emotion
on the online platform is more or less the same as it happens in the class-
room. The fear to be non-conforming to the majority, or of teachers rep-
rimanding students on raising any critical points, and further the fear of
public humiliation may result in a sober attitude on the part of students.
When it comes to the actual classroom education in the school, as stated
earlier, the agenda is to discipline the students through classroom etiquette
and pay attention to the academic instructions. The humiliation of students
based on their caste has been frequently cited through different catego-
ries of observations, both academic and narrative based. The systematic
humiliation of the students from lower caste backgrounds is through the
microaggressions where they are frequently insulted through gossip, lack of
representation in the classroom when teachers are asking any questions or
eye contact, and sarcasm about their ability.
Observations also showed that non-conforming students were consid-
ered as low on ability, problematic, causing disturbance to the classroom
proceedings, or unintelligent. Mostly they were not allowed in the class-
room or seated at the back. Even the students who conformed were humili-
ated and insulted for their belonging to a low caste or stereotyped for their
being from a lower social class. The idea of progressive education is also
to provide an emotionally safe space and an environment of self-expres-
sion which is most of the time lacking in schools. The hurling of casteist
comments on the non-conforming students is not uncommon in both the
online and actual classroom. As per the situation where nationalism has
started a new form of discourse among the people, schools have acted as a
regime of controlling the students’ actions. Those who were non-conform-
ing were considered illegitimate students and the controlling of students’
sense of emotions was operated both from the policy and school level. At
the psychological level, the identity of students was taxing on the students’
everyday academic activities. They are bullied and victimized and much of
the time these microlevel oppressions are underreported and the students
have to accept the burden of being from a particular sociocultural group
and identity.
The available sociocultural models in cultural psychology, as studied and
researched by scholars in India, attempted to define identity from the cul-
tural perspective and they redefined the available categorical understand-
ing of the students belonging to lower caste groups and tribal groups. The
scholars working to understand sociocultural psychology tried to bring
equality of perspective from the cultural vantage point. However, culture
is not homogeneous and within the same culture, there are varied experi-
ences. The attempt to homogenize culture is usually observed in the school
agenda. Sociocultural psychology deriving from the work of Vygotsky
(1978), as one of the protagonists of the Marxist approach to the cultural
understanding of human behaviour, situates students as a social being and
their cognition as a culturally emergent phenomenon. Studies indicated
that cultural diversity helps in the integration of emotion and cognition
and helps students go beyond the restraints of formal and imposed cur-
riculum (e.g., Mirza, 2016). For example, in the school where I worked
earlier, there was no imposition of curriculum, and the pedagogy was activ-
ity-based where the teacher acted as a facilitator and collaborates with the
students engaging on the problem at hand. Students in the class were from
different classes, such as from the weavers’ community, children of domes-
tic workers, and children of shopkeepers. Among them, however, many of
them were from upper-caste backgrounds except the children of weavers
and domestic workers. Some of the students who came from minority and
Dalit backgrounds find it hard to adjust even to the environment where stu-
dents were given space to put up their ideas, emotions, and experiences. The
reason can be the whole schooling space flourished in a historical context
of discipline, training, and epistemic violence based on identity and ability.
These are not simple proxies to be taken as a cause behind these students’
lack of motivation or self-handicapping behaviour, they have deep histori-
cal connections constructed in the form of stereotypes and preserved in the
zeitgeist and resulting ingroup labelling and hence self-labelling.
The uniqueness of this form of schooling is its critical engagement with
the students and offering a model of school which is not a school typi-
cally but a space of self-exploration and liberation. Liberation of learning
is not an aimless exercise as some policymakers may attribute this form of
schooling as lagging or regressive. The recent NEP 2020 is hinting some-
where about activity-based learning and the amalgamation of tradition and
the modern. In the earlier educational movement at the policy levels, the
national policy on education (NPEs) and later national curriculum frame-
work (NCF) also pushed for experiential education where culture is in a
more diverse form. In other words, in the last couple of decades, emphasis
was on understanding the students’ sociocultural meaning-making. How-
ever, this effort formally at least in the academic research taken aptly by the
Indian scholars working in the area of sociocultural psychology. Returning
to the classroom context of education where the power dynamic is either one
sided or dissipated through the empowering methodologies, the emotion
gets shaped, co-constructed, and deconstructed at the same time depend-
ing upon the school values. In this process, emotions can be self-directed
such as pride, ambition, happiness, sadness, and guilt or they can be other
directed for example shame, compassion, and sympathy. In the case of the
former, emotions emerge in the independent self-construal society and in
the latter case, emotions emerge in the interdependent self-construal society
(see Choi, Han & Kim, 2007; Markus & Kityama, 1991). Choi, Han, and
Kim (2007) pointed towards the limitation or ecological fallacy of these
kinds of comparative scheme which need not be a sweepy assumption about
the deep sociocultural differences existing within the geographical bound-
aries. Emotions that are self-directed such as pride or guilt usually emanate
among the students of high status who are powerful through their acquired
social capital and teachers who have certain expertise and hold the author-
ity to regulate students’ behaviour. Self-conscious emotions such as shame
and humiliation are usually seen among the powerless and in the case of
students who are from low-status groups, or low achievers and socially
stereotyped. The systematic cultural humiliation and insults in the schools
which are the result of deep sociocultural hierarchy may also result in the
feeling of anger directed towards the powerful. When observed from the
social identity perspective the anger among the students from minority and
disadvantaged sections is the result of humiliation. These students want to
identify with education and try to excel without any social and other kinds
of capital; however, the situation of existing stereotypes prevalent against
their group in society and school creates a large barrier both in terms of
their present standing in education and their future mobility. In most cases,
it results in disidentification and devaluation where it seems that anger has
reshaped itself into escape and avoidance. In the school’s context, there
are few cases of student protest especially from the sides of disadvantaged
students regarding their rights because of the controlled construction of the
school structure.
Understanding emotions and diversity in the classroom

Kincheloe (2008) noted that educational leaders mostly control the school
curriculum and funds allocated to run the schools. The monitoring and
accountability of teachers fitting into the given standards of schooling
and knowledge is a regular marker of power and control. Through this
control of knowledge, teachers, and policies schools also control different
kinds of emotional schemes. The systematic development of schools is
in terms of the desires of educational leaders communicated through the
designs of schools and under the shape of rational action. From Bruner
(1996), it can be inferred that schools are cultures themselves where there
are toolkits that sustain their legitimacy. These toolkits are “techniques
and procedures for understanding and managing” (p. 98) the school cul-
ture. They construct narratives and stories of success, which Nambissan
and Srinivas (2013) discussed as the reproduction of structure and agency,
which affects the students’ and teachers’ pedagogical relationships and dis-
courses. The context of schools which don’t have a clear anti-discrimination
policy may reproduce the culture of discrimination based on their estab-
lished and model system of pedagogy and learning. The resistance and
mediation by the possible democratic pedagogue such as teacher to work
upon in tackling discrimination by addressing the students feeling, some-
times regulated by the authorities. This may result in teachers being given
different tasks unrelated to academics or asked to resign.
Any attempt to collaborate with the students’ emotions, especially, emo-
tions that are demeaning to one’s existence in the school is preemptively
neutralized by the powerful authorities. This is not to say that authority
in itself is reprimanding all the time; however, the distribution of author-
ity is an effective means to legitimatize all the agents of schools. Students
as learning agents and teachers as pedagogical agents come into congru-
ency through the active moderation of the school culture. Chawla-Duggan
(2007) studied the children’s understanding of schools, how they develop
their “learners’ identity” and the strategy they construct to adjust and
adapt to the school’s circumstances. This study indicated that the children
are not passive receivers and reproduce as the schools expect from them
but are active constructors of their identity. In the process of understand-
ing their place in the school both in terms of teacher-peer relationship and
school identification, children manage their emotions also. For example,
in one of my observations, when children from working-class parents were
approached in the school, they collectively responded with their under-
standing of their space in the school. Though some were speaking and some
were silent observers, they were well aware of their social position, the
kind of job their parents do and what school means to them. As the above
study noted that children are equipped with different social, cultural, and
material resources which may further lead to differential success. However,
these differences in the available resources or capital are situated in a com-
parative socioeconomic context, where children from low caste and social
classes are homogenized into the same categories. The difference should
be objectively stated in terms of where the resources are lacking. As this is
a pragmatic understanding, at least in the sense of Dewey and Ambedkar,
that deficit in resources, capital, and ability also needs to be objectively
defined.
The growth of research on emotional intelligence and self-regulation
ventured into the academic domains. The research suggested that the
role of self-regulation in academic and behavioural outcomes is direct.
Self-regulation featured as one of the causal factors of school readiness
consists of focusing and maintaining attention, emotional regulation, pos-
itive response to the stress, reflection, and sustained positive social inter-
actions with teachers and peers (see Blair & Raver, 2014). The congruence
of both self-regulation and school readiness estimates the student’s success
in academics. Exploring from the power perspective, the schools reward
the student’s ability to self-regulate their emotion and behaviour. This is
taken as a token for the student’s adaptability to the given school culture
and norms. To adjust to the norms of power is a cultural outlook to see stu-
dents as future citizens who are emotionally stable, normative, and partic-
ipative. The terms like academic performance, cognitive fitness, academic
adaptability, and efficacy are promoted and defined from the perspective
of authority whether schools, parents, law, or society. In the process of
self-regulation, it can be noticed that it is not happening completely as an
individual phenomenon but has a deep sociocultural impact. Thus, the
adaptability and adjustment to the above authority assumptions is a new
shift in discourse towards the self-regulation.
Conclusion
There is a strong link between emotion with power and it is evident that
the powerful find the emotion of regulated people either invisible or threat-
ening. Power has many faces and power defines the situation of the power-
ful and powerless. It is indicated how being powerful with resources such
as psychological, social, and monitory defines the social interaction of the
negotiators such as students and teachers, teachers and higher authority. In
other words, exploring how the legitimation in education moulds the power
dynamics in the educational domains and how this power relation is tran-
scended in the future display important insight to the working of schools in
the current times. The role of power is undeniably stronger in the shaping of
thought processes and behaviour. Any divergence from the established nor-
mative way is against the will of authority and hence disordered. In recap,
we can say that the school manages the conscious emotions of the students
by providing a platform of learning which systematically homogenize their
identities. We have observed how students from marginalized backgrounds
come to school with their collective memory, sociocultural meanings, and
identities. Managing their emotion through the general understanding
available about these groups becomes contrary to the possible coopera-
tiveness and diversity sharedness. One of the repercussions that students
from marginalized group face is an exclusion based on their social identi-
ties. As a result, they become self-conscious of their excluded identities in
the domain of privileged outgroup. This has a remarkable impact on their
emotions leading to negative emotions (e.g., humiliation, shame, fear, dis-
gust, and hatred). This further influences the construction of their self and
social identity. In the next chapter, the issues of stereotyping, prejudicing,
and othering will be dealt which has a deep connection to their collective
emotions.
Note
1 Resourceful schools in this context refer to the benchmark based on which any
school can provide necessary and sufficient resources to the students which
include well-equipped classrooms, skilled faculty members, clean toilets, an
equipped library, playground, tutorial system, effective mechanism to involve
parents and guardians, counselling facility, and security and effective mecha-
nism to deal with microaggressions and discrimination.
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4 Stereotyping, prejudicing,
and othering
Students and staff who are the victims of prejudice may have negative inter-
personal relations, lower academic outcomes, and less identification with
schools and have lower academic efficacy which can affect their wellbe-
ing. As we see later that there are researches that showed students coping
mechanisms by devaluing school activities and affiliating with their social
groups, the outcome for the minority and marginalized students is more
oppressive. In one sense, stereotyping and prejudicing based on people’s
belongingness to marginalized groups make them others and sometimes
invisible and voiceless.
The recent row on the high court order in Karnataka, not allowing
Muslim girl students to give exams wearing Hizab and Burka is a new
expression of prejudice in the name of discipline and uniformity.
It is indicative that this form of regulation in education has nothing to do
with the vision of education and learning which was imagined by Gandhi,
Phule, Ambedkar, or any progressive social reformer. The rise of social
media trials through trolls represents the surface level but deeply prejudiced
understanding of minorities and culture. The use of majoritarian religious
symbols, for example, tika in the educational and formal spaces does not
draw attention or protest, though perhaps these too should come under the
uniformity of appearance in the formal contexts like schools. It directly led
us to the segregation of mind, faulty education system, and powerful influ-
ence on the people who are struggling to have their constitutional rights
accepted. Even the courts sometimes come out with prejudice guarding
laws under the umbrella term of justice.
The prejudice connects with stereotyping and othering in the complex
underplay of ingroup and outgroup. Though it gets always simplified and
overgeneralized (Allport, 1954). The prejudicing and othering of Dalits,
Muslims, and Christians are common systematic exclusionary process
experienced by these social groups in different domains. In the case of
Muslims, students face the gazes of othering. It seems that the schools are
meant only for upper-caste Hindus. Though there are madrasas where most
of the students are boys, their education is homogenous and its agenda is
74 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-7

Stereotyping, prejudicing, and othering 75
to discipline, self-regulate, and respect (e.g., Allam, 2013; Gupta, 2015).
Allam (2013) noted:
It is through the internalization of the norms of the madrasa that stu-

dents feel that they gain respect in society. After all, it is the madrasa
which gave them knowledge through which they can discern what is
good and ignore what is forbidden.
(p. 240)
In the heterogenous schools, though Urdu is mostly not taught, the Mus-
lim students are limited. In the affluent schools’, Muslim students are few
in number and from an upper-middle-class background. The government
schools in India mostly comprises students from the working class and
among them, the Dalit and Muslim student are unevenly distributed. Ear-
lier village maktab consisted of both Muslim and Hindu students but in
today’s time, the deep ideological and political upheavals have politized the
knowledge into religious propaganda (see also Rajan, 2021). The enumer-
ation of representations of castes, communities, religions, and gender in
different categories of schools such as missionaries, government, middle,
and lower status private schools are well documented and systematically
figured region-wise (see Gupta, Agnihotri & Panda, 2021; Kumar, 2018;
Ramachandran, 2021; Rao, 2016; Shah, Bagchi & Kalaiah, 2021; Shah
& Bara, 2021). The social-psychological aspects in the school contexts of
India need further explanations. Though studies in the western domains
intended to figure out the psychological metrics for the issues of self and
social identity in the educational context (e.g., Mavor, Platov & Bizumic,
2017). This chapter will engage with both subtle and blatant social-psycho-
logical nuances in the Indian educational system. Further discussing on the
schools which fulfils the need of marginalized people, one of the parents
expressed his anger for the schools which feel shameful and practices dis-
crimination in admitting students from the working class and marginalized
group.1 At the same time, he expressed his respect for the schools which
look after and take care of children. He stated:
Yeh to nahi kahenge daave ke saath ki yeh school kiske liyen banaya-
gaya hai
Magar yeh kahenge iss school mein jo itfaak se bhi chalaan ayaa
Aur school se acha to yeh school hai
Kaun sa videshi log school mein padhayenge yeh bataien
Tarah tarah ki language me padhai hoti hai
Teachers sabhi bacho ko padate hain
Aur private school ki apeksha yeh school acha hai
Garib bache un private school mein padha hi nahi payenge
Woh private school garib bacho ko lega to uska beijjati ho jayega
Apna position banata hai
Lekin iss tarah ke school me dekhaua nahi hai
[I will not say with confidence that for whom this school was built
But I will say that if someone comes to this school by chance
This school is better than other schools
Tell me in which school foreigners are coming and teaching students
Teaching and learning happen in different languages
Teachers teach all the students
In comparison to private schools this school is better
Poor children could not take education in those private schools
If those private school admits poor children, it is a disrespect for
their image
They built their position
But in this kind of school, there is no show buzz]
He expressed his determination, confidence, and sense of pride in his chil-

dren who are taking education from South point which provides low-cost
quality education, food, and employment.
Iska koi mukabla nahi hai

Hamare chaar bache hain English ke
Main dava karta huun sabhi schoolon se
Hamari paas aukat 101 rupaye ke hai par puuri duniya ke samne
hum aukaat dikhaiyenge
Hamari beti ka mukawala koi karle?
Bata denge kis school ka beta hai...bacha hai
[There is no comparison
We have four children who are studying here
I challenge all other schools
We have lower level but we will show our level to whole world
I challenge anyone compete with my daughter
We will tell from which school my daughter, my children are]
The response showed an integration of emotions towards the perceived

discrimination by mainstream schools and respect for the school which
caters to the needs of the working class. There is not one domain where
prejudice is not experienced, but it spreads in different domains. Schools
are the site of power display and prejudice is systematically woven into the
system. Schools are not apart from the broader social structure and the
platform that school creates to educate students, itself becomes the vantage
point of prejudice expression and biases. In the Indian school system, this
social-psychological marker of intergroup relation is seen between teacher-
student, student-student, and other staff. The data shows the rise of stu-
dents from diverse backgrounds in the schools. However, as referred to
in the previous chapter, schools in India are of varieties where there are
distributions of high, middle, and lower status schools. Among them, there
are private and government schools. Diversity in the Indian context is not
always pluralistic in the educational domain but segregating. Prejudice is
observed and felt on many occasions by the students and staff. Among the
students of a minority group discrimination based on intergroup prejudice
is rampant. The systematic studies on stereotyping and prejudice in the
school system have a direct link with the wider social system. Though ste-
reotyping and prejudicing are known concepts, their impact is insurmount-
able in almost every domain where people make a hasty judgement based
on their preconceived notions about the people belonging to different social
groups. Allport’s (1954) work on the nature of prejudice was remarkable
and exemplary. He situated people’s judgement in the context where people
don’t give a second thought to the outgroup’s reality. The reality is framed,
historicized, and deep-seated to be critically self-noticed. Schools are the
domain where stereotyping and prejudicing operates at the everyday level.
In the Indian situation, there are no neutralizers systematically designed
where people become conscious of these phenomena and vilify them. Stu-
dents are the victims if they belong to the social group which is historically
oppressed. In other words, the phenomenon under question is banal and
hegemonized.
School space is also a domain of identities where a different form of iden-
tity processes works simultaneously. Apart from that identity with which
children are associated is controlled by the school authorities and the fac-
tions outside the schools. Schools act as homogenizing agents through com-
mon pedagogy and curriculum. In that act, the students from the prejudiced
identities further face marginalization where they face discrimination in the
name of homogenization. Identity matters and is not stagnant, the way it is
appropriated and concretized in our society. The next section will discuss
the meaning of the identity process in the context of power and education.
Identity process: social identity perspective

Identity serves two functions. At one level it acts as a signifier of one’s self
and at the other, it acts as an operating agent falling into the processes
either inimical or favourable to the person. The process through which
an individual’s assigned social identity interacts with social context and is
shaped by it lies in the perspective which has more explaining potential. The
social identity perspective was developed within the metatheoretical frame-
work of European social psychology (Hogg et al., 2004, p. 249). It rested
upon certain assumptions concerning the nature of people and society, and
their interrelationship, maintaining that society comprises social catego-
ries which are situated in power-status relations to one another (Hogg &
Abrams, 1988). The social identity perspective in social psychology is com-
monly viewed as an analysis of intergroup relations between large-scale
social categories, which rests on a cognitive definition of self, the social
group, and group membership (Hogg et al., 2004, p. 246). Working at the
meso-level of analysis (Pettigrew, 1998), social identity of the person acts as
a channel between macro-social factors and micro-psychological analysis
(also see Simon, 2004). In other words, macro-level variables such as social
institutions, political, and economic systems and micro-level variables such
as individual motivation, feeling, and behaviour interact with each other
through the medium of social identity. Thus, the social identity perspec-
tive opposes any kind of reductionist approach to explaining psychological
phenomena. This cycle of macro-meso-micro together denotes the identity
process (Simon, 2004) based on one’s accentuation of similarity between
self and the ingroup (Hogg & Abrams, 1988). However, the situation plays
a predominating role where individuals self-categorize themselves based on
the relevance of social categories, that is, an individual’s perception of the
“fit” of the category, where the concerned social category becomes more
cognitively accessible (Oakes, 1987).
The social identity perspective has its conceptual origins in research by
Henri Tajfel on perceptual accentuation effects of categorization (Tajfel,
1959), cognitive aspects of prejudice (Tajfel, 1969), effects of minimal cat-
egorization (Tajfel et al., 1971), and social comparison processes and inter-
group relations (Tajfel, 1974). Drawing on work by Berger (1966; Berger &
Luckmann, 1971), Tajfel first defined social identity as “the individual’s
knowledge that he belongs to certain social groups together with some
emotional and value significance to him of this group membership” (Tajfel,
1972, p. 31). In the social identity tradition, groups are defined as collec-
tions of people sharing the same social identity, which is, having similar-
ity in the association with highly preferable social categories (Hogg et al.,
2004). According to Turner (1988), the original intergroup theory which
analysed intergroup conflict and social change focused on the group’s com-
petencies with one another for positive distinctiveness. The nature of the
competition, and the strategies used, depends on people’s beliefs about the
nature of intergroup relations (Hogg et al., 2004). This general idea, which
became the social identity theory, later became the “social identity theory
of intergroup behaviour” (Turner et al., 1987). However, the more recent
self-categorization represents a general theory of group processes based on
the idea that shared social identity depersonalizes individual self-perception
and actions (Turner, 1988).
As pointed out by Hogg and Abrams (1988), “social identity is a for-
mally defined and theoretically integrated set of processes and assumptions
explaining the relationship between sociocultural forces and the form and
content of individual social behaviour” (p. 13). Of the above development in
the structure of social identity perspective, two of the major developments
were social identity theory and self-categorization theory which comple-
mented each other in understanding identity processes. Stereotyping, prej-
udicing, and othering can better be discussed through the understanding
of social identities and where its activation is felt by the concerned group
members who become the target of the social categorization.
At the current time, some scholars may speculate that there are enough
studies on stereotypes and prejudices. In other words, they may insist that
there is a point of saturation in the understanding of these concepts. How-
ever, the more it is believed that the prejudices are saturated and easily
reconciled, the more its roots are strengthened and are felt in the normality
of everyday life and the private homogenization of people belonging to the
outgroups. Since stereotypes and prejudices are linked to the social process
which involves intense emotional reactions towards the outgroup, the num-
ber of instances in the school dynamics witness to its ever-increasing effect.
The socio-political times, the rise of the discourse of market influences and
intersecting ideologies are not operating in its mechanism but they have a
deep influence on the identities and power. For example, in the times of
neoliberalism, the value-loaded terms such as market regulation and the
upliftment of meritorious have de-emphasized the social identities and ste-
reotypes associated with them. The backroom boys involved in the actual
transaction of prejudicing becomes invisible under the influence of neolib-
eralism. Prejudice involves negative emotion towards the outgroup and this
social influence is pronounced in the form of action towards the powerless.
In the chapter, the influence of prejudice is understood in the school con-
text where there are clear-cut dynamics of teacher-teacher, teacher-student,
and student-student. This will be understood under the dominant influ-
ence of power, operating hegemonically within the school premise and also
from the structural level. The concept of prejudice was heavily challenged
in western research and had made a remarkable entry into educational pol-
icies. In the educational domain in India, some of the works addressed the
issues of prejudices in the subdomains of multilingualism in education, ped-
agogy, and curriculum in different cultural contexts. However, the direct
social-psychological challenges like stereotype threat and prejudice have
been less addressed at the policy level. It was indicated earlier that efficient
policies are necessary for the social and emotional development of students
in the classroom. However, policies also adumbrate the dominant ideology.
If the issues of prevalent prejudices will be addressed through the policies, it
may act as a boomerang effect on those dominant ideologies which shaped
the policies.
The inherent paradox of educational reforms and non-address of preju-
dice has largely occupied the Indian educational domain. The studies done
to see how stereotype threat effect and prejudice operate in the Indian edu-
cational domain didn’t address the power dynamics of the dominant social
structure. The innovative education programmes seem to design an edu-
cational system nurturing mediocrity and the latter is one of the reasons
for the fostering of prejudice rather than tackling it at a holistic level. The
sources of prejudice are strengthened in the neoliberal times rather than
diminished. Though the sources of prejudices are located in some cogni-
tive, emotional, and behavioural components, it is systematically observed
in everyday practices such as casteism, sexism, nationalism, job discrim-
ination, hate speeches against minority groups and migrants, bigotry,
authoritarianism, and homophobia. Researchers in the western tradition
highlighted these markers of prejudices and had greatly contributed to the
policies.
To learn in an environment, where rampant stereotypes and prejudices
are operating on an everyday basis, is a systematic prevalence of oppression
in which the students are trying to survive. This is an indicator of stiff-
ened power dynamics based on identities. The possible worlds of children,
as indicated by Jerome Bruner (1986), become limited to the environment
of prejudice prevalent in schools. These prejudices are the result of social
categorizations that concretized through practices and rituals. The possi-
ble meaningfulness which can be derived through the prejudice neutralizer
is the marker of expansion of the children’s world. It is the creation of
new avenues taking out the children from the grip of psychological disad-
vantages that has occupied the consciousness of the marginalized being.
The notions of belongingness in the school are a co-constructed phenome-
non where the meaning of prejudice can be understood through groupings
and categorizations. In the same classroom, some students know that they
belong and others are in ambivalent situation. This is further facilitated by
the teachers and staff who may intentionally or unintentionally promote
these notions of authenticities. Prejudices are nurtured in varieties of ways
and the school agents such as students, teachers, parents, and staff together
co-construct its meaning. For example, the meaning of high achiever is just
not what the students showed through the marks but also their social group
belongingness. Usually, it is observed that high achievers in the school con-
text are students from a higher caste as compared to students from a lower
caste. This statement may not be misinterpreted in terms of essentialism of
abilities but the real cause is the availability of resources, historical deval-
uation, and negative stereotype that has occupied the educational domain.
Since school provides a platform for equality, as it is ideally indicated, the
difference in the performances and unequal treatments are the markers of
the practices which is fuelled by various forms of prejudices. The essential-
ist’s view about human agency and also as a matter of group belongingness
situates the knowledge about any person like a person. As Rorty (1989)
critically discussed how knowledge is a constructed entity and is not the
“mirror of nature” (see Olson, 2001). Prejudices put blockades to the chil-
dren’s intellectual growth and possibilities of scientific exploration unless
the child gets some space for expression and resistance.
Prejudice is absorbing, creates social-psychological boundaries and lim-
its contact. In the process, the agency of the group members is objectified.
Thomas Nagel (1986) in his work on “the view from nowhere” stated at
the start, “something peculiar happens when we view the action from an
objective or external standpoint. Some of its most important features seem
to vanish under the objective gaze” (p. 110). The words of Nagel have a
transformative effect. It suggests the possibilities that Bruner imagined for
the meaningful future of the child where the school has the potential to
play an important part. Educational psychology, even today, dominantly
neglects social influence. It is based on certain factors which are assumed
to be measured, diagnosed, and cured. The fictionalized and ideologized
image of human agency, according to Martin-Baro (1994), missed the his-
tory of the oppressed and limited the people to individuals only. Prejudice is
not a problem to be cured within the person. The personality dimension of
prejudice such as authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950) has essentialized it
as some trait that is loaded with conventionalism, authoritarian submission
and aggression, tender-minded, superstitious and stereotypical, identifying
with dominant and powerful, destructive in approach, and so on. Further,
Altemeyer (1981) extended it in the form of a scale to measure right-wing
authoritarianism with reliable dimensions such as authoritarian submission,
authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. So, if someone is showing
the mentioned behaviour in a social relationship, the person is categorized
based on some mentioned trait, disposition, or personality dimensions.
This is possible in schools where the teachers and principals may show the
mentioned trait in their actual behaviour. They design curriculum, decide
pedagogy, engage in actual classroom behaviour, regulate marks based on
performance, and design timetables. The most needed aspects of classroom
interactions and school culture remain undocumented. The process of sur-
veillance and continuous observation of students has also occupied the
school system. Though the actual process of prejudicing seems an individual
psychological response towards the other, it is a social process mediated by
social identities (see Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue, 2014; Duckitt &
Mphuthing, 1998). The power dynamics between the social identities in
the school system are also an exchange of discourses and values, where
prejudice is communicated and perceived. Usually, this happens between
an authority figure and the subordinates. In the school context, this subor-
dination can be linked to either teacher from a marginalized background
who becomes the victim of peers’ and students’ preconceived notions. It
is also rampantly seen between the teachers, especially teachers from the
upper-status background are prejudiced towards the teacher from the lower
status group.
Some people advocate it as the oversensitivity factor rather than the fre-
quent facing of prejudices in different forms. For example, not giving enough
space to the student to question, negatively judging the marginalized,
double-checking if the student performed well, caring for some students
who carry positive stereotypes, back-benching students, holding a stereo-
typical view about the girl students, and practicing untouchability in some
forms. Prejudice manifests in many forms, as we see in the school contexts.
Mostly it encircles around the identities and powers, where the dominant
identities manipulate the oppressed identities into their agenda of sustain-
ing societal power in one form or the other. The case of Dalit students in
India is one paramount example where there is a double impact of social
exclusions. This further systematically excludes the girl child and embeds
them into various social pressures adumbrated through gender, regional,
linguistic, and social class dominance. Since power has many faces, some
visible and some invisible, the deep-seated prejudice against the Dalit stu-
dents in society has dominated the space of schools. At least in the univer-
sity domain, the chances are high that students with the help of a student
union may protest, but in the school context, the protest and movement to
address the issues of prejudice at various levels of schooling is hard to see.
Educational reform is mostly seen at the higher level but at the school level,
the policies have only regulated rather than liberated the minds of students.
Starting from early childhood education to the higher secondary level,
students generally are punished or sometimes violently controlled in the
name of discipline and self-regulation. Prejudice as we may infer has a com-
mon global meaning but it operates at the cultural level. In Indian schools,
prejudice is manifested and rigidified in the existing stereotypes. For exam-
ple, if the upper-caste students in the classroom get to know that one of
their classmates is from the Dalit group, the activation of the existing stere-
otypes is quite common which further impact the social relationship. The
very interaction patterns create a situation where the simplified meaning is
constructed based on the identities and further blocks the understanding.
This can be tackled through efficient interventions where one group tries
to venture into the experience of others and come to the truth. However,
prejudice has a stronghold on the mindset and is nurtured through various
alterities such as parents, grandparents, teachers, neighbours, and all the
interventions model fails at addressing the roots of prejudice. There were
several attempts to tackle prejudice, which is assumed to link to various
other social and educational challenges such as violence, academic fail-
ure, bullying, pedagogical domination, unrepresentative curriculum, and
students’ disidentification. Education is not the problem of school alone
but is the social problem. Education is sometimes nurtured through the
social identities through the lens of prejudices taken as normal and unques-
tionable. The making of education in the neoliberal times as driven by the
market forces is the problematic placing of identities as a neutral concept.
Education is not ahistorical and neutral. It is political and critical. When
we conceptualize education as neutral, anyone can learn, and standardize
its didactic format, we underestimate the power of social identities which
played a very important part in that manipulation of knowledge.
The power dynamics is not just a mechanism but a display of the rule
of dominant identities. The situating of identities in different commercial
and economic conditions preserved the group-based prejudices in varieties
of activities. The schools in the Indian context become the platform for
capacity building apart from the idealist agenda to promote values derived
from the dominant ideologies. It represents varieties of values from cultural
asceticism, acquiring knowledge, and skills to the consumption of skills.
However, in all these historical processes, prejudices also continued. Still in
the 21st century where the aura of modernity has taken new turns of inter-
pretations, that is, from idealism to materialism and then the integration
of both in the social activities of people, the prejudices have taken a new
form and interestingly taken forward by the current generations. The quest
of becoming a true human being to the manipulation of an idea to make it
practical for individual economic gain is shaping the new culture of human
relationships. Some schools are good at facilitating this agenda and many
schools are alienated hence they serve the everyday need of the people who
cannot afford expensive education. Neoliberalism, if understood to have an
overpowering influence on all, the alienation of identities, in the documen-
tation and everyday behaviour, is contrary to the agenda of equality. All
the system has a face and we can see it only if the mask of neutrality and
market is removed. Thus, the comprehensive account that neoliberalism is
the situation of the profit motive, merit creation, and other forms of crea-
tivity is nullified once the identities agenda is also included. Neoliberalism
in education can mask the identities in the name of neutralities but we need
movements to unmask the same. Prejudice against the students belonging
to any oppressed group seems to take a “substantive mode of mentality”.
It is “the tendency to account for or describe events (social or otherwise)
in terms of the ‘essence’ of things instead of in terms of related process”
(cf. Sherif, 1948). The unscientific appropriation of human nature as a group
nature to which the person is a member has always sustained and nurtured
prejudice. In the classroom process, the tendency to observe others in an
uncorrected way is an inclination to get the reified look only. This is an
approach to sustain the social structure and retain the social position both
for the person and his generations. The future generations are socialized in
those terms of seeing the members of oppressed and marginalized groups
as uncompetitive and further creating a system of exclusion and incompe-
tency. Though social identity theory showed the positive effect of group on
the wellbeing, self-esteem, and efficacy of the students (see Mavor et al.,
2017), the overpowering effect of prejudiced intergroup relationships has
always created divides in the classroom. Researchers, activists, teachers,
and even the policies intervened in this direction but the oceanic influence
of the social structure negatively influenced the future social relationship
where the latter is an important marker and facilitator of social change.
Power dynamics, schooling, and prejudice

In the classroom process, the prejudices against the person work in a pow-
erful and authoritarian context. In the actual classroom settings, the availa-
ble prejudices are internalized by the members of the target group and form
a part of their social selves. Though this may not be communicated by the
family members the varieties of the domain in which the child enters equip
him with self-prejudicing by providing cues. These cues are loaded in the
everyday teacher-student and student-student relationships such as sitting
arrangements, eateries, and food distributions. These social cues if asked,
the sender rationalizes into neutrality. Prejudice operates both explicitly
and implicitly, where the former is the direct expression in the public
moderated by the time, and the latter is like a reflex response sometimes
privately expressed. It may be possible that the prejudiced students may
express their positive self-concept on the explicit measure rather than the
implicit measure of a social stigma (see Ashburn-Nardo, 2010). This can be
further generalized in the case of classroom prejudices. Here, the group of
students interacts as per the social norms, established schemas, and com-
mon sense understanding of one another. Unless this interaction is deeper
and dialogical the swift impression about one another in terms of ingroup
and outgroup categorization is common. The studies showed how a par-
ticipant persists to carry on with the dispositional attribution about others
despite the availability of situational information which they usually over-
look (see Jones & Harris, 1967). Prejudice is hard to combat due to one’s
tendency to confirm one’s prevalent preconceived notions about others. The
school’s role in the identification and prevention of prevalent stereotypes
and prejudices adds to human rights. However, the methods which are best
suited to address these issues are based on an incomplete understanding of
the meaning of stereotypes and prejudices. They may serve as curative func-
tions based on threats and punishments only. The more inter-dialogical
approach to understanding their roots is hardly facilitated in the schools.
Some schools undertook a task to address these issues of prejudices at the
model level and they explicitly portray their school as non-discriminatory
based on caste and gender. The “anxiety of incompleteness”2 (Appadurai,
2006; p. 8) is coped with the alignment to the belief one holds about others.
One of the recent examples of a caste-based prejudice in the Indian
school3 showed how students from upper caste refused to take mid-day
meals cooked by the Dalit cook (bhojmata). They wanted their meal to
be cooked by the upper-caste cook. At the school level where children are
assumed and expected to show obedience and conformity expressed their
socialized form of a deep-seated caste-based prejudice in their refusal to
take food from the lower caste cook. This move was rejected and contested
further by Dalit students as an anti-caste movement who refused the food
cooked by the reappointed upper-caste bhojmata. In the Indian schools,
this was one of the rare moves where students participated in the social
movement against the prevalent palpable prejudices observed directly. One
of the reasons is the social power in which the students from the upper
caste are socialized led to the sustaining of prejudices. The prejudices are
either shown explicitly or implicitly preserved. It depends upon the kind
of mechanism which emerges during any intergroup interactions. One of
the studies (Guinote, Willis, & Martellotta, 2010) noted that the group
who is perceived to be powerful hold a positive attitude towards powerful
identities. They even hold the same attitude towards the identity having
a positive view about those powerful identities. In the case of schools, if
the mechanism of neutralizing any expressed prejudiced intention among
students or teachers is effective, the chances are high that this may be car-
ried forward. Though the larger social milieu is strongly fabricated with
the caste structure and this mechanism of neutralizing prejudice may be
diluted, the global effort is certainly going to help. In the event of Dalit
students protesting the food cooked by the upper-caste teacher was the
reaction in the form of identity assertions. This is possible because of the
critical consciousness and the political will of the group members which is
possible when the oppressed group members experience some social power
or derive their inspiration from their leaders. In both situations, the mech-
anism of social power either facilitated the prejudice or contested it with
resistance, as in the latter case of Dalit students. Though psychologists may
find roots of prejudice within the parent-child relationship and mirroring of
the existing parental and familial stereotypes, the interventions of schools
in creating a better platform to make an unbiased choice is crucial for the
student’s wellbeing.
At the policy level, attempts had been made to make education acces-
sible to all. The effort was to make the educational agenda more global.
Conferences and seminars were organized and the discussed themes were
transgressed into the actual pedagogical practices and curriculum. One of
the examples, as discussed in detail by Sadgopal (2005) was revisiting the
knowledge agenda of globalization. Attempts were made to arrive at a com-
mon line from where a major regulatory decision could be made. The world
declaration on education for all (EFA) framework discussed reaching the
basic learning needs. Another forum that happened in the past after the
formulation national policy on education (NPE) (1986) guidelines and pro-
gramme for action 1986 were Jomtien Declaration and Jomtien framework
(Thailand and Dakar) which was jointly convened by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Educational, Scien-
tific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations International
Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and World Bank. This was done
to know the progress of EFA. According to Sadgopal, these frameworks
were the “new policy-level international guide post”. Though the emphasis
was on the market forces as discussed above, the verge to fit education into
the global economic order was not fully unsuccessful. The sociocultural
expectations were not met with the new imposition of orders. The policy
acted as a standard safety net rather than as a force to tackle the barri-
ers to fulfilling the agenda of just not basic education but education with
dignity. The nature of education is shifted through many terrains. Despite
the agenda of bringing in social change, whether it was for uplifting and
equipping girl children with necessary skills, or helping Dalit children to
get good and dignified educations and skills, the stereotypes against them
didn’t vanish from the everyday discourses and activities. The starting
of the district primary education programme (DPEP) in 1993–1994 was
only a structural adjustment programme based on a design offered by the
World Bank. The neoliberal interventions only violated the basic principle
of equality and social justice. The basic agenda of “Buniyadi Shiksha” and
Gandhian Nai Talim where integration of the world of work and world
of knowledge (see Sadgopal, 2005) was just not the upgradation of mere
literary skills but arriving at meaningful education for children from all
sections of society. Some of the policies are rooted in “ambiguous notions
of basic learning needs and basic education” (Sadgopal, 2005, p. 87). The
recent spearheading of NEP 2020 in the educational domain starting from
primary education to higher education has systematically tried to change
the image of education. In the process of changing the structure of the edu-
cational system, the agenda of education is revivalism of the tradition and
at the same time making the students skilled and meritorious to fit into the
evanescent job market. However, these are also the agenda of the current
government to show its audience the new toolkit of reform. Whatever may
be the case, nowhere the reality of discrimination based on stereotyping
and prejudicing was addressed. Indian society doesn’t need designs of poli-
cies to impress the powerful and enchant the audience with hollow drums.
Designs and structures are already there and the need is to shape the idea
of social justice which can address the concretized social divisions in the
schools.
One of the major worldviews linked to the marginalized students’ drop-
outs and disidentification with schooling is because of systematic struc-
tural exclusion. The right of the student to move out from the oppressive
schooling system is a social cognitive act which is also a collective act. The
progenitor of neoliberalism and market regulatory forces makes the cause
invisible and removes the human element responsible for the decisions of
students as a mark of self-respect and honour is missed out in the literature
on educational psychology. The notions of academic achievement and fail-
ure were earlier limited to the human individual agencies. Over time with
increased awareness, social movement and progressive research, the role of
group history, persistent inequality, lack of resources, opportunities, and
societal structure also came into the description of academic achievement
and failure. Some looked into the matter of academic achievement differ-
ences away from agentic and cognitive sufficiency to social constructionist,
identity, and social representations viewpoints (see also Sinha & Mishra,
2015). The social identity of the child, one that he/she comes within the
classroom and the other which was formed through the school interven-
tions seem to be interrelated. The students from the lower caste if found
any opportunity to study in the school carried the burden of being from the
lower caste and all later engagements with the classroom situations were
derived from their social identities (see Hoff & Pandey, 2006).
Gaps in learning and performance
In the educational psychology literature, the academic achievement gap
has been explained mainly from a deficit perspective. The metatheoreti-
cal assumption of the deficit model is that all human behaviours can be
explained in terms of their traits and ability. Winne and Nesbit (2010) cate-
gorized the available explanation of school performance as “the way things
are” and “the way learner makes things”. The first domain emphasized
the psychological phenomenon that was seen as universal and not under
learners’ control, for example, cognition, socioeconomic status (SES), home
environment, school structure, etc. And thus, this domain was portrayed
as deficient in character. The second category domain emphasized the psy-
chology of “the way learners make things”. In that category, Winne and
Nesbit (2010) considered learners as agents. These agents were expected
to shape their learning environment by choosing between tasks and psy-
chological tools. Accordingly, when those choices were made and acted on,
new information was created and feeds forward. For example, children’s
metacognitive monitoring, motivation, and interest were considered as indi-
viduals’ agency to make choices and to operate in their environment. But
what if the social and historical experience of an individual doesn’t allow
shaping his/her environment? The mechanistic interpretation of success
and failure as due to efforts or ability by making choices was considered
insufficient and problematic.
The cognitive endowments, as it was earlier identified, valued intra-indi-
vidual constructs dominating over outward achievement. The efforts not to
overlook the social context and identity processes in shaping cognition is
the current trend of shaping the school discourses. The more equipped justi-
fications had been advanced in the last two decades within the four distinc-
tive theoretical models. These models tried to explain the gap by situating
cognition under the social structure. These are, namely, Doise and Mugny’s
(1984) genetic social psychology, Monteil and Huguet’s (1999) social regu-
lation of cognition, Sidanius and Pratto’s (1999) social dominance theory,
and Steele’s (1997) theory of stereotype threat. Despite a focus on slightly
different problems, these theoretical perspectives shared the view that
cognitive ability as responsible for students’ academic achievement is not
the fixed entity as it was once considered (e.g., Aronson, Fried, & Good,
2002; also see Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Van Laar and Sidanius (2001)
documented a more general theoretical perspective on this issue of status
and performance. Drawing from social dominance theory, they argue that
social psychologists need to become aware of the various social and psy-
chological factors that may transform low social status into low academic
achievement. On the other hand, Brenninkmeijer, van Yperen, and Buunk
(2001) took a quite different approach where the major social factor which
had an impact on students’ academic performance was located in the teach-
ers’ agency and sociocultural experiences. Therefore, it was asserted that
if student-teacher relations were difficult, learning and performance on the
part of the students may get suffered.
Guimond and Roussel (2001) raised the issue of gender and the role of gen-
der stereotypes in the perception of academic achievement. While this theme
has perhaps been studied mainly from the perspective of the teacher, Gui-
mond and Roussel (2001) argued and provided evidence from three studies
to suggest that gender stereotypes may affect how students perceive their very
own performance and abilities in math, science, or language. Thus, if char-
acteristics of the teacher (Brenninkmeijer et al., 2001) and those of the wider
social structure (Van Laar & Sidanius, 2001) can have a definite impact on
the academic achievement of students, the psychological significance of the
task at hand can also determine performance (Huguet, Brunot, & Monteil,
2001), and the performance itself can have different psychological meaning
(Guimond, 2001). Further evidence for the role of stereotypes in intellectual
performance is presented by Croizet et al. (2001) in their overview of recent
research on the theory of stereotype threat. After the first generation of
research established the basic effect of stereotype threat on cognitive perfor-
mance, they introduced what may be the beginning of a second generation of
research (see Guimond, 2001), geared towards understanding why the effect
occurs, and thus setting the stage for some possible interventions aiming at
reducing the negative impact of stereotype threat. In introducing the topic
of social influence in aptitude tasks, the work of Quiamzade and Mugny
(2001) makes it clear that teaching is a social influence process, and that
much is to be gained by focusing on the social influence dynamics that may
improve learning and cognitive performance. Buchs and Butera (2001) also
illustrate this view in some of their results from their research programme
on cooperative learning. Their contribution is significant at the theoretical
level as they attempted to specify the ingredient in cooperative learning that
makes it work, and also at the methodological level as their experiment
shows how one can observe and quantify some genuine and complex pieces
of the educational process. Further, Monteil and Huguet (1999) pointed
towards the social regulation of cognitive performance. Integrating 20 years
of research, they argued that cognitive performance, in general, is as much
dependent on the social context under which it takes place as on any generic
cognitive ability. The above theoretical position respected the social nature
of cognition as context-dependent. But even those theoretical perspectives
have shown their location in the same observers’ perspective. However, their
presence as an explanation of reasons behind low academic achievement
highlighted the gap where understanding actors from the actor’s viewpoint
becomes more prominent.
Steele’s (1997) work offered an alternative explanation for the academic
achievement gap keeping the group perspective more pronounced at a
deeper level of explanation from the actors’ perspective. As identity pro-
cesses because of the accessibility of actors’ social identity in the evaluative
situation, like school, becomes an important parameter to be explored in
this direction. Therefore, it becomes imperative to understand the social
identity perspective to better explore the psychological processes in aca-
demic achievement, first at the level of metatheory (what kind of a theory
is it?), and then at the level of theory (what does the theory itself say?) (See
Hogg & Abrams, 1988). Unless we have prior knowledge of the contrary
about one’s social identity and its situational manifestations, students who
achieve poorly on tests or acquire bad grades in school would probably
appear untalented or lazy (Aronson & Steele, 2005). These impressions
supporting the actors’ position from the observers’ viewpoint may be cor-
rect only some of the time, but in many cases, as in the earlier examples,
there is more to the story. Powerful social forces are at play that may be
hard to see or appreciate, but that nonetheless undermine people’s academic
achievement in important ways (Aronson & Steele, 2005). The perspec-
tive under which the observer’s tradition worked ended as a-social and
de-contextualized, affirming the discourse of psychometric community
shaping educational psychology. This view supported the cognitive epis-
temology of human behaviour as it appeared sophisticated in its outlook
and result. Even the literature in social psychology and education was full
of examples regarding objects that influenced social relations and students’
motivation, learning, and performance, but too often we failed to appre-
ciate these kinds of social forces (Aronson & Steele, 2005). It is gener-
ally assumed that students’ intellectual achievements are the products of
internal forces like intelligence or competence, rather than situational ones,
like an encouraging social climate (e.g., Dweck, 1999; Jones, 1989). In
their quest for a positively valued social identity and positive distinctive-
ness, individuals are thought to be bound by and take into consideration
the nature of group status and group boundaries (Schmid, Hewstone, &
Ramiah, 2011). Previous research investigating the sole presence of indi-
vidual factors responsible for achievement rejected other possibilities of
academic achievement. Children’s social identity and cultural context have
been a powerful voice in the context of academic achievement.
Children’s psychological disengagement with the academic domain was
interpreted as a lack of cognitive/motivational factors but not as the prod-
uct of different contexts and the quest for positive social identity. Ogbu and
Simons (1998) identified two types of minorities, i.e., voluntary and invol-
untary where voluntary minorities have more permeable group boundaries
but involuntary minorities don’t. The feeling of perceived social mobility
has varied chances of its implications. Thus, when group boundaries are
seen as permeable, individuals of low-status groups who didn’t identify
with their group mostly engaged in social mobility strategies and attempted
to join the higher status outgroup. However, in case of perceived imperme-
ability of group boundaries, group members may engage in other strate-
gies to enhance their social identity, for example, social creativity or social
competition (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). It can be inferred that students who
perceived their group belongingness as stable have remained in it involun-
tarily by psychologically disengaging their self from the domain of aca-
demics. In other words, there was the possibility that students’ search for
positive meaning to their selves allowed them to search for a positive social
identity. However, those states of mind may not exist for students who
believed that their chances of social mobility as their enhancement, thus
deriving their sense of worth in pro status activities. In the last case, these
students valued the system based on their socialization and their belief in
the non-cognitive resource they received from home (e.g., “work hard if
you want to exist in competition”). Here, there is ample chance for them
to identify with their group taking it as a psychological resource and not
as a liability. Students who think their chance of success in the other group
domain is low engaged in other strategies of enhancing social identification.
Social identity, schooling, and performance: empowerment

in action
The issue of social identity or sense of group belongingness as a possible
factor in students’ academic performance was not adequately identified as
it was taken as a separate entity to deal with, categorizing it as a contextual
factor. However, Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady (1999) stated that it is the ste-
reotype associated with the group in the particular domain which is respon-
sible for stereotyped behaviour and not the identity itself. The processes
of identity led to two trajectories. First, the knowledge of belongingness
towards their group as stereotyped one may lead to increased effort to come
out from that situation and second, which we have seen among African-
Americans, as disidentification from the academic domain. The latter part
can be better associated with psychological disengagement comprising two
behaviours, i.e., devaluation of the academic domain and discounting of
the academic domain. The way this factor was dealt with in literature is
entitled to further examination. Further, in the recent literature pointing
towards the process of group identification as a result of group devalua-
tion, the opposite pattern was more prominent (see Leach et al., 2010). It
was noticed that members of the devalued group increased their ingroup
identification after (perceived or actual) group devaluation is an assertion
of a (pre-existing) positive social identity that counters the negative social
identity implied in social devaluation (Leach et al., 2010). Belonging to
a group that is devalued in society is widely expected to have deleterious
psychological consequences, for example, stereotype threat, low academic
efficacy and identification, low self-esteem, and low academic performance.
In the Indian context, it was found that despite group-based stereotypes
particular categories of people excelled and performed better or equally
with their high-status counterparts (Hoff & Pandey, 2006). Researchers
have seen the effect of stereotyped identity as the main source of perceived
academic bias and thus their psychological disengagement from the aca-
demic domain with a low level of school identification (e.g., Schmader,
Major, & Gramzow, 2001). Overall, from social identity theory, it can be
inferred that members of the stereotyped group when perceive devaluation
identify more with their social group. So, to keep their self-esteem intact
they identify with their most preferred social categorization. But this is not
implied generally because it seems to vary with context and culture. Also, it
varies with a social identity which became more surfaced in the particular
situation. Jones & Nisbett (1972) asserted that when it comes to explain-
ing people’s behaviour, there is a big difference between the “observer’s
perspective” – the perspective of a person observing the behaviour – and
the “actor’s perspective” – the perspective of a person doing the behaviour.
Jones and Nisbett (1972) pointed out that as an observer we look at the
actors in explaining their behaviour. Thus, the actor dominates our literal
and mental visual field which makes the circumstances to which the actor
is responding less visible to the observer (as cited in Steele, 2010). It could
be inferred that we emphasize things about the actor characteristics, traits,
etc. that seem like a plausible explanation for the behaviour and deempha-
size, as causes of his/her behaviour, the things we can’t see well namely the
circumstance to which person is adapting.
Conclusion
Designing the thing into cultural metaphors has limitations in addressing
the problem at the global level. This chapter showed that stereotyping, prej-
udicing, and othering in varied forms are observed universally and their
mechanism of operation is almost the same in varieties of cultural contexts
making it a global phenomenon based on social identities. When we see
any problem only from the cultural angle, it may dominantly situate into
the embedded dominant discourse and has elements of truism. Rescuing
the phenomenon from the cultural bewitchment makes the schools a better
place for the people who were the victims of historically driven stereotypes
and prejudices.
The shaping of the school structure which goes beyond didactic con-
trol requires intervention at both the cultural and global levels. Global,
here is taken as a universal value that derives from the idea of ethics and
social justice for all beings and not the market regulation, colonization,
and neoliberalism. Many of the students from marginalized backgrounds
face the situation of “you don’t belong here”. There is very little space to
question these social influences in the actual classrooms. The intersections
of social identities which has historical significance when positioned in the
classroom give way to varieties of power dynamics some at the individual
and some at the contextual level. The aspects of academic achievement dif-
ferences are not just ability-based but it is linked to power and identities.
The classroom process is a social process where there are ample identity
influences and this shows the dynamics of power-laden within the school
and societal circumstances. In the Indian context, identity is not easily
diluted, especially in the case of marginalized and oppressed ones which
is loaded with the emotions like humiliation. The school space seems to be
designed as neutral and combinations of diversity but it is more or less a
platform of identity politics also. Since many incidents of institutional and
academic violence showed rampant display of power and microaggressions
in the educational spaces. For example, categorized attacks, based on caste,
gender, and other minorities in the educational spaces in India has a direct
link to one’s social identity and categorization. Further, the violence in edu-
cation will be discussed.
Notes

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5 Violence in education
Violence is a global problem and its presence is seen in different domains,

including educational spaces. In one sense, violence indeed blatantly enacts
power. Undeniably violence is socialized by the power relationship; it is
nurtured and created in the social realm of power. Violence has many faces
and it is acted out and in. There was a different interpretation of violence,
for example, objective and subjective, individual and social, macro and
micro, and legitimate and illegitimate. One aspect which connects all the
serious thinkers on violence is its direction and impact. We saw in the chap-
ter on emotion and education, how sudden and intense spurt of emotions
such as anger is directly linked to violence. It also denotes how the context
of power further gives direction to emotion and results in violence, coer-
cion, discriminations, and so on. As Markova (1987, p. 291) argued that
antinomies are an essential feature of thought because we form knowledge
by distinguishing between opposites – “every concept makes sense only in
the context of its counter concept” (see also Kadianaki & Gillespie, 2015).
The construction of space and how group affiliates can also give meaning
to the violence in the shared domain. The making of collective memory
and identification with the space may create the authenticity of being a
true bearer of that space. In the school domain, this situation is observed
where the privileged and those who think that they have the required social
capital embark upon the education space and give way to the culture of
dominance. However, this making of the collective space and discourse
has not emerged as a matter of ownership only. There is a complex connec-
tion. Some of the examples highlighting collective memory of social space,
such as communalism based on religion (see Varshney, 2001) or violence in
educational space based on the dominance of religion and caste which was
considered to be true space and no one else can build any memory on that
space. This is problematic and hard truth to understand.
Violence indeed blatantly enacts power. Undeniably violence is socialized
by the power relationship; it is nurtured and created in the social realm
of power. Violence as a variable attracted much attention in the social
sciences, especially among the model constructing disciplines like educa-
tion psychology. Some scholars looked at its nature but others its effect.
96 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-8

Violence in education 97
In the social sciences, especially among the political scientist and sociolo-
gists, violence is more or less taken within the power gambit in different
domains like family, caste, gender, labour movements, economic policies,
and other intersections like peace and security studies, criminology, and
social policies (see Kannabiran, 2016; Lohmeyer, 2020; Walby, 2013). The
latter strived towards the descriptions and the cause was identified within.
Though economics as a discipline also works efficiently on the platform
of the power structure, it always operates in the background. Its impact
is lethal if it works for the power asymmetry. Violence was less dealt with
in mainstream psychological literature where it was operationally defined
and related to variables that were hypothesized to cause the event. Though
mainstream psychology seems to be a closed ally of economics, their rela-
tionship was always intense and subtle enough to be realized by the public.
The subjective understanding of violence was reduced to the impressions of
quantitative arrangements of variables. Events of violence and its descrip-
tions, memories and its politics were more or less the domain of these social
sciences rather than psychology as a discipline. When it comes to educa-
tional psychology, the portrayal of violence became the element of cold
storage.
Conceptualizing violence
Violence as a variable either to be experimentally manipulated or selected
became routinized. This exercise is done to look for the exact science in
educational psychology. Violence as a historically embedded phenomenon
and as a matter of power dynamics was limited to the psychoanalytical
traditions and judgement in psychology. This kind of phenomenal expla-
nation doesn’t seem systematic and applied to the immediate problems of
a child in the educational psychology stream. Manipulations of variables,
deception, and operationalization were more attractive and fitted into the
model construction rather than the grand approach of addressing the sub-
ject under question. This is not to indicate that the grand approach offers
a holistic explanation and solution to the educational challenges, however,
when it comes to societal phenomena like violence which has both individ-
ual and group level impacts in different domains, they have the potential to
understand these problems at the transformative level. Violence is seen as
a crude and archaic form of power (World Health Organization (WHO),
2019).1 Violence had been witnessed and narrated in different histories.
Some narrated it as a matter of self-esteem and some narrated it as a scar on
their memory and human agency. Nelson Mandela had devoted the whole
twentieth century to violence. He stated that violence thrives in the absence
of democracy, respect for human rights, and good governance. Popular psy-
chologists like Pinker had compared the history of violence in different cen-
turies concluding that the intensity of violence or its impact has decreased
with time. It is another matter that the outcome of violence shows the
inherent asymmetrical relationship of power (Bagade, 2021; Pratto, 2016;
Reicher, 2016; see also Simon, 1957; Singh, 2021). Is violence rooted in the
culture? If this is so then the culture has to be understood through the sub-
altern lens which critiques the power asymmetry being rampant among dif-
ferent social groups. Since culture is not the agenda to be provoked here, its
influence on the meaning-making and everyday social cognition in different
domains, such as education, is systematically laden. Violence in the psycho-
logical literature is defined in terms of action and production, if not by the
Aristotelian ethics, then by the observation of the behavioural outcome.
Any action seems to be non-violent if it doesn’t produce an observable effect
of harm. Though actions that have the high potentiality of harming the
system where the chances of harm, both physical and psychological, are
high shall be considered legally as an attempt to harm. However, if any
act comes under the realm of self-defence or unintentional factors where
the person is harmed is not violence because it is not acted and designed
wilfully (see Hamby, 2017). The deterministic debates surrounding violence
as human nature used as a defence by the perpetrators are derived from
evolutionary sensemaking. These include factors such as genes, culture,
brain structure and neurodevelopment (e.g., Raine, 2013), and hormonal
influences. During the presence of hostile and emotionally provocative
stimuli, neuroscientists even situated the cause of violence in the reactive
aggressive tendency of the person whose frontal cortex is impaired and has
little control over the controlling limbic system. Whatever the cause and
mechanism of violence are, its impact on the social beings resulting due to
structural power and context is an integral part of how society through its
institutions is functioning. At least in the case of violence, nothing is nego-
tiated but asymmetrically imposed. Students, teachers, and, to some extent,
schools are examples of this collective imposition in the guise of self-regula-
tion, disciplining, agentic rationality, cognitive control, over objectification
(e.g., Nagel, 1986), and the politics of meritocracy. Not complying with this
results in harm. Some are programmed enough to comply through their
social and human capital. Alternatively, many others suffer the collective
victimhood of this power structure.
Hamby (2017) indicated four elements (intentional, unwanted, nones-
sential, and harmful) to define violence as a behaviour. Violence is defined
through a different approach, such as through examples like sexual abuse
and assault. The social-psychological approach mostly took the intention
to harm approach that is aggression to define violence from the evolution-
ary psychology perspective (e.g., Buss & Shackelford, 1997) as compared
to violence which is an aggressive act. DeWall, Anderson, and Bushman
(2011) took the social-cognitive approach to understand aggression and
violence in their general aggression model. They critically approached the
adaptive nature of violence and insisted on the intervention to reduce it.
Though these approaches cater to the reduction of violence at the indi-
vidual level, the structural and macrolevel systems of violence seem to be
embedded in the social, economic, and political contexts. Gordon Allport
(1954) located the cause of violence in intense emotion which converts
intentions into harmful action. The embedded prejudices under the influ-
ence of emotions generated through whatever social mechanisms and inter-
sectionality may incite an act of violence. Violence is an act of prejudice
along with other negative actions. Allport stated, “the more intense the
attitude, the more likely it is to result in vigorously hostile action” (p. 14).
If violence is a translation of fear, rage, hatred, and despair, the chances are
high that the social system along with its legitimate institutions and state
mechanism may make it official. The tyranny of the state can be reduced
to lesser levels of oppression if these contagious emotions (e.g., Hatfield &
Rapson, 2012) don’t incite prejudice and dealt with the active involvement
of the institutions. If these institutions, such as schools, imbibe these preju-
dices, then any form of emotional elevation may result in more victimizing
of the marginalized students. For example, violence such as forced displace-
ment. Dr Ambedkar’s effort to emancipate Dalits from the historical atroc-
ities was a collective effort. His approach fuelled the social movement for
social change at all levels of society. In the educational domain, he longed
for the full development of Dalits. As Dalits education was confined to
primary education due to structural exclusion, humiliation, and alienation,
Ambedkar’s call was to create a space for achieving higher education. Even
in the current scenario, Dalits are less educated, face maximum dropouts
from the primary level education, maximally humiliated, and ostracized.
The violence they face due to the prevalent prejudices creates a hurdle in
their educational, social, and economic pathways. Looking at the data,
these marginalized and oppressed students find it maximum difficult to
attain higher education because of the biases, constraints, violence, and
exclusions at the school levels. The school has its importance in facilitating
diverse students to attain higher education parallelly addressing their eco-
nomic and social constraints. The shaping of the structure of school needs
the social-psychological pathways paved with the essence of the constitu-
tional preamble such as justice, equality, liberty, and fraternity. Since this
seems to be the highest form of ethics that any social system and individual
can attain, why the location of power is embedded in the authority and why
the violence shaped through this authoritative resemblance is legitimatized?
Allport (1954) clarified how prejudice can lead to negative actions. If a
teacher from upper status is prejudiced towards the lower caste students,
he/she may engage in the behaviours like expressing antagonism with other
teachers and students, avoiding those students, discriminating based on
marks, and refraining from allowing participating in school programmes,
physically punishing them. The objectification of students and teachers
from the lower status group, despite being part of the school fraternity,
points towards the theoretical self-constructed in the caste-based hierar-
chical structure. Caste becomes more important than human agency and
dignity. Dignity seems to be for those who have a position in the societal
hierarchy based on caste and economic accumulations. In this process of
showering violence of varieties, it is forgotten or intentionally repressed
those rights given by Indian constitutions to be treated in a dignified man-
ner by all the stakeholders, whether students or teachers or any member of
whatever diverse group the person belongs to.
Violence has many faces and it is acted out and in, without much causal
understanding as understood through research. There were different inter-
pretations of violence, for example, objective and subjective (see Zizek,
2007), individual and social, micro and macro, and legitimate and illegiti-
mate. One aspect which connects all the serious thinkers on violence is its
openness and subtleness. What we see is objectively interpreted as violence
and the whole context of violence which plays its parts such as diffusion
of identity dominance into the self-understanding is coming into the con-
sciousness at the meta-level. For example, the rising violent incidents in
educational setting shows the clash of a theoretical model of groups’ under-
standing of the context which is more or less simplified as the display of
power over the other group members. Its history lies in the understanding
of the present use of available social symbols by different groups and how
at one end it is taken as a right and needed, and at the other, wrong and
dissenting. The understanding of violence as authentic, legitimate, godly,
divine, as explicit in some the religion combined with the state’s use of
this symbolic violence move coercively at their ends. The protest, dissent-
ing movements, disobedience, critical arguments against the status quo by
the minority groups are taken as violent action against the peaceful state,
shaking the idea of a democratic country which sustains the dominant
oppression in the name of religion and caste identity as a nationalistic idea
taken as fact due to its combination of the power of reasoning, history, and
institutionalization of those ideas. The following sections will deal with the
understanding of violence in education, the power enactment, and legitima-
tion of violence. Further, we will see kinds of violence in a school context
and the case for the transformation of power will be made to empower
teachers and students with the help of educational leaders by promoting an
inclusive and threat-free educational space.
Understanding violence in education

As we answer this question, it is worthy to relook at the meaning of educa-
tion and how violence has become an integral part of this valued domain.
Education was said to be the praxis of liberation though it comprises the
whole domain of formal teaching and learning where people are fixed into
different stages of the hierarchical education system. Violence doesn’t have
a fixed face and it is a matter of power in action and discourse which makes
the violence fixed upon the social identities. This is an irony that violence in
itself becomes difficult to question and its origination becomes an attribute
of the person. Here, ideologies become an important part of social research
where violence is linked to the person representing an ideology and not
the hegemony of ideology is taken into account by researchers interested
in understanding human and group behaviour. The education system is
an institutionalized system where some values and ideologies take a lead
due to many cultural and political factors. For example, few institutions
claim that their core values are synonymous with the national culture and
few symbolize their existence to the tradition, which in turn is taken as
national culture (see also Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2010). This is
promoted to neutralize any alternative culture to counter the established
way of schooling.
Violence has many forms and it was seen in many domains. Violence is an
act of aggression directed towards self and others. Though there are many
incidents of self-injury and suicide in the educational domain, its causal fac-
tors in a more systematic form of discrimination are less highlighted in the
educational psychology literature. Aggression against others is also an act of
violence against people belonging to different groups. In India, the aggres-
sion directed towards people from historically marginalized and minority
can be seen frequently and many of them are underreported or taken for
granted. Violence occurs in many forms such as bullying, emotional degra-
dation, microaggressions, punishment by authorities, abuse, and rape. The
most common primary emotion which instigates aggression and violence is
noted to be anger. Anger is noticed in both authority and power as well as
powerless. However, anger displayed through the powerful authorities is
an act of violence when it is directed towards powerless minorities. In the
latter case, the perceived secondary emotion is a humiliation which is also
a form of felt violence by the oppressed. From individual to the group level,
violence towards the other was seen to be a blatant course of action and
was cherished by the powerholder when it comes to regulations. Teachers
giving punishment to disobedient students is taken as a legitimate exercise
by the authority. It happened in the past narrated in the epic of Mahab-
haratha when Guru Dronacharya, who was considered an authority and
one of the brilliant teachers of warfare. When Eklavya, who was the poor
tribal, couldn’t access warfare education from the guru, practised himself
in front of the guru’s sculpture. When he displayed his self-acquired skill
to Dronacharya and since he didn’t belong to the Kshatriya class who were
considered to be an authentic recipient of knowledge and skills, he was
asked to amputate his thumb, a vital finger for aiming at the target. In one
way, from the cultural vantage point, this was appropriate and the marker
of culture and obedience, and at the same time, it was a display of casteism
and violence. The instigation to give guru dakshina in the form of thumb
and not anything else showed how casteism, power, society, and emotions
are linked together. As time changed, the act of punishment or danda
also gets reformulated, however, it never vanished and both implicitly and
explicitly took its recourse. Stanley Milgram (1969) in his famous exper-
iment on obedience to authority displayed the pressure that an authority
creates on the follower that it may even lead to extremes of punitive acts.
Violence under the course of legitimacy, legitimate leaders, representative-
ness, and authority is exhibited and systematically authenticated. Violence
follows the routes of different narratives. One route serves as a legitimizing
function and the other delegitimizing. In the case of authorities, violence
becomes appropriate and authentic. It serves social positioning and suste-
nance of culture and traditions. For example, “punishment is necessary to
keep the students disciplined”, “the baton of policemen cures all the inten-
tions of doing crime”, “evaluation and marks are important indicators of
students’ academic learning”, and likewise. The second route is situated in
the actions of outgroups such as the protest by the union members and stu-
dents. The latter route is most of the time seems threatening to the majority
who look for protection in the state’s mechanism. Though studies indicated
that the protagonists adopting the second route are mostly peaceful and
powerless, they are taken as against ethics and democracy. The roots of
these two mechanisms are embedded in the dynamics of power, where the
former is socially sanctioned and fitted in to the culture as compared to the
latter. The route adopted by the powerless is also anarchic and challenges
the status quo. Though anarchy is also judged from the different ideolog-
ical and experiential lenses, for the sake of understanding the meaning of
violence and power dynamics in education, this chapter will take the lens
of the subaltern and the socioculturally disadvantaged.
There are cases of continuous violence against the Dalit students in the
schools. Assault and segregation practices such as beating, scolding, caste-
based insult, and alienation from classroom collectivity is a usual behav-
iour from the school authorities. 2 These kinds of violence are the signifier
of deep caste-based prejudice and discrimination prevalent in the Indian
social system. The rise of atrocities against Dalits based on reported cases
of violence captures the picture of prevalent caste-based discrimination.
The meaning of atrocities in the above cases is limited to physical violence.
Other forms of violence and aggressions apart from physical intimidation
are less reported and neither taken seriously if put forward by the victims.
Verbal abuse, gossiping and imposing demeaning tasks on students and
teachers from oppressed group symbolize how prejudice is channelled
through different modes. Though there is a report of a slight decrease in
violence against the tribals, they are also a constant victim of discrimina-
tion and violence. Korra (2021) noted:
While attending the schools and colleges, children of Denotified tribes

(DNTs) experienced various shades of discrimination from fellow stu-
dents and teachers. They often felt that they were despised. Some fellow
students and teachers called DNT students by their tribe’s name with
a derogative connotation. A few of the teachers asked them to sit on
the backbenches in the classroom. There were instances of DNT chil-
dren even being asked to clean the classroom in the disguise of manual
work, to sit separately while taking the mid-day meal and not to take
water from the common pot or use the common glass in school.
(p. 172)
School matters for children and their parents for some reasons such as
comfortable living in the future, a better source of livelihood, a bright
future, social mobility and change. If the educational context is segregation
based, discriminatory, violent, and alienating, the basic right of the child is
thwarted. This happens because the right to education is a constitutional
right and to sustain motivation to endorse their right, children need to be
treated with respect and dignity. Their agency is important and any event
to dehumanize their identity and cultural experience is contrary to the idea
of education. Education is not ideology-free and it cannot be for the sake of
representations. If one ideological stance is governed by the fascist motive
of homogenization then the resisting ideology is needed to situate the con-
text of the marginalized in that dominant and regulatory system. Accord-
ing to Olson (2003):
Both individuals and institutions may be viewed in intentionalist

terms with rights and responsibilities, entitlements and obligations.
Whereas the actual working within an institution such as school is to
be explained in terms of the intentionality and subjectivity of the indi-
viduals involved, the policy and organization of bureaucratic institu-
tions are carried on more or less independently of the subjectivity of
the individuals involved.
(p. 277)
The imposition of subjectivities of the powerful as an objective rule is an

act of epistemic violence leading to many behavioural outcomes. The stu-
dents who have to forcibly comply with the values become the victim of
the homogenized school structure. When there are mismatches or lack of
congruency between different values, the role of the school is rather a facil-
itating diversity. However, most of the time, it doesn’t happen and students
from the lower status, marginalized and oppressed groups either have to
compromise with imposed values or disidentify. Either one can observe the
compromise wrongly as coexistence, or come out with an invitation for a
dignified diverse mode of existence in the classroom. Any organizational
system and schools are one of them and signify a system of control where
the pupils are tested. Their inner resistance is neutralized with that control
mechanism. Sometimes, in class, when students confront discrimination
and violence, they resist and disobey. From the control point of view, this
is pondered upon the student as lacking in discipline or coming from a
family and cultural background seems to be valueless and unrestrained.
The cultural symbols which form an essential part of schooling, such as
flags, uniforms, badges, classroom design, prayers, slogans, and names
of the houses of different sections, form an impact on the student’s iden-
tity. It has both surface and deep meaning (see Gabriel, 2000). Offering
respect to the national flag of India can either infuse a sense of pride in
our unity and diversity or it may be taken as a symbol of nationalism or
both. Depending upon the construction of discourse around the symbol,
the meaning is internalized and narrated. In the conflicting zones, for
example, Palestine schools have contributed immensely through discipline
and regularity. It had become a space of hope and transformation despite
the frequent violence and harassment from the Israeli military (Skovdal &
Campbell, 2015). Skovdal and Campbell (2015) showed how schools are
not nascent entities but the microcosm of a wider social context. They
asserted:
We argue that schools cannot be viewed as a ‘magic bullet’ capable of

tackling the impacts of complex social problems without significant
resources and outside support. We caution against regarding schools as
islands, out of the context of their location in the wider communities in
which complex social problems are located. In many ways, schools may
sometimes be part and parcel of the wider social systems that generate
the very ill-health, discrimination or conflict that impact negatively on
learners.
(p. 181)
However, this is not the final view about the schools but they are also capa-
ble of bringing change. Schooling is simply not the standard mechanism
but can willingly contribute to society through its agents. In other words,
school agents such as teachers, principals, and students have the potential
to bring all-encompassing value.3 They further concluded:
We point to differences in the views of contributors who suggest that

schools have little power to protect children from social problems aris-
ing from factors beyond the control of teachers and school-based inter-
ventions, and those who see the potential for school-based programmes
to not only protect children but also to contribute to the tackling of
wider social problems.
(p. 182)
Though the paradox is sensed here, schools when working as a commu-

nity become representative of all the community member. If it excludes in
the name of common values or the common sensemaking of symbols, it
becomes unrepresentative at the same time. In the Indian educational con-
text, varieties of schools operate within the sociopolitical system, but the
latter’s influence intrudes in some other ways. Nevertheless, it is in the will
of the school to be capable of representing the history of diversity and work
for a peaceful and nurturing educational climate. Though Olsen (2003)
indicated that schools are institution where standards of dominant values
prevail. He stated:
How schools as institutions, far from the social practices of everyday

life, define new sets of roles, rules, norms, entitlements and obligations
that are attuned to the structures of modern bureaucratic society. Fur-
ther, it allowed the possibility of addressing the fundamental concern
of modern critics of education, namely, the issue of accountability of
the schools as institutions to the citizens who pay for them-schools
are not only environments for growth and development, they are envi-
ronments for mastering the norms and standards set by the dominant
institutions of the society.
(p. 277)
Looking into the historical conundrum, schools promoted vidya or knowl-

edge and stimulated a deep sense of obedience to the authority of the guru
or teacher. Schools are the space where the guru and shishya acted on
their environment to make it a domain of learning. It was collective sense-
making. At the equal level, there were the stories of exclusion, avoidance,
and punishments. Further, there was evidence of violence carried over the
students from the oppressed community both by the upper caste students
and teachers. History of oppression was never neutralized but was pres-
ent in the praxis and socialization. The norms and standards if not cater
to the dignity of the marginalized students can be inferred that standards
are syndicated through the biased lens of stereotypes. The portrayal of the
dominant model as authentic by homogenizing, neutralizing, and imposing
values does not address the everyday life of people from oppressed groups.
In another way, it is a new form of exclusion in the disguise of exclusion,
which exactly happens in the schools. The values of upper caste authorities
are taken as a basis of modern education too. The quest to shape the struc-
ture of school education is not just infrastructural design but also the mind-
set. Powerful people and authorities shape the school structure through
policies and everyday pedagogies. The structure of the school can’t be neu-
tral to the societal structure under which it operates. However, schools that
create the standards to neutralize violence through representative models of
diversity may offer society an ostensive and new model for social change.
The power enactment and legitimation of violence

Violence in the school context is not only the personality dynamics as seen
in most of the educational psychological literature. The extraction of indi-
vidual characteristics from the macrolevel features such as situations of
cultural interactions, politics of ideology, and social history is a reductive
exercise. The violent act can be based on political intention and actions. For
example, removal or modification of history in the history textbooks with
the history of power is also surmised as an act of violence. The attitude
towards some established order, rules, cognitive systems, and behaviours
is taken for granted when it is legitimized. These mindsets are somewhere
linked to the desirability of a stable environment. In the case of schooling,
the variety of violent acts indicated the will of school authorities towards
both cultural and social permanence. Permanency in the social structure
requires legitimacy and normalcy where the institutions have a leading
role. Schools are one of those sites where knowledge is shaped and, in
most cases, violence is an inherent part of its practices. The relationship
between knowledge and violence takes a new turn in understanding the
meaning of education. Pressures on the students to adapt to the curricular
and pedagogical demands, reprimanding through marks and attendance,
the rise of digital pressure, no fee-no education, promoting competition
at the cost of mental health of diverse and marginalized are some of the
categorical violence commonly experienced in the school context. Apart
from this, the segregations and inequality due to systematic deprivation
of opportunities for the disadvantaged group members are benign forms
of violence that led to difficult and dangerous life. In the latter case, chil-
dren are most susceptible to the violation of their rights based on their
development, care, protection, rehabilitation, and social integration (see
Bajpai, 2017). The prevalent just world assumption about the social divides,
segregation, casteism, disadvantaged situation of marginalized, gender
oppression, and poverty has occupied the mindset. The socialization with
this mindset has fuelled the tendency to discriminate against others as a
token of sociocultural integrity. The powerful authority through the insti-
tutions like schools caters to the mindset derived from the available social
arrangement. However, this creates an image of a normal and socially bal-
anced world which the schools imbibe within the children. The culture
of obedience, discipline, classroom hierarchies, notions about ability and
illusory correlations among ability, agency, social class, gender, and caste
have occupied the everyday classroom interaction patterns and sociocul-
tural relationships.
The schools’ engagement with the students is mediated by power strug-
gles. Teachers through their pedagogical imperatives stimulate the social
hierarchies and at other times students from privileged backgrounds exer-
cise their dominance over the students who seem to be socially and intellec-
tually weak. To be out of the evolutionary alters, it is the conscious social
engagements that construct the reality of power dynamics and division.
Michael Apple questioning the movements of legitimizing educational
homogeneity and imposed neutrality indicated the design of methods and
actions well suited to promote legitimatizing the structural basis of inequal-
ity (Apple, 2010). Indian constitution preserves its right to be legitimate
where it authenticates the meaning of rule of law. However, if violence is
seen as a legitimate method of controlling and disciplining, those actions
by the authorities breach the legitimacy of the constitution which longs for
justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even an agenda is to steer towards
discipline and knowledge, any form of violence in the schools is unconstitu-
tional. The praxis of education is a culmination of an effort to explore, right
to ask questions, and even disobey if authority tries to regulate through pun-
ishment and fear. Why do we search for patterns in the chaos? Is it the will
to organize? Why we don’t accept the chaos that we witness? The agenda of
schooling is to bring pattern, engage in organization, and infuse an ability
to audit anarchical thought through disciplinary desires and formulation. It
is in the history of schooling to bring violence to nurturing the mind of stu-
dents. A situation of civilizing violence through the legitimatization of insti-
tutions like schools is what education has formally witnessed. Formalism
in education corresponds to the shaping of society through shaping the
cognition of children through the coercive intervention of dominant values.
These dominant values believe in meritocracy, neoliberal assumption about
development quickly assuming that the children’s basic rights will also be
covered which in itself is a flawed notion of bringing equality.
The history of antagonism and violence based on identities has shaped
the nature of the intergroup relationship. School context which has given
a variety of memories of violence, indifference, and discrimination is also
preserved in the history of education apart from the pattern and discipline
it offered. Violence as an instrument of prejudice and discrimination has
both intentionality and will to act against a member of an outgroup, espe-
cially if that member holds a subordinate category in that social context.
Vice versa it takes the form of resistance under the appropriate situation of
collective awareness of being historically discriminated against. If the vio-
lence both objective and subjective, as in Zizek’s (2007) formulation, inter-
vene in the classroom process in terms of beating, punishment, sarcasm,
microaggressions, “illegitimate” assimilations (Tajfel, 1981) where even the
contact among people carrying different social identities fails despite the
ideal proposal of equality by the schools. However, this doesn’t guarantee
equity and authentic promotion of students to be protected from prevalent
violence in the schools. Even the idea of meritocracy becomes limited under
the homogenizing agenda of schooling. Inside the school, the intergroup
relationship is strong enough to defy equal treatment and led to the shatter-
ing of hopes that students and their parents gathered at the outset. Tajfel’s
explanation about the psychology of minorities and who are minorities
clears the picture of illusory correlations based on stereotypes between the
groups where the majority group revile the minority (see Tajfel, 1981). The
story of Om Prakash Valmiki explains the violence against Dalit students
and when any Dalit student tries to explain his/her position or ask a critical
question to the upper caste teacher, they were handled with an iron hand
and punitively (e.g., Krishna, 2012). People were homogenously against any
view portrayed by the Dalit students resisting the explanation given by the
teacher. This double impact, one from the oppressive social system and
second from the schools which were the space of hope for these children,
showcased the paradox of educational values getting swayed by powerful
social identities.
Kinds of violence: school as a therapeutic agency

The engagement with the question of violence in education is derived from
the macrolevel facets such as cultural norms, institutions, and power. It can
be observed through a different lens. For example, the countries identify-
ing themselves as post-communists find it difficult to go into the memory
of stagnancy. The homogenization of schools, children’s uniform, prayers,
people having the job of the same kind, houses, and other amenities as equal
to their neighbours, and prohibition for them to work in other countries
created collective despair. The hope of mobility, for them, was systemati-
cally encountered by the authorities. That was a kind of totalitarianism that
inhibited one’s potential to express one’s free will. However, alternatively,
in the capitalist countries, the verge of neoliberalism somehow kept the
social mobility hope intact but at the same time created an invisible hurdle
in the name of merit and markets. The person lives in the hope of express-
ing the free will and simultaneously stopped. This is a kind of epistemic
violence that along with another genesis of race, caste, and gender flopped
the idea of free will for the powerless. Powerful is always triumphant when
not questioned through the collective effort. Violence in institutions like
schools’ manifests in varieties of formats. There is no scepticism that mac-
rolevel facts have a hegemonical impact on thoughts and actions. Tiwary,
Kumar and Mishra (2017) indicated towards social violence prevailing
in education uses coercive methods such as punishment, discriminatory
awards, forced shaping of thoughts through internalization of inferiority,
and making students believe of their being belonging to socially prejudiced
and ascribed as inferior. These are the pedagogical violence often catego-
rized as punishment only.
The conglomerations of instances like beating and scolding, insulting,
power display of bullies to gain higher status among the peer group, dis-
criminating and denial of opportunity, neglecting, gossiping based on gen-
der and caste-based identity are also categorical forms of violence inherent
in the school pedagogical practices. Along with that, the same categorical
form of violence is also faced by the teachers both from the students and
other staff who seem to be outgroup in some way under the established
norms. Peer victimization and intentionality behind the violent act is a
marker of embedded aggression built upon the history and socialization
of prejudices (Nambissan, 2009; Pal, 2015; see also Pal & Swain, 2009).
The frequent prejudice and violence faced by the Dalit students have its
limit. A feeling of resistance and rebellion is also part of human nature and
that was observed among the oppressed group of children. They feel like
reacting to the social ostracism frequently regulating their oppressed self.
Similarly, the educational context is more or less a reiteration of equality
and at the same time facilitator of the stereotypical gender roles. If these
roles are revolutionary contested, the embedded prejudice against the girls
becomes more punitive and violent (e.g., Bhog, 2020; see Manjrekar, 2020).
Dalit girl students and Muslims are seen as a scavenger and impure. This
has loaded the imagination of the school with a false impression about the
oppressed students from these categories. They are seen as low achievers,
uncultured, and without any emotions. It is not uncommon that these stu-
dents face everyday humiliation and anger frequently only to be justified by
the schools as they are oversensitive. The doubling of discrimination against
Dalit women in education requires reconstruction (see Paik, 2014). In the
western racial context, West (2019) showed how the sweeping judgement
made against minorities frequent encounters microaggression as hypersen-
sitivity. In the Indian context, Sohi and Singh (2015) similarly reported
invisibility, distress, and self-stereotyping among the people from North-
easterners in India. The rise of violence against these students accounts for
the biases taken as a fact about minorities and alienates them as others. The
violence against the marginalized corresponds to the internalized preju-
dices through socialization, education, and everyday meaning-making with
the biased form of discourses. The dominant emotions resulting in violence
showed how the dominant identities taking the authority positions in the
school materialize their emotions in the name of disciplining and learning
politics. This is not to say that discipline is not important in the digni-
fied engagement of both teachers and students, however, the hidden biases
which skew the ability to neutralize violent emotions and prejudices hinder
the objective school as a platform of equality.
The rampant expectation biases and stereotype threat has occupied
the schools which sometimes reminds what Illich (2021) reasoned for
de-schooling society, though for a different note. He opined, “school has
become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizen and
their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world”
(p. 66). The discipline of minority students more frequently as compared
to the same behaviour committed by the privileged group shows the inter-
nalized and deep-seated biases affecting the ability to judge in a balanced
way (see Jarvis & Okonofua, 2020). Contesting the production of identity
capital (Warin, 2015) through the removal of violence is required in the
shaping of the school structure.
Fear is an emotion when induced among the students through school
practices becomes political. This is because by this politics of terrifying
emotions the supremacy of the authorities is established. Sometimes, when
students don’t obey or show indiscipline, the subject teachers call for the
class teacher or any teacher having a dominant demeanour. Students’
account in both the government and private schools shows frequent beat-
ing and scolding, as such these actions are the only marker of schooling.
It may be activated through different domains such as full school uniform,
haircut, cleanliness, polished shoes, and so on. One of the efforts by school
teachers such as “Bal Katai Divas” infused a sense of self-discipline among
boys students to have a haircut regularly. However, if this discipline is not
followed, the chances of any form of reprimand may arise (see also Gupta,
2017). The expectations are especially from the students who are from poor
families and their parents don’t have time to engage in this disciplining
process. Sometimes, these students become the target of violence and add
further to the existing stereotypes. Though largely violence in schooling is
defended logically by school agents such as staff, teachers, and already dis-
ciplined students. This is also a marker of culture and respect. For example,
“what I am today is because of my school and punishment was the medicine
to cure”. The curative agenda of schooling and the medicine metaphor has
displayed school as a therapeutic centre where students are shaped, cured,
and made sane members of society. For this, the teacher-students connec-
tion is a power relationship like a psychiatrist-patient relationship. Students
are taken as immature and inexperienced, so they need to be engaged in a
therapeutic exercise to make them obedient. Here, the therapeutic exercise
is meant as engaging in a violent act such as punishment or reprimanding.
However, there is another counselling exercise where the violent students
are treated as patients or forced counselees. The social system of schooling
becomes the individualistic improvement programme rather than the cul-
turally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billing, 1992; Mishra, 2017), demo-
cratic, and critical engagements (see Kincheloe, 1999).
Role of educational leaders

The critical exploration of how the meaning of educational leadership
integrates both colonial and dominant cultural values in the Indian educa-
tional space is an important tryst to neutralize identity-based violence. This
violence can range from belongingness to any oppressed social group to
diversity in body structure and colour, religion, and cognitive functioning.
Educational leadership indicates the power and authority along with the
sensibility to have a vision and authentic approach to vilify any unconstitu-
tional methods in dealing with the children. Further, a case for decolonizing
educational leadership also matters which goes beyond the politics of indi-
vidual traits to the cooperative communal intermingling and dialogicality.
The contexts influenced by power, identity dominance, and cultural values
bifurcated indigenous as well as minority social groups and it adversely
shaped the fabric of schooling. The idea is to decolonize the educational
system by taking the relevant critical perspectives which require an authen-
tic leader, which Haslam, Reicher, and Platow (2011) suggested as reflect-
ing, representing, and realizing. These leaders reflect through the point of
followers, their understanding of the context, aspirations, grievances, and
hopes and do not rush to assume authority. It is also important to ascertain
that the leader is not living under the false impression that he understands
the followers completely, which only alienates him further from the pupils.
The acceptance of the leader is central to the proper group functioning. If
the teacher who is also a leader finds difficulty in understanding a diverse
group of students, he/she will alienate himself as unrepresentative. For
example, when students were verbally encouraged as a future of the nation,
a sense of correspondence to their aspiration becomes activated, and at the
same time, reduced to hopelessness if in action and non-verbal ways only a
few privileged ones are promoted. This is not the true reflection of the stu-
dent’s aspiration of whatever diverse background they belong to. Refection
led to meaningfully representation of the groups.
In the school context, if the educational leader is not able to connect with
the experiences of the historically marginalized students, the representation
is limited and the situation of academic alienation or feeling of psychologi-
cal disengagement may arise. Since psychological disengagement is a defen-
sive detachment of self-esteem from one’s outcomes in a domain such that
self-esteem is not contingent upon one’s success or failures in that domain
(Major & Schmader, 1998; Major et al., 1998; see also Steele, 1997). As
part of a larger class of self-protective strategies, psychological disengage-
ment is more likely to be evoked in evaluative situations that threaten a
person’s self-view. Thus, by psychologically disengaging one’s view of one-
self from an evaluative domain, a person can maintain a previous level
of self-esteem despite information that implies one’s inferiority in that
domain. Psychological disengagement was viewed as a general strategy that
may be applied for coping in any kind of self-threatening environment, for
example, a performance evaluative environment. This psychological disen-
gagement processes decrease students’ motivation and interest in the school
proceedings which they think is not their area (see Ogbu, 2003; Schmader,
Major, & Gramzow, 2001). Thus, if students psychologically disengage
their self-esteem from academic outcomes, there may be another possibil-
ity of higher belongingness with the ingroup with whom the school out-
comes seem unjustified. In this regard, future academic affiliation together
with the performance outcome shall be severely hampered, thus leading to
increased dropout and academic marginalization. Furthermore, any stu-
dent might face the individual threat of incompetence that leads him/her to
psychologically disengage self-esteem from academic performance that may
create additional group level threats in the form of negative stereotypes of
intellectual inferiority (Steele, 1997).
Steele has suggested that members of a minority group who felt their
identity threatened at the group level in the intellectually evaluative situ-
ation might disidentify with, or chronically disengage from, the academic
domain to escape the anxiety that results from performing under the weight
of cultural stereotypes of inferiority (see Ogbu, 1991). As high-status groups
mostly do not face these same group level threats in the academic domain,
it can be predicted that levels of psychological disengagement from the aca-
demic domain will be greater among negatively stereotyped groups than
among their non-stereotyped peers (Schmader, Major, & Gramzow, 2001).
Students’ social identity plays an important role in the process of academic
disengagement. From the viewpoint of outgroup members, lack of social
support and authentic leadership in schools, the academic self-efficacy and
motivation may be reduced which is misattributed to the agency, cultural
values and social identity of the students as lack of ability, not fit to take
education, culturally inferior. There is also the possibility that school struc-
ture may impose a threat to the student’s social and cultural identity and
that’s why they disengage from school, disidentify with the schooling, and
their academic self-efficacy gets lowered. School itself becomes the platform
of social identity loss for the marginalized students through the continu-
ous violent acts of different kinds. Educational leadership is also about the
realization of what prototypical categories are especially represented. Real-
izing identity leadership involves, according to Haslam, Reicher, and Pla-
tow (2011), “achieving group goals and creating a world for the group that
reflects its identity” (p. 206). Educational leaders in the schools, who are
mostly appointed and follow the government orders and policies, sometimes
re-represent it to the particular sections of students. The lack of under-
standing of the situations and experiences of marginalized students along
with the surface-level knowledge of the policies led to the subtle form of
discrimination. It can be the hypothesis that the violence emanated in the
schools may be a quick interpretation of the policies through the cultural
lens. In one way, these behavioural aspects may be congruent to the poli-
cies where the latter are also the product of culture and ecology (cf. Weav-
er-Hightower, 2008). This inadvertently fails to realize the goals which
need to be collected and meaningfully shall be derived from the Indian
constitution.
Educational leadership research in recent times is showing a new transi-
tion. What was considered a single grand approach to theorizing leadership
is integrated with other perspectives. Educational leadership in contempo-
rary times got shifted in its imagination from a diversity of perspectives
and different disciplinary domains. As pedagogy and curriculum differ for
different disciplines so the imagination for the future of educational leader-
ship also differs for these domains. For example, how doctors need train-
ing and the kind of environment to enhance their skills depends upon the
nature of their discipline. Mainstream doctors are expected to be skilful,
expert, and at the same time humane. Similarly, the much sought-after pro-
fession in India such as management, engineering, and law has different
pedagogical needs. The educational leadership model considered to be uni-
versally applied has suffered a failure. It is imperative to note that diversi-
ties in the disciplines are not limited to the curriculum at different levels
but it also comes in the student’s needs and interests together with their
demographic circumstances such as socioeconomic status, gender, and caste.
Diversity in educational leadership research is not new and much writing
has been done. However, when it comes to practice, the universal model of
educational leadership becomes paramount. A universal model of educa-
tional leadership is a matter of what people are doing in their actual edu-
cational engagement, for example, teachers covering the syllabus, school
principals managing the teachers and other staff, standardization of policies
regarding online education in the time of pandemic or presence. The spirit
of educational leadership as a process of influence is limited by the singular
model of practice in terms of some dos and don’ts. The feedback, question-
ing, and critical engagement are contrary to the established model of edu-
cational leadership in schools. In the present work, the established model of
educational leadership is critically addressed without denying its importance
to the extent it helps in reforming the oppressive structure. In most cases, the
model in preference is western and based on the different cultural domains.
An attempt to look into the process of decolonizing educational leader-
ship is needed to look into the best possible cultural avenues which have the
potential to become global. However, in most of the contemporary writings
on educational leadership where diversity is the main agenda, researchers
indicate the cultural experience of people from a diverse group. In this pro-
cess, they try to make diversity visible, for example, they mention gender,
race, and other diverse but oppressed groups but when it comes to practic-
ing those proposed models, these diversity issues are absent. We can infer
that these groups are fashionably mentioned but their politics of eman-
cipation in actual life is treated with dismay in the educational settings.
What Billig (2013) stated, “people are doubly absent, for they are even
absent when they are being written about” (p. 158). Though Billig’s state-
ment in the context of academic writing, I feel it is equally applied to the
practice of educational leadership where the agents of academic discussion
also become the agent of change. What is read in the running sentence as
something as nominating is need to be materialized into a verb or action,
for example, words such as liberation and emancipation become emanci-
pating and liberating to the oppressed group out of the mega word diversity.
Can we plan an educational leadership model? And how this model fits
with the everyday life of students and constructs a non-violent space of
every kind? The traditional model of educational leadership shaped the
working of teachers as isolated members of the school community. They
were equipped with the established design of the schools and engaged with
students in a prescribed format. The schools usually provided a template
for them in terms of duties and interaction with the students. For example,
taking classes routinely for fixed hours, completing the syllabus, assess-
ment of students and engaging them in extracurricular activities. Though
teachers’ engagement was based on a formalist assumption about the stu-
dents, somewhere they also have a deep impact on the student’s life, both
positive and negative. As detached personnel, teachers had a quick view of
the students; their leadership was of one kind. They influenced students
with their task in hand, for example, teaching and pedagogy, but found
themselves overpowered by the given template of schools and policies at
large. Their approach was uncritical, systematic, and sometimes coercive.
The political situations have long affected the educational climate. Though
historical context displays the dominance of culture, the making of group
differences and construction of social identity was not possible without the
active interventions of schools along with the family (see also Sinha, 2021).
For example, in the case of the Roma community, their historical picture
shows stigmatization, violence, and discrimination in various domains.
They are not given dignity and respect in society. They are excluded from
society and have near negligible employment opportunities. They were the
victims of genocide in history. Some have linked them to the northwestern
Indian people belonging to the Dom community. For example, one genetic
study showed European Roma descended from Indian ex-untouchables
(Dalit community) belonging to the Dom community (Rai et al., 2012).
The linking to the community in India through the genetic study shows
that the status of the Roma community is non-transformative and their
stigmatized identity is overlapping with the stigmatized identity of Dalits
in India. Roma community members are facing intense anti-Roma preju-
dice and discrimination in the school context (Lasticova, 2016) which has
deeply seated into the mind of people. There seems to be the internalization
of these negative stereotypes among the Roma people which may lead them
to conform to the existing picture.
Children of the Roma community don’t get proper education and their
status is similar to the Dalit poor children in India where they are discrim-
inated against in everyday social life. The dearth of effective leadership,
social movement, and collective effort for the community’s wellbeing both
from the people of the Roma community and at the mainstream societal
level show the grim picture of their social reality. The need is to understand
the economic and social story and mechanism of the Roma people and how
it is managed by the effective education leader. It is a common understand-
ing among the people that the Roma community doesn’t have aspirations
and they are destructive. Also, it is important to understand that when and
under what circumstances Roma community people, who are negatively
defined group, “define themselves in terms of their group membership and
act collectively to challenge their disadvantage” (see Haslam, Reicher &
Platow, 2011, p. 50). The role of educational leaders in handling preju-
dices, discrimination, and violence in education for minority groups plays
a significant role. First, the need is to see in what domain prejudice is high
and then in what way it has reduced due to the educational leaders’ inter-
vention. Focusing on the educational setting, there are schools in India
where minority students (Dalits and other oppressed groups) are highly
discriminated against and excluded and it affects their performance and
overall wellbeing. In a similar case, the minority students in the European
context, for example, Roma children, are highly discriminated against
both in the educational domain and the future occupational domains. It
is important to see what are the identity dynamics which led to different
kinds of repercussions and how these dynamics leading to the discrimi-
nation are regulated by the educational leaders. The need is to argue for
the role of an effective educational leader who may innovate and nurture
a capability to re-categorize the demeaned and devalued identity of mar-
ginalized students into inclusiveness and dignity. As the transformation of
identities is the need at present, it is imperative to understand the dynamics
of categorization and re-categorization (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2011)
and what education leaders do for it.
Conclusion
As we see violence in education was promoted and encouraged in the his-
tory of education. It took the symbolic, structural, and physical (Hughes,
2020) and political turns parallelly with the different reforms and policies.
The punishment tradition (Danda Pratha) is common in Indian schooling
along with the codes prescribed for every behaviour not suited to the nor-
mative design of schools. Since schools were the marker of codified and
disciplined behaviour, any transgression was taken as contrary to the cul-
ture and traditions. Earlier schools worked for the sustenance of culture;
today it tries to fulfil the agenda of globalization through the middle-class
hybrid values, though it mostly fails either to nurture the traditional values
or the modern values. Since it is difficult to inculcate what is traditional
and falls short of what was carried on by the post-enlightenment period.
The populist and majoritarian agenda which is quick and based on popular
norms are inculcated in the students’ school practices. For example, schools
engaging students to do Gandhigiri in the skits and what the satyagraha
meant seems to be is paradoxical. Also doing yoga in school due to the rise
of revivalism skips the meaning of yoga meditation. Students may learn
some posture (e.g., doing Patanjali ashtanga) but don’t find any engagement
with the meaning of “Chitta Vritti Nirodh”. How many times during the
national festivals do the schools talk about the role of Dr B R Ambedkar?
Why there is intentional reluctance to go into the history of the preamble
in the school? Violence can be regulating, hiding, and alienating suiting to
the populist agenda to normalize something to the ideology of political cul-
ture. The school started by Phule in Maharashtra addressed this violence
embedded in education long ago and gave respect and dignity to every child
of whatever caste or gender. The development of a culture of conformity,
fitting into the established model of successful personality based on one’s
social identity, derived from the history of caste, and promoting silence are
the violence on the agency of the child. Not confirming results in punish-
ment, expulsion, and dehumanization. For some social identities, who are
not meant to come into the culture meant for upper castes, dehumaniza-
tion is inherent in its process. This is not to say that becoming human is
like becoming upper caste because the resistance to the cravings to have a
dignified life and the force to conform to the ascribed biased self, given by
the dominant social system, give rise to deep inner conflict. People either
resolve it by affiliating it to their rebellious self or internalizing the ideology
of dominance and losing their self-esteem. The suitable measure to address
the context of equality and dignity may facilitate school system from every-
day dehumanizing. This is a categorical violence in education where one’s
agency is not respected and gets dehumanized by the school system itself,
which will be elaborated in the coming chapter.
Notes
1 World Health Organization Report (2019). School-based violence prevention:
A practical handbook. https://www.unicef.org/media/58081/file/UNICEF-
WHO-UNESCO-handbook-school-based-violence.pdf
2 https://www.deccanherald.com/national/north-and-central/in-this-up-school-
dalit-children-face-constant-violence-1036108.html
3 All-encompassing is not homogenization in any sense but bringing compati-
bility in the social experiences of all the stakeholders in the school, which also
include the provision of space for dissent.
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6 Dehumanized identities and
empowerment
Dehumanization is a process of reducing the agency of humans or depriving

the person of his/her rights. This is also an act of dominance through var-
ious mechanisms and standards, creating an unequal space in the society.
The next aim is to understand the various influence process in education in
which power demands conformity and obedience. In this process, the stu-
dents and teachers become the victim of oppression without any channels for
countering back. Dalit students, students from lower classes, and teachers
from minority groups and gender are rampantly victimized through the act
of dehumanization. Dehumanization of others belonging to an oppressed
and marginalized community is an influence of power. It is embedded in
the historically powerful identities taken as a reality of any social system
that trickles down to the educational system. School requires a check to
filter away this trickling of power and identities and strives for creating
an overhauling and empowering system. Some of the suggestions derived
from the literature on decolonizing approaches (e.g., Phillips, Adams, &
Salter, 2015; see also Martin-Baro, 1994) may correspond to the agenda
of liberating educational psychology from the societal constraints and
attaining an identity respecting culture. These are beyond the conventional
prescriptions that make the marginalized invisible and permanent bearers
of oppression.
Dehumanization operates at various levels. It is a social psychologi-
cal process that affects the person’s socio-political positioning. In many
instances, despite being meritorious, the students’ ancestral occupations
create barriers to social mobility. The occupation which is devalued in
society (e.g., butcher, manual scavenger, domestic worker, leather worker)
has also a seemingly dehumanizing impact. These students are dehuman-
ized based on their occupational identity. Dehumanizing seems to be a
distinct form of prejudice laden within the structure of power and dom-
inant institutions. Wilde, Martin, and Goff (2014) indicated that these
are the worst form of intergroup outcomes where the powerful outgroup
prejudice categorically leads to the dehumanization of the powerless out-
group. These groups are present in all the available domains including the
120 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-9

Dehumanized identities and empowerment 121
schools where there are both soothing and degrading interpersonal rela-
tionships. Soothing of the relationship may show the neutralizing of subtle
and blatant power dynamics and effort for the dignity of all. Otherwise, it
is degrading and sometimes destructive. The power dynamics in education
is the result of many facets of life, for example, family relationship, com-
munity, and neighbourhood where we see people bring the values through
which they are socialized. The memory of power relationships shapes the
mindset and lifestyles. When power is materialized into the process of
degrading the powerless and marginalized others, its effect is toxic and
intended towards the human agency. Power is embedded in the symbols
which are adopted by the power which further lives in our conscience.
This is what teachers, parents, policymakers, judges, and other authori-
tative agents of society communicate to one another and their followers.
In one way, it looks like a human thing, an authentic assumption of social
reality, and system justification. However, this is the perspective used
either to demonstrate the inferiority and othering of powerless identity or
criminalizing if one doesn’t conform to those imposed values. From the
powerful and hegemonical point of view, this is a system of righteousness
but at the same time from the subalterns’ view, this is a system of oppres-
sion. In the technical psychological vocabulary, this is dehumanization
which is a dehumanization is the repudiation of even the basic human
potential to be like a dignified human being (Formanowicz et al., 2018;
Haslam, 2006; Kelman, 1973).
Dehumanizing, power, and schooling

Dehumanization is a form of maltreatment of the powerless and objectified
others. They are seen as having no agency, uniqueness, or human nature.
Since for the marginalized, this is an everyday experience, the acceptance
of this denial of humanity needs to be highlighted out of the framework
of normality on which the society and its institutions are based. During
dehumanization, both the individual and a social group suffer indignity
and objectification. They are the true victims of power indiscriminately
imposed on them and remove them from their agency both cultural and
individual. It happened every time; history is the witness and has an emo-
tional and social repercussion. The perception of students by the school
authority is constantly in a downward direction and in an evaluative way.
Students’ perception of authority is loaded with fear and rage. It is not that
students don’t respect authority or authority doesn’t appreciate students.
But this relationship is not linear as it is understood through the schemas
of cultural morality as one is socialized. The account of Dalit students tells
the story of dehumanization. As in the case of Valmiki, he narrated the
incident in the classroom when master Saheb was narrating the plight of
Dronacharya when he fed his son the flour mixed with water. When Valmiki
cut across that emotional scene with the legitimate question about Dalits
who drank mar, infuriated the teacher. The teacher instantly symbolizes
the era of Dalit questioning the upper caste narrative as a time of Kaliyuga.
He immediately used animalistic labelling (you mouse – “Chure Ke” to
attribute Valmiki and his imposed group identity as untouchable) (Krishna,
2012, p. 55).
Dehumanization becomes the everyday part of schooling where the stu-
dents are labelled as animals and insects. This is not new as it has shaped
the model of education in terms of venting out the emotion and prejudices
on someone who seems not to fit into the established framework of abil-
ity, agency, and identity. Students are not considered human despite hav-
ing full potentiality and the possibility to grow and live a life of dignity
without any preconceived notion ascribed to them. In this process of label-
ling, ascribing, and targeting, there is a swift alignment to the whiggish
history of the marginalized group and connotated in terms of something
which is negatively embedded within this group that makes them inferior.
This happened with the Jews, Dalits, women, third binary gender, poor
Muslim girls, Dalit Christians, and other working classes. These are not
simple categories to be numbered but identities to bear and carried without
many avenues to decategorize them. One of the fundamental rights is to
get educated. In other words, to grow to one’s potential to be a respon-
sible and self-actualized being. Dehumanization from the powerful, who
holds the resource and distribute at their will, is the discounting of the
agency of the powerless recipient. Agency is striving to achieve one’s goals
(Abele & Wojciszke, 2014); however, it is also just not an individual thing.
If an agency is demeaned, it affects the group which continuously defines
the taken-for-granted individual agency. As per Formanowicz et al. (2018),
the construction of meaningful and stable social relations is the effect of
communion which also refers to group affinity and bonding. The role of
this group bonding was shown to have a detrimental effect on individual
members, both as social support and social cure. Conversely, if the group
is a low-status group, it hurts the individual member provided there is a
strength-building mechanism through social power. Any group shows its
strength through its emotional bonding, values, and knowledge of its his-
tory of struggle. Dalit groups though try to come out from the shackles
of shame through their identification and collective pride associated with
leaders, their everyday humiliation is a reminder of their social identity
projected from the past as devalued and from the present as assertive and
political. In schools, it is normal and acceptable to conjecture ability with
identity. The identity of the student is seen as stagnant and to the wish of
teachers how they construct according to their will and experience. The
case of Valmiki is not nascent or one of the incidents but it is an everyday
part of students who come to school, take the dehumanizing label and bear
it. Research has attributed the cause of disengagement, disidentification,
and prejudice along with the socioeconomic and sociometric factors in the
dropout. Dehumanizing is the result of all these factors combined and pro-
ject the marginalized students as unsuitable for formal education.
The social dominance theory (Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006) showed
how the desire to be powerful and superior to others led to the demonstration
of social dominance over the “other” which is thought to be less in social
status and coercively regulated. The methods for this are many and apply
to diversified domains. To dehumanize can also be explained with the help
of the social dominance approach and further; the acceptance of the wider
population of this oppression is a justifying orientation to live in the hegem-
onical climate and approving it. Jost and Banaji (1994) indicated the lat-
ter more precisely as “the participation by disadvantaged individuals and
groups in negative stereotypes of themselves” (p. 1) and the phenomenon
of outgroup favouritism (Jost, 2019, p. 263). This suggests that sometimes
even the unjust is justified and legitimized with fine logic for survival in
the climate of the powerful influence of dominance. However, this seems
to be a paradigm shift where people accept and go on. But does history
indicate the same movements in politics? Resistance was made, the protest
was done, self-government (Swaraj) was announced, the politics of boy-
cott (Bahishkar) was adopted and in the current time youths, students, and
labour protesting in some other form shows that justification is not always
the universal phenomenon and that too when people work in collective.
There are reciprocities of cause and consequences; superstructure emerges
out of substructure, and the politics of memory does not stand on just one
kind of narrative, as it happened in the case of colonized (see Fanon, 1963).
Schools also lived on many narratives and the most outrageous ones are
built upon the embedded prejudices and dehumanization experienced and
preserved. The silence of the students echoes the deep struggle to change
the situation of their life, both academic and social. The values imposed on
them may not be private acceptance as it seems important for the school to
create a just society where what was there will be as it is. Dehumanization
put a mask on the students’ faces, which corresponds to acceptance, but
behind is the face of resistance and misery which is looking for a change in
education.
The reciprocal influence of dehumanization is shown through dif-
ferent studies (e.g., Kteily, Hodson, & Bruneau, 2016). In the words of
Formanowicz et al. (2018), “both dehumanizing others and feeling dehu-
manized have negative consequences and can contribute to the escalation of
the conflict” (p. 102). Dehumanization has been connected to many reper-
cussions such as aggression, prejudice, and discrimination, a decrease in
prosocial behaviour, decreased support for pro-dehumanized policies, and
sometimes mass killings (see Bandura, Underwood, & Fromson, 1975; Bar-
Tal, 1990; Costello & Hodson, 2011; Opotow, 1990; Vaes et al., 2003; cf
Formanowicz et al., 2018). Educational psychology is also social science,
and in the last couple of decades, it has alienated itself from the wider
debate in social science. The process of dehumanization is in the standards
of schooling. It is mechanistically processed in interpersonal interactions
such as violence like bullying, corporal punishment, attaching animal-based
labelling, and false consciousness about other experiences and identities.
The study showed how dehumanization is an interpersonally controlling
and regulating mechanism also. According to Moller and Deci (2010), it
is “often used to keep individuals in line, ostensibly to create a safer, more
civilized society” (p. 41). They showed that the dehumanizing tendency
has a confirming effect on stereotypes held by the regulators. We can infer
that the inner resistance of the silent student, who is the victim of dehu-
manization, is another form of reciprocal effect which fits the biases of the
dehumanizer. Though this resistance can take many forms such as showing
oneself as disidentified, showing oppositional values, being less polite and
non-conforming to the values of school (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu,
2003; See also Hairston, 2008), in the case of historically oppressed stu-
dents, they are dehumanized at various academic and social levels, which
adversely affects their wellbeing and ability to resist. The pathways of
resistance, coping, confirming, fitting, and identification with school for
the group honour are not the same for all the students belonging to differ-
ent social groups. This is established research that the social boundaries are
not permeable for all to face the wrath of dehumanization with supporting
social pathways. The family environment, parent-child relationship, and
social dominance orientation (SDO) predict the higher-status group chil-
dren’s tendency to dehumanize lower-status children. For example, White
children dehumanizing Black children depends upon the levels of SDO in
the family (see Costello & Hodson, 2014).
Identity and consequences of dehumanization in education

The dominant discourse on academic performance can be associated with
the dominant assumption about identity and ability, though this is mostly
a matter of situation that is in the school climate and occupied the logic
and understanding of authorities and pupils. When we look for human-
ity and look forward to constitutional rights, the great aspects of human-
ity are taken into account. The process designed to address humanity is
also a design platform for the humane treatment of people living in a col-
lective, shared, and public space. In the popular language, the breach of
this right of being a human by the powerful is dehumanization (Amanvi-
karan). Dehumanization describes the whole systematic process of reducing
humanity into something which does not consider to have agency, mind,
and dignity. Dehumanizing is a verb through which the person objectifies
and categorizes others into simplified categories of different classes of ani-
mals. Students’ understanding of education may offer important insights
into existing power dynamics. Dehumanizing of any form is demeaning
and insulting to their agency. This is not human and it is in the person
who holds the power to collect diversity into a dignified social space. The
educational domain also pertains to motivated cognition (see Kunda, 1990)
and the students from the diversified group have hope to join the school for
their social mobility. This hope is blatantly rejected once the student joins
the school with lowered self-esteem and self-efficacy. It is dehumanizing
in itself to hold the notion that the students from poor and marginalized
groups join the school for the mid-day meal or any other amenities provided
by the school. They join the school to study and fulfil their hope to break
the barriers of caste and gender-based oppression. However, that hope is
systematically suppressed through the application of prejudice, oppression,
and dehumanization, removing any hope for enhancement and leading to
dropout. Though we have reported on the students’ dropouts, these social
psychological factors are rarely taken into account. Data in itself doesn’t’
say anything unless appropriated with psychological aspects. Educational
psychology missed this point of inclusion of subjective factors under its
rush to limit itself to cause and effect relationships. This is also applicable
to other social science that missed to connect education with psychology.
In the book, Fugitive Pedagogy, Given (2021) narrated the story of
absconded Black slaves who resisted the socio-legal, political, and eco-
nomic dominance. Their mind was reduced to animals which have to serve
its master and any kind of behaviour like running away, learning, or edu-
cation was considered contrary to their nature. Even in the stories, they
were “narratively condemned”, overexploited, and debarred from their
human agency. The founding of oneself through resistance, disobedience,
and accepting their fugitive self was so-called fugitive pedagogy. The cul-
tural-historical approach (Ogbu, 2003) was the approach of resistance and
asserting the collective identity. The Black students opposed the White
value system which led to the history of oppression. Similar to the history
of Black people in America, the Dalits also opposed the Brahmanical orders
embedded in the caste system. Their pedagogy is not shaping themselves
through the acceptance of the ascribed identity and systems but the rejec-
tion of oppressive symbols. To look at school students as a silent specta-
tor is a discourse of authority. The informal life of students shows a deep
resistance to the dominant discourse about agency, identity, and ability.
Dehumanization is a matter of power and identity. It is a matter of reflex to
degrade others under the influence of power. In reciprocity, dehumanized
either strive to keep their view in front of the powerful, invite them for the
dialogue, or assert their identities in opposition to the impositions. Freire
(1970) indicates the conscientization and dialogues between the dehuman-
izer and dehumanized. He showed how oppressors dehumanize themselves
while degrading others. When dialogue and critical consciousness are
emphasized, rehumanization happens in both cases.
The instrumental impact of dehumanization in schools may be con-
nected to the cognition of the students. It affects the thought process and
motivation of students to utilize their agency for the hope which is asso-
ciated with the schools. They hope for facilitation and encouragement to
enhance their social status. Schools are the platform of nourishment of
hopes. However, schools fail also and in the world across schools presented
a dual picture of success and failure. Since schools are formalized struc-
tures, it is the pupils who adapt to their context and not the schools. In this
process, many aspects of identities which include prejudice and dehuman-
ization become formalized and unquestionable. This ubiquity of power in
the form of humiliations and dehumanization in the design and structure of
school shows its normative presence. In the systems of institutions, power is
invisibly present as something permissive, liberal, and change-oriented. In
the schools, the discourse that it provides freedom, opportunity, following
the new policy initiative suppresses the alternative account of most of the
invisible and highly oppressed students and teachers. It may say that despite
the opportunities, schools’ initiatives and hard work, students and teachers
of some kind are not able to adapt and neither progress. The whole respon-
sibility is laden on them as deemed fit to fail. Success and failure are not
simply individual responsibility but it is also power dynamics in education
that operate subtly through the given standards of education designed for
the privileged. As per Han and Butler (2017):
Wherever power does not come into view at all, it exists without ques-
tion. The greater power is, the more quietly it works. It just happens: it
does not need to draw attention to itself.
(p. 17)
According to Kunda (1990), motivation affects reasoning. If authorities and

power-holders are motivated to dehumanize, their reasoning will be framed
according to the held biases. In the school context, the biases against some
particular sections of students may lead to different forms of dehumaniza-
tion, though the power structure and the hierarchical social system based
on caste is taken as one of the potent reasons for the biases one held and
thus dehumanize. This may happen in the case of upper-status students
against the lower-status teacher also. The society of control standardizes
its inherent biases which have lots of different repercussions. Research indi-
cated that dehumanizing mechanistically and animalistically has cognitive,
emotional, and motivational consequences (Zhang et al., 2017). This usu-
ally led to cognitive destruction, sadness, and shame. It was also indicated
how self-esteem held by the target moderates the emotions of sadness and
aggressive tendencies. Those targets, who had high self-esteem, experienced
more sadness and aggressive tendencies than those who were low self-es-
teemed to be mechanistically dehumanized. In the case of the effect of ani-
malistic dehumanization on cognitive deconstruction, self-esteem played a
positive role. Though some studies indicated the presence of dehumaniza-
tion in one’s perception of self, for example, thinking of self-harm, in the
case of school agents, the recipience of dehumanizing treatment may be led
to thinking about self-harming. This is called self-dehumanization which
is associated with aversive self-awareness, cognitive destructive states,
and feeling of shame, guilt, sadness, and anger (see Bastian & Crimston,
2014). There are acts, especially in the case of sexual harassment and other
forms of objectification. These justice systems try to protect people from
self-harming due to the presence of a party that inflicts discrimination and
engages in dehumanization. However, their impact is consequential and
like a deterrent only. The distortion of self-perception and motivation to
belong is thwarted, as the result of the dehumanizing experience of being
ostracized. Here, the feeling of denial of human nature and to some extent
human uniqueness led to the feeling of dehumanizing treatment (Bastian
& Crimston, 2014). The experience of the target of dehumanization mat-
ters in the holistic understanding of the power dynamics in the educational
domain. Also, when it comes to the marginalized group, the vocabulary
and grammar of dehumanization aligning to their subjectivity need to be
retrieved in a format of their personhood. Bastian and Haslam (2011) con-
sidering dehumanization as an interpersonally enacted and experienced
phenomenon noted:
Experiencing ourselves as a human is fundamentally connected to our

interpersonal relationships, and ruptures or insensitivities in those rela-
tionships have the potential to undermine fundamental aspects of our
personhood.
(p. 302)
The metaphors utilized to symbolize students from the marginalized group

can also be constructed on the line of inanimate objects (Waytz, Epley, &
Cacioppo, 2010). Dehumanization is reducing the human category to
something which doesn’t seem to have agency. This can be animals, inan-
imate objects, or even identities and social categories considered to be of
lower status, untouchables, and historically crushed down. When it comes
to the attribution of students who belong to marginalized and historically
oppressed, dehumanization may take a comparable stand regarding these
children as compared to animals of disrespected categories. The latter is
a kind of infrahumanization in which the ethnic and higher-status group
“reserve the human essence for themselves” (Haslam & Loughman, 2013).
Students from the marginalized group, especially, Dalit and tribal, are con-
tinuously deprived of basic human rights. Denying the constitutional and
human rights of having quality education with dignity indicates the psy-
chology of education which is driven by colonialism, racism, sexism, and
casteism. These latter categorizations and objectification of social identities
based on culturally constructed ascriptions and dominance are the deliber-
ative form of dehumanization whose impact is direct and systematic. This
denial of basic rights is conscious and intended, since to preserve the struc-
ture of society, the education system has mostly preserved the signs and sig-
nifiers of the established social system. The image of the school as a safer,
contextualized, emotional, and human space can be misleading, as in most
cases, it has homogenized the education to the values of dominant identi-
ties. In the context of power and education, Paulo Freire (1970) described
that the basic relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is
based on prescriptive elements. The school context despite being the system
of discipline and values results in mechanistic learning culture along with
the associated psychological attribution of abilities based on the students’
identities. These attributions are categorical and symbol-based where the
stereotypes affect the knowledge about the presence of others in that educa-
tional space. The prescriptions are made with this constructed knowledge.
He further stated:
Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice

upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed
to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.
(p. 20)
As we have seen earlier, these prescriptions can be curative, therapeutic,

regulating, and even dehumanizing. Prescriptions are given in the power
hierarchy where the taker complies with the giver based on the needs of
the former. Prescriptions can be imposed and a threat to the self also as
it happens in the case of students of subaltern and marginalized groups,
resulting in the oppositional culture. Ogbu (2003) stated that it is a result
of historical underrepresentation and the glass ceiling by the dominant/
majority group.
Dehumanizing to transformative education

Dehumanization may result in self-handicapping behaviour among stu-
dents resulting in non-compliance with these prescriptions. Somewhere
this affects the students’ self-efficacy belief to go by the schools’ standards
which some of the other time has dehumanizing outcomes. In an act of
dehumanization, these students are deprived of their indigenous cultural
expression (e.g., Ausubel, 1964). One of the facets of colonialism was dehu-
manization where the indigenous groups were largely reduced from their
human agency by the colonizer. They were signified as animals, objects,
numbered or zeroed. Dehumanization mostly directed at the oppressed
crosses the basic limits of ethics on which any society shall be based. It is
also implied through animal metaphors on the tyrannical, who systemati-
cally affects the agency of people. Sometimes, the connotation of the beast
is metaphorically used against the progenitors of capitalism who predates
on the agency of common people.
Of the dehumanization of various kinds, the perpetrators also dehu-
manize themselves by acting as a predator and dehumanizing others by
reducing them to victims. When these assumptions of power relationships
are standardized, objectified, and prescribed, it becomes institutionalized
and legitimate. Though students can create or transform their imposing
contexts and situations, it needs a sociopolitical will to make the system of
education less prejudiced, rehumanizing, and transformative. For example,
in Sherif’s Robbers cave boys camp study, the boys wanted to create com-
petition as soon as they learn of the existence of another group and before
competitions were organized by the experimenters (Sherif & Sherif, 1969).
The context was not external as it was portrayed in most educational psy-
chology studies. In some reviews and literature, the context has been given
a separate (outside) stand which impels some behavioural outcomes, but it
seems through various studies and experiments (Reicher & Haslam, 2006,
Steele, 1997) that context is not a separate entity but collective, shared,
and emerge out of the interactions themselves. It is in constant motion of
construction and co-construction. It is not that people will get driven by the
context by behaving in a set of ways and losing their capacity for critical
judgement. Also, Everhart (1983) ethnography focussed on students who
create overtly oppositional forms in schools but he focussed on those who
compromised with school culture, giving the bare minimum, and taking
care to complete necessary assignments without causing undue trouble. He
stated that schools are a place to meet friends and to relate in activities not
related to the official learning process. Though he does not overtly reject
school context or form, does not mean that they are involved with the pro-
cess of schooling not that their valuation of achievement is any different
from that of others. According to Everhart:
Students create their own cultures within schools and their culture has
a great deal to do with the production of academic outcomes with what
students ‘chose’ so to speak, to value. It is not simply within school
factors (teachers, curriculum) that create students success as the current
students produce themselves.
He further stated:
Opposition/rejection may occur from an unconscious realization that

while working-class youth can succeed as an individual, schooling will
not work for the working class as a whole. Only the destruction of the
entire class structure could do the latter.
(p. 121)
The forms of dehumanization in the school context become sociopolitically

and institutionally sanctioned. Ogbu (1987) explained from the students’
subjectivities as a:
Feeling of aversion, revulsion and disgust they (negative images of

other racial groups) evoke come to be incorporated into the culture of
all dominant group and children learn them “naturally” as they learn
other aspects of their culture.
(p. 260)
In the Indian context, the children of daily wagers, labours, and other
migrant workers are on the verge of displacement. In comparison to the
children positioned better on the social class ladder, these children have to
face continuous difficulties, as their parents have no secure occupations and
they witness the wrath of the house owners, landowners, and their employ-
ers. For example, workers and their children residing in the slums (Jhugis)
are often asked to look for some other place as the owners are constructing
new buildings or any shopping complex. Finding a new place to settle is not
only difficult because of the high cost but also because their social class and
status are detrimental to getting a better and dignified space. The rooms
they live in are crowded, noisy, and unhygienic. This directly affects the
wellbeing and education of children. Sometimes, workers had to travel far
and they find it difficult for their children to get admission to government
schools. The manual labourers who work in unstructured job conditions
without any amenities, health insurance, and basic facilities needed for
any human being are the victims of maximum prejudice and dehumani-
zation where their agency and identity are greatly reduced and deprived
of human standards of living. They are the victim of their occupation
and power domination in India. Most of the parents are either from poor
Muslim or Dalit communities who are working in urban or semi-urban
areas. They don’t have a meaningful occupation in their native homes and
many of them migrate to the city for any labour work. Some of them work
as a street vendor to earn their daily living.
How do children of these domestic workers and labourers form their iden-
tity? What hope does education give them? How this hope is fragmented/
changed by the continuous displacement, and lack of support at the policy
level and also at the social level? The community angle is not discounted
but the dehumanization, helplessness, and misery are observed at the col-
lective level making the whole agenda of social mobility unworkable under
the daily struggle for survival. Domestic work, unstructured job, dirty jobs,
and jobs of labourers and loaders is not just context but historical and sys-
tematic. They are the most wretched kind of occupation and they emerge
randomly without any systematic design. In another form, it is jobless who
engage in these works. The stated work is not a job but an honourable
engagement to earn a living. Education is not seen as valuable prospects in
these endeavours, which does not go to give any positive meaning to the
self. The work which doesn’t require any professional skill and identity is a
matter of choosing between survival for food or otherwise. The current rise
of Covid-19 suspended the opportunity for their children to continue with
their education and that too in the hopeless times of displacement, stigma,
and utter dehumanization and infrahumanization.
As compared to these working-class children, there is no provision from
the government schools to create the condition for teacher-students engage-
ment with the learning process. This depicts the class-based identity deg-
radation where the right to learn is limited to the availability of equipment
needed for the current need of the upper class to learn online. This stark
difference in the availability of educational context is further limited in the
current times and the future for these children. The blatant displacement,
unstructured employment, and the lack of past infrastructural development
for the domestic worker laid a severe impact on their children. Since there
is no structured policy for domestic workers, the time of Covid crisis has a
major impact on the future hope of these children which they derive from
school. In the times of lockdown, when classes were suspended for chil-
dren, there was little learning happening as the home condition is also not
conducive enough to provide an environment of learning from their little
or no educated parents. Together their parents have no work to earn for
their daily living and many of them are migrant workers displaced from
one place to another. They are also seeming to be vulnerable to having
a high risk because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The way it said that the
development process increased the labour, made them more labour, their
children labour, snatching all possibility of education and mobility. This
was a grave reality in India and still it is. Development increased the new
format of labour, the speed of money flow increased in some sections but
with the increased speed the money cashed out in daily living. Still the chil-
dren of labour take education, if they get admission, and suddenly they are
displaced after the completion of work. The struggle to look for new labour
jobs, settlement of the family and children, and daily humiliation and dehu-
manization has become an uncritical part of their life. Some groups engaged
online, and much loss of time happens due to a lack of proper support sys-
tem. It was observed that many students had their school closed and they
had no proper help/resource to continue their education. Social distancing
got a new connotation.
Deeper impact of Covid-19 is observed in the changing dynamics of
social relationships. Struggles don’t have the same meaning for all the
classes. This trend is also increasing among the tribal groups who lost
their hold on the forest-based survival means and their community got
dispersed in the search of occupation. Though research holds that tribals
are not indifferent to formal education but their isolation and invisibility
from the mainstream only create the barrier. Formal education is impor-
tant for their children’s education; however, the forced displacements
don’t keep them in the loop. The rise of enrolment in schools showed a
positive picture and children are taught according to their understanding,
but the standard format of educational curriculum and mismatches in the
policy implementation keeps the possibility of disidentification in schools
(see also Bara & Bara, 2021). The difference in the readiness and suppres-
sion of motivation is most of the time contextual. The contextual impact
on the students from these marginalized communities was such that they
enrolled in the government schools in their very locality but their read-
iness and recognition of the worth of education become lowered due to
several social psychological factors.
One of the factors which seem to create maximum impact on the will
of students was the continued exclusion of their cognitive capital and
their sociocultural identities. In the case of parents who become migrant
workers, their children had to suffer the administrative and other forms
of bureaucratic complexities. Sometimes, they are asked to produce certif-
icates and proofs of their identifications, which requires complex channels
of submissions. Apart from this, the emergence of hopelessness with the
education system as a means to enhance their aspiration becomes thwarted
in the competitive and neoliberal situations where the chances for success
are only high for the students who are better positioned on the social class
ladder. Group affiliation and community engagement factors are absent
from the manual job workers when they are the victims of displacements
and forced migration. The community feeling is based on the collective
memory and that should be enacted in the community. This happens in
spurts as the basic facilities of communications, affiliation with the home-
town, and continued struggle to survive in different cultural context make
the person vulnerable to economic and social stability. Memory is impor-
tant but it does not give food. The rest of the things become secondary and
tertiary to the demands of the dominant classes in the new communal and
spatial regimes. When explored further the meaning of dehumanization,
these socio-structural aspects play a leading role in the objectification of
marginalized people. If school regenerates an integrated identity through
the enabling mediators, which Gupta (2015) aptly connected to the school
education of Muslim girls in India, the Gandhian Nai Talim is possible
through the amalgamation of sociocultural values with modern education.
However, Nai Talim gets a different meaning where the revivalism of the
past which divided identities, oppressed people, and their sociocultural
experiences, schools may be heading towards the dehumanizing spree by
discounting the cultural memories with the forced values. Further, these
forced values may shape students into a format that is designed to promote
only the privileged and historically dominant categories of people. Gupta
stated:
We are now in a position to assess what education can achieve in its

role as an enabling mediator-a mediator between the responsibility of a
modern state towards its citizen, on one hand, and culture on the other.
(p. 141)
She indicated the clash felt by girl students belonging to the Muslim religion
while adapting to the school values. The struggle between school-generated
aspirations and also adapting to the religio-cultural/religio-gendered
framework describes the crisis and resolutions in the life of these students.
An enabling mediator can be a fad if in actual life it creates dilemmas and
situate these students in the direction of what is expected from the commu-
nity. As in the cases of students in poverty situation, schools’ aspirations
require community support to materialize the same. The ethics of school
stays with the systematic integration and nurturing of the students’ values.
If either the aspiration or the values which are derived from the community
is marginalized or systematically rejected as culturally lower, illiterate, or
cognitively demeaning, led to another form of dehumanization through the
mismatches of values and dominance of school middle-upper class cultural
capitals. According to Vaes, Bain, and Leyens (2014), the minds of victims
of dehumanization are:
seen as less intense, less causally impactful, and less objective than one
owner, a phenomenon that they coin the lesser minds problem.
(p. 323)
Government should increase infrastructure equivalent to the high-status

schools. Here, the meaning of necessary and sufficient is not the same, what
seems sufficient for the government schools is of course insufficient for the
high-status private schools in India, and so there is a shift in the meaning of
education based on the infrastructure, class practices, and markets.
Signs of dehumanization
There are some instances when dehumanizing shows its presence. Since
dehumanization is associated with oppression and harassment on an every-
day basis, it is important to act consciously to recognize the patterns of
discrimination, which affects the students’ selves. Some of the signs are as
follows:
a School authorities don’t give space for self-expression.

b Doesn’t allow marginalized students to engage in everyday school
activities as compared to the preferred ones.
c There is a lot of administrative bullying and harassment of students
based on their identities such as caste, gender, and belongingness to the
oppressed social groups.
d The school doesn’t value social identity or categorize students based
on social hierarchies emanating out of social prejudices. For example,
Dalits are dehumanized for their choice of food, excluded in the class-
room, and treated as animals loaded with prejudices derived from the
history of untouchability.
e Reducing students to invisibility if their social class is lower or if the
students belong to an educated group, their identity is reduced to the
same caste and gender-based stereotypes.
f Creates hurdles in the achievement efforts of the marginalized and ren-
ders them choiceless.
g School authorities don’t recognize the students’ indigenous ways of
doing the academic task, and if they move forward with any leadership
role, they are considered as worthless.
h If the students have any concern, they are avoided, excluded, silenc-
ing them, doesn’t address their concern, remove from the channel for
expressing any grievance, and rejected their voice as meaningless or
inappropriate.
i Doesn’t help in enriching their academic and social mobility aspiration,
shows comparative evaluation, discouraging any imagination of their
being in a better position on the social ladder, systematically demean-
ing and suppressing the students’ interest in the school task leading to
dropout, disidentification, discounting, shame, and humiliation. These
are the aftereffects of the power hierarchy derived out of the context of
historical oppression.
j As animals are threatened or punished to discourage them from doing
something not approved by their owner, similarly students and mem-
bers of marginalized groups are epistemically threatened and negatively
reinforced shaping the negative intergroup relation and contact.
These are aspects that deprive the students and members of the margin-
alized group of full human status leading to “intervened constructions of
shame and injustice” (Murray, Durrheim, & Dixon, 2022). Though the
wider enhancement of social status, mobility, and group-based authentic
pride have positive consequences in the school in terms of improving inter-
group relationships, the structural barriers, socialization, and sustenance
of intergroup conflict have always depleted the hope for group enhance-
ment and expression of marginalized and Dalits.
Student voice as a research methodology (Smyth et al., 2014) makes sense
when the vantage point to decipher the voices in an egalitarian framework.
In the context of marginalized gender and schooling in India, research had
showed both promising and alarming pictures (see Manjrekar, 2020; Paik,
2014). The systematic degradation of students and staff from minority and
historically oppressed background is not new in the educational domain,
though some authentic protests emerge when a group of students and staff
resists the oppressive policy through active social movement. Some scholars
(Bhatia & Priya, 2018) highlighted the role of neoliberalism in diluting the
resistance. This is a picture of movements while it rests on the neoliberal
agenda of making society and its artefacts more driven by the pulse of the
market. The market has to be understood critically as its reach is just not in
the flow of capital but also in the psychological terrains of humanity.
Every aspect of society has become victimized due to market control.
In critically discussing the market and its paternalistic intrusion into
the mindset, the focus was on two major societal domains, first, group
relationships and collective movement, and second on educational spaces.
Then, the focus is on the presence of market influence in our daily lives and
the construction of our everyday reality. The best possible effort to centre
the meaning of the market is to look at its invisible influence operating in
a hidden manner and the regular discourses in the domains like schooling.
This has further affected our everyday engagement with various facets of
life such as family interaction, construction of aspiration, and attributions
about agency and ability. Tileagă (2007) indicated that the dominant ideol-
ogies of moral exclusion happen when the concerns of the marginalized are
not taken into account. The digression from the perspective of oppressed
identities through the imposition of dominant values is an active attempt to
depersonalize, delegitimize, and dehumanize. It is embedded in the social
practices, rituals, and philosophies which continuously frame the mindset
prevailing in the institutions. Schools are not apart from this situational
construction of deservingness and authenticities. This further accounts for
the degradation of abjection that has occupied the history of inequality.
Franz Fanon (1963) in the context of cultural estrangement and colonial
intervention stated:
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of per-
verted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts,
disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history
takes on a dialectical significance today.
(p. 169)
Are schools legitimatizing this order in the new format of cultural colonial-
ism? The idea to bring the marginalized from the darkness to light through
the cultural shaping of native ideas is no less than the colonialism of the
past. Though the oppressed group members see the new wave of modernity
offered by the schools as enlightening and promising (Jeffery, Jeffery &
Jeffery, 2008) because it is taken:
as an important factor for economic mobility and changing the land-

scape of hereditary affiliations mandated mostly by ascriptive identities.
(Venkataraman, 2014; as cited in Rout, 2021, p. 34).
However, the deep categorization is already done as education remains a

potential site for the social reproduction of inequalities and discrimina-
tions, particularly for SCs and also for other marginalized social and gen-
der groups (Rout, 2021, p. 35). Dehumanization is laden in the history of
human present experiences, it is an arena of a privileged oppressor who
engages in a screening process of who is human in their term and who is
not. Schooling, politics of curriculum, controlling of pedagogical and class-
room activities, uniformity, degradation of community culture through
controlled schooling methods, possession of indigenous capital were coer-
cively discouraged, changed through dominant institutionalized culture,
the culture of punishment, discouraging of native language due to the influ-
ence of a kind of Eurocentric culture and further marketization of educa-
tion in the service of the dominant identities. In India, the way elite upper
caste adopted Eurocentric values and the way Dalits who were educated
adopted the same has a difference. Eurocentric values adopted by the dom-
inant classes in India situate their greater control of social hierarchies and
control. For Dalits, it’s annihilation of the oppressing hierarchical values
and connecting to the idea of modernity, egalitarianism, and emancipation.
Malott (2011) indicated that the targeted victims have always fought back
demonstrating the persistent fixed or biologically determined nature of the
abstract notion of free will (p. 75). The danger of conditioning through the
historical domination in all the domains including education had imposed
behavioural control on the children of the marginalized based on societal
expectations and prejudices. Freire (1998) insisted to be conscious of our
conditioned consciousness. Schools have the potential to create a culture
of resistance to the demeaning and dehumanizing value system. Students
are the active member of the school and reducing them to a passive unit is
contrary to the idea of education and emancipation. Churchill (2004) noted
that the native children were not merely the passive victims of all that was
being done to them (p. 51; as quoted in Malott, 2011; p. 75). This counter
hegemony-essence of revolutionary hope indicates:
The larger purpose of domesticating, dehumanizing behaviourist psy-

chology is worth revisiting for transformation comes from the ashes
and rubble of deconstruction.
(Malott, 2011, p.75)
The colonialist legacy of psychology in the neoliberal age of global capital-

ism needs a critical turn in questioning ourselves and our ways of seeing.
We talked about learnification, where lifelong learning has become essen-
tial for everyone. But how we learn whether passively or actively/critically
matters much in the context of critical pedagogy? The age of predetermined
and prepackaged knowledge and facts within student minds shows what
Roth (2007) stresses the importance of being aware of the socially con-
structed schemes that mediate the knowledge production process of indi-
viduals rendering the notion of objective science absurd (Malott, 2011;
p. 79). Further, the continuous exposure to the hegemonic ideologies led to
the homogenization of one kind of mindset without giving way to diverse
thought and dignity for the human agency. According to Malott (2011):
because we are all exposed to roughly the same dominant cultural texts
and messages through the mainstream corporate-controlled media, as
researcher and educator or teacher/researcher we find consistent and
predictable similarities between the schema of most people within a
given society.
(p. 79)
Here, social class is seen uncritically as a permanent structure and minds

are linked to it, for example, the rich are rich because of superior intelli-
gence and the poor are poor because of biologically determined deficien-
cies. Neoliberal context corresponds to individual differences, and hard
work, without giving any cognizance to the overpowering context. Critical
pedagogy, which we will see in the chapter ahead, helps cross the dehuman-
ization and learnification trap.
Conclusion
The Freire’s approach to rehumanize education was strongly built on the foun-
dation of society which is not stagnant but always in flux. As a recap, our school
system works on both formal and informal models of social relationship. First,
there is an ability approach which is built upon the students’ active engagement
with the schools’ proceedings. Second, there is something in the air which
connects or categorizes people. Dehumanization was observed rampantly in
the school systems where the students from the oppressed community or low
on academic achievement were always labelled to the animalistic categories.
Dehumanization has a direct relationship with the identities, whether based on
belonging to community or related to one’s cognitive categorization. As Apple
(2012) hinted that the schools are not factories as it is generally observed in
the mechanisms employed to regulate and control students and teachers. To
respect the agency of all the stakeholders and school agents is to help them
sustain and contribute their best part to education. Students learn when they
are given better space and full respect. They are the active agents of social
change. However, as we see that snatching one’s agency in the name of shaping
and controlling and reducing them to the stereotypical animal categories has
added to the school design. This categorizing to the same social constructions
negatively influenced the consciousness of society and the meaning of educa-
tion. School nurtures the aspiration and provides platform for active learning
and choice making. By encouraging dissent and creating the pedagogy of hope,
schools can provide ample psychological capital to the marginalized groups
students and teachers. We look next how educational psychology connects to
the identities and contexts to nourish better pedagogical practices.
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Part III
Decolonizing Educational
Psychology
7 Marginality, aspiration, and
choice
An implication for educational
psychology1
Earlier works have discussed how the preference of choice is shaped by the
market. In the domain of educational psychology, this causation is further
elaborated in the form of corrective behaviour through therapeutic methods.
For example, the power dynamics can be seen in the role of school adminis-
trators either in promoting the program which is more conducive to the dom-
inant group or promoting efficient measures to cater to the need of diverse
students. Educational psychology in India as an established sub-discipline
of psychology provides little knowledge about social-psychological
facets such as social class identity and social power which shapes the
student-teacher relationship and choice, curriculum and pedagogy. Educa-
tional institutions are also the platform for commodity production where
knowledge is manufactured as per the market. We will discuss the power
relationships in the context of social class privilege and available choices
in education. How marginalization is constructed and how does being
marginalized go along with the children’s aspiration and choice-making
in education? The present chapter questions the legitimacy of formal
education and examines the dominant notion of educational psychology
shaping the structure of schooling in India, for example, academic achieve-
ment, cognitive ability, cultural capital, choice and the culture of uncriti-
cal acceptance of knowledge. An attempt is made to critically address the
dominance of educational psychology that has occupied the mindsets in
the school. It is important to revisit the reform processes that correspond
to the respect for diversity and needs, going beyond the myopia of legiti-
mizing limited forms of disciplinary culture. The rise of expectations from
parents, teachers, and society that children will perform well and show
high cognitive and language skills is somewhere contrary to the ethics of
agency and the child’s right to express himself/herself. The ethics of justice
and respect for the agency of others is one of the fundamental aspects
which can be a future agenda of schooling.This is observed in the NEP
2020 with its ambitious long-term educational reforms. There is a possi-
bility of reverting to failed attempts of improving students’ performance
as the existing structure has not been questioned. Issues of identity and
sociocultural experiences of students from disadvantaged backgrounds
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-11 143

144 Decolonizing Educational Psychology
have not been addressed openly, thus limiting education to increase in lit-
eracy rate only. However, the scheme of continuous and comprehensive
evaluation (CCE) had embarked on flexibility for schools to plan their aca-
demic schedules as per specified guidelines on CCE, the possibility of the
negligence of low-performing students not fitting into the school value sys-
tem can’t be denied. NEP 2020 seem to address this issue by reshuffling the
structure of schooling and escalation to a higher degree. Reshuffling the
structure of education into layering doesn’t solve the problem of exclusion
and marginalization. Neither does it give a freedom of choice until basic
challenges of social and psychological representations, acceptance, expres-
sion, dignity, and cognitive justice are addressed.In one of the excerpts, it
is stated:
The Policy acknowledges the importance of interventions to promote the

education of children belonging to all minority communities, and par-
ticularly those communities that are educationally underrepresented.
(p. 25)
The approach of the policy in addressing the needs of marginalized chil-

dren directly led to the inconsistency in the application of justice in edu-
cation. The policy in its statement is less explicit about the experiences
of minorities and how they are going to be represented in the long term.
However, the agenda to be representative may have a valid addition to
the educational psychology that has systematically subsumed the schooling
activities.
During the focused group discussion with the director and teachers of
Vidyashram, Varanasi, it was observed that they are committed to the stu-
dents from the working-class background who need support at different
levels. 2 It is a mutual understanding between students, teachers, schools,
and the policies. It was discussed as follows:
To woh sab kaam hum log ko apne upar leke karna hai
Unhi ke umar ke log ya parivaar ke log kah sakte hai ki
kya fizul mein padh rahe ho
Abhi to bahut din padhna padega
Abhi yeh kaam shuru kar do
Agar family ko lagega ka ki hamara vision bahut clear hai, planning
bahut thos hai
Saath saath pocket money bhi paa rahen hain hai
To woh aage ki padhai karenge
[We have to take all the responsibilities for those works
People of their age or their family members may say that why you are
wasting your time in studies
You have to study for many days
Marginality, aspiration, and choice 145
You must start this work now
If family members see that our vision is very clear, planning is solid
Side by side their children are earning also
So, they may allow for further education]
Most of the marginalized children don’t get new opportunities to come out
from their present disadvantaged situation, occupational structure, and low
hierarchical portrayal of their occupational status which are less preferred
in the society. The preference of education for children who have higher
status is not to go for these low-status jobs, so basically it confined as low
status and as working class. The condition of marginalized children, ghet-
toization of poor Muslim, and other disadvantaged group came out with
many psychological burdens and the release of those burdens becomes a
necessary priority of the schools through education and promotions. Some-
times, children are not able to cope with the difficult school environment;
they disengage from rigid structure of schooling which often denotes values
which may not be congruent with their cultural experiences. The motive
is to uplift these children’s social class status and self-esteem so that they
enrich their identity. Teachers also discussed about their interaction with
the parent. They described:
Kuch parents Kahte hain ki mera beta cellphone repair karnemein,

welding job mein, transport meinachahai
Lekin yeh sub working class profession hain
Hume yeh bilkul encourage nahin karna hai
Sun lo lekin encourage nahinkarna hain
Working class ko working class mein nahin bhejna hai
Working class kaa ek level hain
Unlog ko jo bhi idea hai who galat hai
Teachers job me bahut jyada security, status, and progress kaa samb-
havna hai
Uske saath kuch bhi karen ek dusra life style ho jata hai
[Some parents say that their children are good in cellphone repair,
welding, transportation
But these are all working class profession
We will never try to encourage this
Listen to them but don’t encourage to engage in manual occupation
We are not here to send working class children to working class pro-
fession again
There is a level of working class
Whatever idea they have is wrong
In teacher like job there are much security, status and the possibilities
of progress
Along with that if they do anything the new life style will be there]
Even if the rate of literacy in India increasing (see Kingdon, 2007), the cur-
rent debate has more aggressively inclined towards the quality education.
The movement to educate children has been in progress but it also seen in
the recent times that the divides in education also increased. The pace of
movement to educate and the quality education has taken a new turn where
the accessibility to quality education is still determined by the agenda of the
powerful identities. The psychological reality of people is still underscored
or sometime exaggerated. More psychological understanding is needed at
the level of policy implication for the school. According to Kumar (2007),
the real solution to the problem of under achievement lies largely in a class-
room structure where time is provided to deal with social needs. The solu-
tion lies largely in making the classroom activities of such high levels of
attractiveness that motivation arises from even among those indifferent to
learning. The solution also lies, and in connection with the above, in pull-
ing together the real-life experience of children with the academic skills,
they need to learn (p. 307). The commitment to bear all the hurdles to
uplift the students is not very much seen pragmatically in the policies, and
sometimes it is the school who opts to take these responsibilities. They
are fully involved to make the planning better to have students’ quality
and interdisciplinary education, so that the students can become capable
in arts, teaching, design, entrepreneur, and start-ups. However, they insist
for the quality trainer who can engage in the process of apprenticeship
development.
The attempt to empower students through effective pedagogy, curric-
ulum design, and different co-curricular activities occupied the working
psychology of the school system. The new educational policy mentioned the
term power and related term such as empowerment more than 30 times in
the script. A few examples are stated below:
empower teachers and help them to do their job as effectively as possible.

(p. 4)
promoting multilingualism and the power of language in teaching and

learning.
(p. 5)
a ‘light but tight’ regulatory framework to ensure integrity, transpar-

ency, and resource efficiency of the educational system through audit
and public disclosure while encouraging innovation and out-of-the-box
ideas through autonomy, good governance, and empowerment.
(p. 5)
It indicated the structural improvement of school space so that the above

agenda can be fulfilled. According to NEP, this can be possible through
decentralization and distribution of power to different working bodies,
rather than being limited to a single institution such as the department of
school education. NEP 2020 stated:
At present, all main functions of governance and regulation of the

school education system – namely, the provision of public education,
the regulation of education institutions, and policymaking – are han-
dled by a single body, i.e., the Department of School Education or its
arms. This leads to a conflict of interests and excessive centralized
concentration of power; it also leads to ineffective management of the
school system, as efforts towards quality educational provision are
often diluted by the focus on the other roles, particularly regulation,
that the Departments of School Education also perform.
(p. 30)
As we see some educational programs such as “beti bachao, beti padhao

(BBBP), sarva shiksha abhiyan (SSA), school chalo abhiyan”, mandatory
yoga classes, voucher system of education, new educational policy 2020,
and policies for disabled and minorities students, the bringing of marginal-
ized categories such as gender, social classes, minority rights, and disabil-
ity can be appreciated. At the same time, how much these policies render
to the empowerment through the access to high-quality education, design
of similar and inclusive spaces of education through equal representa-
tions of diversity, facilitating better resources to marginalized students to
freely opt for the school of their choice is also to be facilitated on regular
basis. The reproduction of oppressive relationship based on the same class,
caste, and gender mindset happen through the social structural looping
that had gripped the social relationship. Changing the structure of school
through the design of educational space will not address the broader prob-
lem of exclusion unless students from the marginalized group get social and
psychological support. NEP didn’t list the prejudice neutralizers to bring
equity nor does it show its influence on the broader policies and budgeting
on education to bring representation and affirmative-justice action. Some
of the technical phrases are observed in the NEP 2020 document such as
“cultural preservation”, “promotion of critical thinking”, “knowledge and
an employment landscape”, “technology”, “affordability”, and “private
philanthropy”. Raina (2020)3 noted:
In detailing the vision, content and processes for school education NEP
2020 envisions that child must not only learn but also ‘learn how to
learn’.For this, it recommends an ‘experiential, holistic, integrated,
inquiry-driven, discovery-oriented, discussion-based, flexible, and of
course, enjoyable’ pedagogy. It recommends a broad-based school cur-
riculum which includes ‘basic arts, crafts, humanities, games, sports
and fitness, languages, literature, culture, and values, in addition to
science and mathematics’ for a well-rounded education.
Academic engagement, aspiration, and choice of students were judged from
the cognitive perspective. The question frequently explored in the educa-
tional psychology literature and educational discourse that “why do some
students get difficulty in adjusting to the school environment which results
in either dropout or low academic performance?” The answer to this ques-
tion has been explored through various approaches, such as cognitive (e.g.,
Kintsch, 1988), motivational (e.g., Dweck & Master, 2008), contextual
(e.g., Sirin, 2005), and cultural (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004; see also
Vygotsky, 1978; Kityama & Uskul, 2011). If contextual and cultural fac-
tors are included in the educational domain, the cause of psychological
processes, both cognitive and non-cognitive, can be better understood.
However, it was observed that these two factors have been interrogated as
separate entities rather than as macro-level forces shaping the individual
level phenomenon.It is becoming a fact that individually represent society
and any behaviour can be accumulated as societal input but still main-
stream psychology separated its form and structure (see Winne & Nesbit,
2010).
Equality and equity in education

The main obstacles to excellence and equity in education depend on grasp-
ing the complex nature of how social inequality is socially organized and
sustained (Portes, 2005). Taking a glance at the reforms in the educational
sector, we may notice that despite the efforts in improving the quality of
education and wellbeing of children, the all-encompassing achievement
problems persist. The most common problems of the academic achievement
gap faced by students were often categorized as either genetic or socially
driven. Even those who refused the dominant role of genetic influence
metaphorized it in other forms. The historical forces shaping the social-
psychological aspects of students have been rather placed under the umbrella
of evolutionary degeneration. This portrayal of a wider academic achieve-
ment gap was positioned under the individual genesis of vulnerability and
deficiency. Thus, the observance of the academic achievement gap in terms
of the performance of students became the governing marker of students
as well as national development. Critical observation of school by students
and their detachment from the forced entity of the educational system was
taken as something gone astray in the students themselves, and educational
policies were designed on that basis.
In one of the discussions with the father of working-class student, who has
a tailoring shop at home, he expressed his financial problem in educating his
children4. He believed in his child’s ability but due to family and financial
constrains felt hopeless with the current educational system. He said:
Aamdani koi theek nahi hai

Saal sahih hai to aa jaata hai
Kaam karte hai to aa jaata hai nahi to nahi aata hai
[Income is not stable
If year is fine then money comes
If we do work then we get money otherwise there is nothing]
This is plight of working class, even though some studies talk about the
community affiliation. Since all the working-class parents have to struggle
a lot to give the manual service, even if they have a community, income
generated is meagre enough to sustain the needs of family, though they
have faith and trust over those schools which are working hard to raise the
levels of working-class children to middle class through education. How-
ever, many constraints are with these schools, especially the financial. They
survive on donations, fundings, and approval from the government institu-
tions. Even if they prepare their students well holistically, the exam system
conducted by major governing bodies becomes the challenge for them both
in getting the affiliation and collection of necessary exam fees, clothing
and food for the working-class students. The agenda of social mobility and
upliftment become the distant dream without the full-fledged government
support in keeping the independence of these schools intact and decentral-
ized. The missing link between working-class and oppressed community
parents, schools, and government make these marginalized children return
to vulnerability.
The present educational system has legitimized its mainstream ideol-
ogy which intentionally or unintentionally deprived the right of groups,
portrayed as unconventional or from diverse backgrounds. However, it
has been untenable approach to include the widely debated ideology into
mainstream education as a new approach, as it was seen as unthinkable
and oppressive on the part of victims. For example, the recent position-
ing of different theories, one of which is a sociocultural theory, into the
national educational programs such as NEP 2020 and earlier such as the
national curriculum framework (2005) needed a critical understanding
of the metatheoretical assumption. This may lead to a better conclusion
about the open and democratic forms of education. The academic achieve-
ment gap of socially disadvantaged students has varied social consequences
such as failure (Ogbu, 1992; Steele, 1997), dropout (Dreze & Sen, 2008;
Janosz et al., 2000), lack of motivation and interests (Carr & Dweck, 2011;
Stipek & Tannat, 1984; Wigfield et al., 1997), and low academic identifica-
tion (Ogbu, 2003; Steele, 1997). These factors are the result of systematic
deprivation of marginalized students from their aspirations and rendering
them choiceless. Nevertheless, their ontogenetical basis seems to be under
the same systematic discrimination on the part of the school (Portes, 2005).
The above-mentioned challenges placed before future educational reforms
posed major obstacles to equity and equality in education. Effects of colo-
nial and occidental (westerner interlocutor) notions of competence and
achievement, till now, have been the major dominant feature in the social
representation of academic achievement. Therefore, the representation
and reification of the dominant perspective of education as commonsen-
sical knowledge on the historical time plane became the toothless ideol-
ogy of the mainstream educational system, representing dominant identity
(Moscovici, 1998; Moscovici & Hewstone, 1983). This process of legitimi-
zation of education by the more dominant social group in the society, grad-
ually, became part of the educational discourses of educational psychology.
Questioning the formalist agenda of education

The father of Prema (Markendey)5 expressed his view on achievement by
conforming to the commonsense understanding prevalent in our society.
He stated:
Safal vidhyarthi wohi hai jo teacher ki baat mane, padhe likhe, field
me rahe
Padhega to safal hoga life mein
Jo padhega nahi, kisi ki baat nahi manega, teacher log ka respect nahi
karega
Woh Asafal hoga
Aajkal safal aadmi kaa hi ijjat hai
Samajik bhi hona chaiye
Yeh school acha hai
Padhai hoti hai aur be gatividhi hoti hai
Kum pasie me humare bache achi shiksha paa le rahen hai
[Successful student is that who obeys teacher, study, be in the field
If study, he will be successful in life
One who will not study, disobeys, disrespects teachers
He will be unsuccessful
In the current time, those who are successful are respected
One should be social
This school is good
Education happens along with other activities
In low-cost children are getting good education]
What are the principal reasons for the persistence of inequity in educational
outcomes for students in a society which seems to stand on the platform of
democratic values? The formalist system of education is influenced by the
dominant worldviews of the psychometric tradition of measuring human
agencies and attributes. These dominant worldviews are appropriate to
the tradition of inequality (Kincheloe, 1999). In this regard, Portes (2005)
raised the following questions on the present status of education and the
persistence gap in achieving systematic equality in representations and per-
sistence in the educational domain. Indian social system has been the pro-
geniture of the colonial mindset derived from the meritocratic and ability
agenda of educational psychology, though the recent awareness programs
facilitated through plays, writings, or photography are in the process of
leaving a gradual impact. For example, the movie “Three Idiots” (2010)
conveyed one interesting message to its audience that the present system
of education still embarks on its pedagogy which Freire (1970) indicated
as the “banking style of education which is a barrier to creativity”. These
authoritarian styles of education sustained the motives to subjugate the
people of a historically oppressed group.
After so many years of important educational revolution worldwide by
pioneers such as Vygotsky in Russia, Paulo Freire and Joe Kincheloe in
Latin America, John Ogbu in North America, the education system silently
subscribes to the same functionalist approach, for example, “education
promotes equality; schooling provided the means of socializing young
adults into roles required by society; schooling ensure social cohesion and
harmony by moving us closer to equity and social justice; and, above all,
schooling accomplish this without prejudice to race, gender, or class”. This
represents commonsense knowledge regarding the role of school in edu-
cation. These aspects of schooling have created much ado in the context
of education and become part of the educational dialogue. Other aspects
are the sociocultural influence on the cognitive structure of a child. The
formalist system of education is still the dominant force in the societal rep-
resentations of academic achievement. Therefore, the answer to the question
that “Why one form of education which is prioritized in the mainstream is
always legitimized and valued and not others in the society?” can be traced
under the social constructivist model.
Constructivist and social constructivist perspectives

Psychologists have long been interested in knowing the causal factors
behind the high and low performance of students in the classroom. These
causal factors dominated the domains of education and schooling position-
ing them in the dominant worldviews. Two of which were quite prominent
representing traditional and realist epistemology, namely, the organismic
and mechanistic nature of human agency (Prawat, 1996). The organismic
view holds a Piagetian or schema-driven brand of constructivism in which
self-organization was an inherent feature of the organism– a tendency most
evident in the activity of the human mind which was nurtured under the
paradigm of rationalism. The mechanistic worldview was tailored under
the academic regime of realism which was the philosophical antithesis of
Piagetian constructivism. These worldviews were observed to be more indi-
vidualistic rather than social in orientation and were placed under the defi-
cit model of achievement (for other views see Kitchener, 1991). Apart from
the traditional and realist worldview, the alternative worldview comprised
sociocultural aspects, symbolic interactionist worldviews, and “mind in
society” worldviews. This alternative worldview was more context-driven,
though they were positioned under the postmodernist paradigm (see
Blumer, 1969; Cobb & Yackel, 1996; Gergen, 1985; Harre, 1986; John-
Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Toulmin, 1995; Vygotsky, 1978).
Social constructivist perspectives focus on the interdependence of social
and individual processes in the co-construction of knowledge (Palincsar,
1998). Since knowledge is either prescribed or self-created, Everhart (1983)
noted them as either reified knowledge or regenerative knowledge. Former
is a knowledge that treats abstract, tenuous, and problematical as if they are
concrete and real. Regenerative knowledge is the production of students. It
is based on mutuality of communication and created, maintained and rec-
reated through the continuing interaction of people in a community set-
ting because what is known is in part dependent upon the historical forces
emerging from within the community settings (Everhart, 1983). Regener-
ative knowledge is experienced by students as socially constructed. They
feel that they have a hand in its creation. Students’ regenerative knowledge
is oppositional to school knowledge while students exert no control over
reified knowledge (either its production or the process through which they
are supposed to consume it), they exert substantial control over regenerative
knowledge. Regenerative knowledge and its creation and recreation among
students reveal that the deterministic forces of the school, as exemplified
by reified knowledge, do not always take root and, in fact, may scarcely be
paid any attention to at all. The student culture and the regenerative knowl-
edge that grows from it may serve to resist that alienated aspect of learning
by creating oppositional forms that contradict the mechanistic processes of
school learning.
The work of social constructivists comprises mainly Piagetian and Vygot-
skian accounts here. However, presently the focus shall be on the Vygot-
skian notion of academic achievement and also an effort shall be made to
interlink and differentiate it from other perspectives of post-formalist and
cultural-ecological approaches.Apart from these perspectives of education,
rest shall be presumed to be inherently the area of the formalist agenda of
mainstream educational psychology (Kincheloe, 1999). The reason behind
this categorization as formalist and post-formalist educational psychology
is manifold. One of the reasons which impelled the present discussion in
this direction is not universal but more or less based on a sociocultural
understanding of schooling and academic achievement. The formalist forms
of education, though, are fiercely debated in diverse disciplinary circles, at
the practical level place, and compare the student under the same main-
stream and middle-class educational value system.It was implied that those
who are not fitting under this formalist system of education are enough
to be projected as a deficit, thus strengthening the existing legitimizing
myths portrayed by the dominant class and culture (See Beteille, 2007;
Tyler, 2006). These formalist approaches are dominant in the educational
system due to colonial impacts demeans the cultural and linguistic diver-
sity of historically marginalized students (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996)
and became reified as commonsense knowledge. These representations of
education in the form of academic achievement disregarded other aspects
and paradigms of education. For example, the category of students involved
in proper education, their achievement as compared to underachievers or
low achiever, their cultural representation in schools and not others, and
their politics of social identification never had become part of people’s
understanding of academic achievement. The urgent need to understand
other aspects of education and their representations is the need of the pres-
ent hour.
A practical illustration of the present educational system is its classroom
effect which has sustained the legitimacy of the past educational system in
its discourses. In this sense, the representation of formalist education weak-
ens the position of students from marginalized and low socioeconomic sta-
tus (SES) backgrounds and labelled their underperformance in school as
deficit and not as different from the children from un-marginalized and
high SES backgrounds (see Meacham, 2001). Some cultural arguments
problematically define certain ethnic-racial identities and cultures as sub-
tractive from the goal of academic mobility while defining the ethnic cul-
tures and identities of others as an additive and oriented towards this goal
(Warikoo & Carter, 2009).
This has shown that the dominant formalist force accepted the superior-
ity of the students coming from the privileged socioeconomic background
(Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993). In the process of judging students’ academic
achievement, the larger educational context was never questioned in which
students were seen in terms of their fitting/unfitting to the education system
rather than fitting education to the diverse needs of the students. This is
observed to some extent in the current NEP 2020 as:
The goal of the school education regulatory system must be to continu-

ally improve educational outcomes; it must not overly restrict schools,
prevent innovation, or demoralize teachers, principals, and students.
All in all, regulation must aim to empower schools and teachers with
trust, enabling them to strive for excellence and perform at their very
best, while ensuring the integrity of the system through the enforcement
of complete transparency and full public disclosure of all finances, pro-
cedures, and educational outcomes.
(p. 30)
Earlier, Meacham (2001) argued from the Vygotskian perspective that

a culturally diverse learning environment, in contrast to the tradition of
deficit, may embody important advantages in higher-order conceptual
development (p. 190). Researchers often ignored factors in psychological
studies that could have reconciled the gap in terms of cultural assump-
tions of non-mainstream communities and those of the school regarding
learning, which could be beneficial in literacy achievement based on gender,
caste, and other minority identities in various cultural contexts (see Heath,
1983; Manjrekar, 2020; Moll, 1992; Moll & Whitmore, 1993; Nawani,
2016; Paik, 2014).Nawani (2016) noted:
The job broadly requires a deeper understanding of children-their

developmental need, sociocultural contexts, individual differences
among them and so on-which then needs to be factored in for providing
them with appropriate learning support.
(p.19)
It was indicated that the children’s aspirations are also somewhere linked
to parental aspirations and needs. The policies catering to their aspiration
genuinely cater to their need. Conversely, if it imposes the needs of dom-
inant classes and caste, somewhere it is alienating the marginalized from
their aspirations which directly affects the community’s social mobility.
As we will see in the next chapter on critical pedagogy that how teach-
ers’ leadership is a political action and how teachers’ intervention matter
despite the overpowering policies and the school’s agenda. At the outset, it
seems that people of minority and disadvantaged backgrounds held motives
derived from the outgroup to justify the present system of education. Thus,
they legitimately succumb to justifying the present system (see Jost &
Banaji, 1994; Jost, Banaji & Nosek, 2004) of education. This justification
of underachievement by people of disadvantaged backgrounds undermines
their sociocultural experience as a deficit. Though, varied paradigms com-
prising sociocultural underpinnings also need to be vigorously debated.
Sociocultural factors matter?

Literacy acquisition has been the central concern of sociocultural theory
(John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 202). Scribner and Cole (1981) in their
analysis of the relationship between literacy and the cognitive development
of a child expressed the possibility that literacy acquisition can be inde-
pendent of schooling and have contextual implications in the development
of cognitive competencies. Sociocultural approaches emphasize the inter-
dependence of social and individual processes in the co-construction of
knowledge (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 191). One reason attributed
was that “children from working-class and lower-socioeconomic-class
homes do not ascribe the same importance to the mental functions required
by intelligence tests or achievement tests and academic work in the same
way as do middle- and upper-middle-class students” (Kincheloe, 1999,
p.2). Working-class and poor students often see academic work as unreal,
as a series of short-term tasks rather than something with a long-term rela-
tionship to their lives (Kincheloe, 1999, p. 2).
Studies showed that school failure resulted from the cultural inferiority
of the poor or the marginalized and teach us that power relations between
groups (based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on) must be considered
when various aspects of schooling and students’ performance and activities
are studied (e.g., Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 1991). The social context and
power relations of the culture at large and the school culture, in particular,
are central in the attempt to understand the class and cultural dynamics
of student performance (Block, 1995). Kincheloe (1999) emphasized soci-
opolitical cognitive theory which tried to understand the way conscious-
ness and subjectivity are shaped by the world around the human agency
or entity. This emphasis on sociopolitical theory rejects the mechanistic
worldview that is embedded in the cause-effect, hypothetical-deductive sys-
tem of reasoning. Lev Vygotsky theorized in the 1930s that individuals do
not develop in isolation but in a series of interconnected social matrices in
which cognition is viewed as a social function (Kincheloe, 1999, p. 9). In
a socio-psychological theoretical context, Vygotsky’s work creates a space
where integration between macro-social forces and micro-psychological
forces occurs. Analysis of these integrated spaces becomes a central activity
for a democratic post-formal educational psychology concerned with the
way identity is formed by large social forces and mediated by individuals
operating in a specific environment (Kincheloe, 1999, p.4). Such under-
standing allows us to imagine pedagogies that move individuals to greater
understandings of themselves and their relation to the world, to higher
orders of thinking previously unimagined (Driscoll, 1994; Marsh, 1993;
Vygotsky, 1978; Weisner, 1987; Werstch & Tuviste, 1992).
The most fundamental concept of sociocultural theory is that the human
mind is mediated (Lantolf, 2000, p.1). The sociocultural revolution focused
on learning in and out of the school contexts and on the acquisition of skills
through social interaction (Voss, Wiley, & Carretero, 1995). Failure of the
educational system has resulted in new revolutions which deviated from the
established framework of looking at education. Vygotsky (1978) argued
that human beings do not act directly on the physical world but with the
help of cultural tools and labour activities. This gives us the freedom of self
to operate on its ecology and systems and to change it. The use of symbolic/
cultural tools or signs, to mediate and regulate our interaction and opera-
tion with others, is the major hallmark of the sociocultural paradigm.
A child’s mind seems to be, as pointed out by various sociocultural
theorists, culturally shaped and it is the matter of plasticity of the child’s
brain which happened to grasp the utility of the artefacts when operating
in his/her environment. In this process of understanding children in their
school contexts, Vygotsky reasoned that an adequate approach to the study
of higher mental abilities is through genetic analysis (Palincsar, 1998).
Although sociocultural theory recognized four genetic domains viz., phy-
logenetic domain, sociocultural domain, ontogenetic domain, and microge-
netic domain, most of the research has been carried out in the ontogenetic
domain (Lantolf, 2000). For example, focusing on exploring how abilities
such as voluntary memory are formed in children through the integration
of meditational means into the thinking process (Lantolf, 2000). However,
these four aspects were found to be interwoven together in the develop-
ment analysis from the Vygotskian perspective (Palincsar, 1998). Hence,
it is with the application of ontogenetic analysis that the complex inter-
play of meditational tools, the individual, and the social world is explored
to understand learning and development and the transformation of tools,
practices, and institutions (Palincsar, 1998).
According to Lantolf (2000), their mental system had been reformed
as a result of their participation in a culturally specified activity known
as schooling (p. 5). A well-established fact of child cognitive development
fragmented in the stages was challenged by the notion that learning is
not the result of the pre-established stage of a certain form of maturation
but rather a result of social interactions and socially learned phenomena
giving impetus to the inner development of the child. The sociocultural
theory argues that thinking and speaking are tightly interrelated in a dia-
lectic unity in which publicly derived speech completes privately initiated
thoughts (Lantolf, 2000, p. 7). Context has an important role to play in
ascribing varied meanings to the individual or group performing the task,
though the task may be the same in its structural form. The point is that
while people from different contexts could copy the model imposed in the
process of teaching and learning but the activities people are engaged in are
not the same because the motives and goals underlying the behaviour are
different (Lantolf, 2000). Activities in different settings (e.g., classrooms)
do not unfold smoothly but there is a chain of one activity reshaping itself
into another activity in the course of its unfolding (Lentolf, 2000). The
shift in inactivity can give rise to the need to discover different meditational
tools for carrying out a new activity.
Palincsar (1998) asserted that
the peer collaboration resembled interactions between teachers and

children, resulting in the generation of new story elements and more
mature forms of writing than children had demonstrated alone. Fur-
thermore, the researchers speculated that the peer interaction was more
facilitative than teacher and child interactions, given the shared per-
spectives and life experiences that the children were able to bring to the
collaborative writing process.
(p. 349)
Behaviourists and latter constructivist agendas were limited in their dis-

course of teaching and learning as they ignored the more potent factors of
the entity such as cultural-historical-political force. In the classroom dis-
courses, students form a shared identity with each other which can be a very
effective factors to be utilized for effective learning through dialogues and
discussion. Gee (1990) suggests that as researchers and teachers we must
go beyond mere recognition of discourses’ role in producing or potentially
challenging hierarchies of power. We must take theoretical and pedagogical
stands against oppressive forms of discursively produced power hierarchies
in and out our tacit theories about students and their abilities to learn that
help inform and construct these hierarchies and specific classroom learning
environments in the first place (p. 195). Therefore, it becomes foremost to
look into the basic tenets of the child which have their genesis in the soci-
ocultural configuration and experiences (Cohen, 2009). This sociocultural
format has been dominantly synchronized by the children’s socioeconomic
positioning. Recently Mahadevan, Gregg and Sedikides (2021) showed that
sociometric status such as respect, admiration, and importance are more
potent and probable predictors of one’s self-esteem than SES based on edu-
cation, income, and occupation, though they also showed that sociometric
status mediated the link between SES and self-esteem. This may lead us
to think that SES as a sociocultural indicator remains important in one’s
expectations about sociometric needs. Here, the role of schools as a plat-
form of meaningful inclusion of the students from the marginalized group
may infuse a better social relationship among the diverse group of students.
We can infer that students not only received an education and aspiration
fulfilment but also respect and dignity which the school is capable of pro-
moting if it effectively takes responsibility in addition to the policy didac-
tics. This SES definition emphasizes the contextual, sociocultural, and
subjective aspects rather than its linear treatment in the formalists’ domain.
Burkit (2008) pointed towards social class as a fit for a certain category
of capital essential in one’s understanding of social selves. Categorization
of SES as an objective criterion for measuring one’s hierarchical position
is based on a set of variables that are clustered and complementary. Thus,
for the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the social class differences and
distinctions between individuals that influence their biographical trajecto-
ries and identities are not just based on the ownership or non-ownership of
material capital, or on the person’s relation to the division of labour, but
also depend upon the possession of cultural, social, and symbolic capital
(as cited in Burkit, 2008, p. 138). These capitals can be associated with
Vygotsky’s sociocultural and post-formal theoretical assumptions given
earlier than Bourdieu’s thesis. However, these associations of capital decide
the social position of the individual in any social situation such as a class-
room. According to Bourdieu (1993), each individual occupies a position in
a multidimensional social space or fieldwhere he or she is not defined only
by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he or she
can articulate through social relations. These invisible and visible accumu-
lations of capital include the value of social networks, which as Bourdieu
showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality. According to
Snibbe and Markus (2005):
cultural models are sets of assumptions that are widely (though not
universally) shared by a group of people, existing both in individual
minds and in public artefacts, institutions, and practices. At the indi-
vidual level, these cultural models provide implicit blueprints of how
to think, feel, and act. When people act according to these blueprints,
they reproduce the public models, thereby perpetuating the cultural
context from which both were derived.
(p. 704)
The above definition of the cultural model has been described into three
major forms, namely, religion, SES, and region (Cohen, 2009), where SES
has been seen as of major practical importance. The American Psychologi-
cal Association’s (APA) Task Force on Socioeconomic Status (2006) noted
that differences in SES and social class have important implications for
human development, wellbeing, and physical health. In research on SES
and social class, these are commonly operationalized as combinations of
variables such as income, education, and occupational prestige. When
investigating social class and SES, many investigators also probe subjective
social class, or individuals’ estimation of their social class (Cohen, 2009,
p. 197). People may perceive their social class to be different from what
objective indicators might suggest (Cohen, 2009). Thus, socioeconomic and
class inequity may be perceived not only in terms of tangible resources such
as income but also in terms of structural aspects such as power, privilege,
and social capital (American Psychological Association (APA), Task Force
on Socioeconomic Status, 2007; Cohen, 2009). Cohen (2009) highlighted:
Whereas much attention has been paid to the effects that socioeco-
nomic status and social class have on domains such as health, devel-
opment, and wellbeing, psychologists have not often taken a culturally
informed approach or considered the rich culturally textured beliefs,
values, and practices of higher versus lower social class individuals.
(p. 197)
Snibbe & Markus (2005) through various experiments had shown how
people of low and high SES differ in their views of the agency. It was found
that high SES people are more able to control their environments and influ-
ence others, whereas those of low SES are more likely to have to adapt to
their surroundings and maintain their integrity because of their inability
to directly control their environments (Snibbe & Markus, 2005). Thus,
Snibbe and Markus (2005) claimed that the culture of high SES values con-
trol and agency, whereas the culture of low SES values flexibility, integrity,
and resilience (Cohen, 2009). It can be concluded that children of different
SES are enculturated to have different values (Snibbe & Markus, 2005).
Providing meaningful education for all children sets the agenda for a more
diverse form of education for the child (Palincsar, 1998). In this context,
Moll (1992) asserted,“in studying human beings dynamically, within their
social circumstances, in their full complexity, we gain a more complete
and a much more valid understanding of them” (p. 239). Failure of the
school to serve children from all diverse backgrounds has been explained
through the following sociocultural explanations such as(a) discontinuities
between the culture (values, attitudes, beliefs, and SES) of the home and
school (Gee, 1990; McPhail, 1996), (b) mismatches in the communicative
practices between children of lower class and SES and mainstream teachers
who represent monolithic value system of middle social class that lead to
miscommunication and misjudgement (Heath, 1983), (c) the internalization
of negative stereotypes by minority groups or people of the working class
who have been marginalized and may see school as a site for opposition
and resistance (Steele, 1992), and(d) relational issues, such as the failure
to attain mutual trust between teachers and students (Moll & Whitmore,
1993) and a shared sense of identification between the teacher and the
learner (Litowitz, 1993). Adding to the above sociocultural explanations of
mismatches between the value assumption of the child and the school, the
children co-construct their knowledge system in the social processes with
their use and familiarity with the artefacts. Thus, we may call for an alter-
native view that reconsiders the tradition and scheme of schools and pro-
vide major overhauling through awareness. This is required to have a shift
in the perceptions of an observer and to value the agency of the child which
is the actor and bearer of the oppressive situations. Therefore, it becomes
important in understanding a child’s appropriation of his/her cultural val-
ues and to provide better education from a diverse perspective.
The cult of prescription seems to be present in all other circumstances
of schooling. The key phrase is “to do as you are told” (Thomas, 2006).6
Recently the rise of anxieties among middle-class parents is observed. The
reason is whether to trust formal schooling or not. Some textbooks on
unschooling and homeschooling are published. The merits and demerits
of schooling are discussed in the seminars and conferences along with the
policies on education, though schools have always fascinated the people in
their children’s career advancement, learning, and disciplining. Even soci-
ocultural psychology emphasized the role of culture in educating the child.
The family and community values were strictly followed in the parent-child
education spree. Some viewed that formal education may be a dilution of
the family value and the child may digress from the community bondage
with the colonial and modern form of education. Our NEP 2020 has also
attempted to bring the elements of Indian ethos derived from traditional
schooling to its modernizing agenda.
Though it didn’t elaborate on unschooling and homeschooling but called
for the state’s intervention in nourishing the cultural values through policy
efforts. Though it emphasized prevailing wishes to revive the traditional
ethos based on Hindu psychology, somewhere it missed the cultural val-
ues of many other diverse groups from tribes and religious minorities. The
question is: will it be a loss of community-based and collective learning as it
happened in the formal learning environment? Who can do homeschooling
and of what kind? Homeschooling sometimes happens as a parallel pro-
cess along with the school. It happened among parents, family members,
and the community for a long time. So, it is not something new, and it is
actively followed. For example, the caste-based occupational intervention
was strictly followed in the communities and sometimes schools played
an active role in encouraging the occupational roles of the community.
Taking into account, the movements in some schools to help students from
the working class to enhance their social status to middle class is valid.
Schools are essential zone to have a better life style. However, the con-
straints like mismatching of values and sociocultural experiences push
back these students to join their family work. So, there is no concrete data
to show the enhancement of students to the middle class despite a number
of efforts from different agencies. Homeschooling may become same as a
family engagement to manual works as they were doing from long time. It
results into caste-based occupational engagement for daily wage earning
if schools become hopeless and the parents and children from working
class didn’t find any proper employment opportunities. It is evident that if
given opportunity parent and children from marginalized group strive to
study, identify with the schooling and takes maximum care for their chil-
dren routines and regularity so that their education should not be missed.
However, the scope of formal schooling itself becomes the barrier. Even in
the case of open schools, alternative schools or any other schools, which
help meritorious students from the poor background and rural areas,
become hopeless for these children and parent, if long-term support like
financial, academic, emotional, and psychological is not placed. The NEP
2020 seems promising but much accountability and allocation of fund
is needed to help these working-class and socially marginalized children
across the social, psychological and financial barriers. Markendey further
stated7:
Subah bhore me padhti hai aur school ke liye nikalti hai

Hum bhi chilaate hai chaare baje har Mausam mein
Heater to hain nahi ki paani garam hoga
Hum log kisi ko kya banayenge
Dil ki baat…kaam kar ke haatho mein cheda ho jata hai
Agar aisa school sabhi garib bacho ko mil jaye to bachon ka bhala ho jaye
Hum bhi karkhana kholna chate the par jagah hi nahi hai
Ek kamare me rahte hain
[She studies in the early morning and go for the school
I also shout at 4 am in every season (Laughs)
There is no water heater to boil the water
What manipulations we will do to others
Saying from the heart, the work I do creates holes (sores) on my hand
If school like this is accessible to all the poor children everyone will be
having a positive effect on their wellbeing
I also wanted to open factory but there is no space
We live in one room]
From his view, it is clearly indicated the motivation of parent and chil-
dren for education. The depressing picture about these children is that due
to lack of opportunity and other constraints, they are pushed out from
education, their hope, and career aspirations.Alternatively, some view that
these children don’t trust in education and schooling. However, that is not
the complete view as many parents and children struggle and routinize
themselves for education and career aspiration, as we can see through the
excerpts mentioned above. In the words of Markendey8:
Hum apne ladke ko sab kaam sikhayen hai

Naukri nahi milenga apna kaam kar ke jee lega
Kisi ke adhin nahi rahega who
Imandarr hai aur kaafi mehnati bhi hai
Jitna mehnati hai utna imandaar hai
Naa galat ravaiyaa hai kisi tarah kaa, na koi bada shouk, TV dekhta
hai, kaam karta hain
Dosti bhi nahi, sab bekar
Sab paise se dosti karte hain
Hai garib kaa bacha, shauk nahi hai
Aur shaouk hai bhi toh zaahir nahi hone deta hai
Sab badhiyaan aadat hum hi dalenge
[I taught all the work and skill to my boy
If he will get employment, he will survive by doing this work
He will not be dependent on anyone
He is honest and hardworking
He is equally hardworking and honest
Neither he has bad behaviour and character, nor any big desires,
watches television and do his work
No friends also, its worthless
Everyone does friendship with money
He is the child of poor, no desires
Even if he has desires, he doesn’t show
I will teach all good habits]
These parents from working class are people of honour as we can decipher
from above. Though they don’t have many choices and are in the disadvan-
taged position, they teach their children to be self-sufficient so that they
may survive and earn their living. At the majority of scale, children from
the working class carry on with their family occupation due to hurdles at
different levels of education and career. The fear and anxiety among parent
and children is emanating from their socioeconomic position in the soci-
ety which is both unstable and condescending. It is congruent at the level
of perception of their SES and in objective sense (see Sinha, 2017). The
behavioural, social, and emotional consequences of their current position
is derived by concatenation of factors which at one stage is full of hope
and second the insecurities and inequality which is deriving their everyday
activities.
The coming of modern education and formal schooling created a class
of gentry who aspired all other generations to be of one kind. According
to Richards (2020), “Unschooling is a child-trusting, anti-oppressive, lib-
eratory, love-centred approach to parenting and caregiving. It is a way of
life that is based on freedom, respect, and autonomy” (p. 54). Though
in the Indian context, homeschooling or unschooling9is possible for the
affluent and not for the people who are from lower-status, both economic
and social. Family occupation may be important but what about thedirty
work such as manual scavenging which is demeaning and devalued work
by society.
Wood (2011) expressed her concern regarding homeschooling as not
turning into a biblical hub for family unity where the child is excluded
from the other avenue of life and ideas which will be called unwanted and
contrary to the family’s religious values. She opined that
homeschool promoters as a whole have raised important questions

about what state schooling is doing at present and politicians and edu-
cationalists must listen to those concerns. But it is also important to
recognize some of the tensions that opting out brings. It is not obvious,
for example, how homeschooling promotes a more equitable, just or
tolerant society.
(p. 129)
Homeschooling is also the schooling of one kind and there is a need to

see it from a critical point of view. It is not unschooling in Holt’s way
or de-schooling in the Illich standard. In one-way, schooling matters also
for the children who are migrants, manual workers, and Dalits, who were
marginalized in social, educational, and political domains. In one sense,
they are forced out of the dignified occupational zones. They did manual
service to the upper sections of society. Homeschooling is not applicable
here unless there is an intervention to make their environment free from
poverty and indignity. Here, the global impact of capitalist power through
formal schooling or any other controlling mechanism advocating neoliber-
alism needs a creative amendment and provides a secure space for the chil-
dren to democratically express, learn naturally, and develop the culture of
a healthy community. The good boy-good girl image construction as aned-
ifice of morality through obedience, discipline, and respect for tradition is
encouraged and expected from students. This is hidden from the formalities
of policies which in the current time insist on building critical ability. Crit-
ical ability is an activity of dissent and a scientific way of exploring one’s
curiosity. If this is possible and encouraged in schools, the agenda of educa-
tion will work better in the schools. Though critical activities are one form
of unschooling method and it links with critical pedagogy can be a part of
policies of future.
Reconsidering sociocultural tools for literacy

Positive results were obtained when the method of “reciprocal teaching”
was applied in the shared endeavour between students and teachers in
which questioning, clarifications, summarizing, and predicting strategies
were used to construct text-based knowledge (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996;
see also Olson & Torrance, 2009). Kasten (1992) illustrated the high drop-
out rate among Native American Indian children not because they were
handicapped or had a learning disability but the incongruency of the value
system between the Native American Indian children and the mainstream
American Educational system. Compatibility of the native belief system
with the principle of whole language learning was the major issue high-
lighted by Kasten (1992). Sleeter (2005) emphasized a pluralistic form
of education which includes cultural and historical respect for the entity
involved in the learning processes. Multicultural education includes the
curriculum and pedagogies which is compatible for every student from
diverse backgrounds, historical roots, and culture. These students find
themselves different from others in terms of the use of the tool to supple-
ment their cognitive processes when they are dealing with the knowledge
to meet the same result with equality and equity. This form of education
refutes the inflexibility in the education system of one-fit-all notions of the
state-sponsored pedagogies and facilitates the student’s indigenous way
of dealing with their environment. Sleeter (2005) differentiated between
standards of education and standardization of education in which she
emphasized pluralistic and culturallyresponsive forms of education condu-
cive to every student. Standard education is based on quality where the
teacher can facilitate students to engage in the school activities and achieve-
ment goals. Standardizing maylead to bureaucratizing and inflexibility in
the education system which lay opposite effects on every unit of the educa-
tional system, especially children. This is not to say that standards should
not be stated, but its agenda must be clear and inclusive. Sleeter (2005)
asserted that bureaucratizing schooling may lead to low-level knowledge
engagement and skills which are commensurable to the capacity of norma-
tive reference tests. However, Sleeter (2005) warned that sometimes stand-
ards become unquestionable which in turn leads to inflexible curricula and
teaching strategies violation of home culture and language of students and
de-professionalization of teaching. Teachers face a dilemma when they try
to teach in a culturally responsive way to help students in acquiring the
knowledge and skills needed to perform successfully on state and national
standardized tests (Wills, 1977). If they ignore the tests, low-achieving
students will become further marginalized within school and society and
the existing social, political, and economic structures will be reproduced
(Wills, 1977). Leistyna (1999) indicated:
Educational institution continues to perpetuate cultural racism through

their curriculum (e.g., which and where values, beliefs, voices and rep-
resentations of history, identity and differences are included), teacher
assumptions and teaching styles and de facto segregation of racially
subordinated students via tracking.
(p. 58)
Group prototypicality and identification is natural processes on the part of

the individual in a group to raise their voice in concern for the educational
reforms making it more plural and compatible for all groups to identify
themselves in the learning process in the broader political discourse. In an
ethnographic work in an Indian setting, Sarangapani (2003) found that
children’s use of their cultural artefacts in their ecological setting doesn’t
find a place in the textbook they encounter during their classroom setup.
However, the use of artificial signs and symbols was evident in the formal
classroom setups (Sarangapani, 2003) making them more vulnerable to the
natural process of education. In recent times, researchers have attempted to
look into the arguments presented here through different cultural contexts,
yet many questions remain to be answered. This topic is one with manifold
aspects to it ranging from broad ones such as cultural issues, government
policies and plans, to teaching strategies and curricula. So, teaching in a
culturally responsive way is major agenda of today’s serious educators to
fill in the gap created by the banking system of education which is in the
proposed agenda of the standardized education system of government plan
and policies. Hence, future researchers may consider the employment of
collaborative but critical effort from social scientists belonging to various
disciplines so that the different issues associated with the subject may be
dealt appropriately.
The socio-medical crisis of Covid-19 resulted in a major shift in the
thinking and activities in the majority of domains. One of the most affected
domains is education starting from schools to universities and professional
institutes. Previous research showed the meaningful relationship between
students and teachers where the teacher scaffolds the activities of students
with demonstrations and led them to examine the phenomenon under
examination. Cultural-historical psychologists like Lev Vygotsky, symbolic
interactionists like John Mead, cultural ecologists like John Ogbu, and dis-
covery learning psychologists like Jerome Bruner situated the context of
education in the student-teacher relationship. Some other theorists from
the critical pedagogical metatheory rejected the formalist form of education
and emphasized the dialogical engagement between teachers and students.
This engagement transforms knowledge and gives new meaning to the
context, better critical understanding of the sociopolitical situation. The
whole technology of education in their terms was to devise a dialogical
engagement for emancipation. So, technology needs to be engaging in a
better way so that one is free to question, see the context in collectivity and
devise active space for needed movements.
The rise of Covid-19 in the world affected this idea of engagement with
the so-called social vaccine-like distancing which is leading to the online
learning process with an ever-increasing reliance on the technology where
one can do conferencing, meetings, write questions, and chat. This mode
of learning, which was a kind of aid to the learning process, especially
to the upper classes who can afford these devices and was also a matter
of choice now makes it compulsory presence among the upper class and
further expands the class gap in the learning processes. We know that
upper classes are better equipped in online marketing and the new crisis
of Covid-19 deriving these classes forming a more confined form of edu-
cation. What was learned in the schools with teachers’ engagement was
the context of meaningful social interaction, identifications, and construc-
tion of student identity for all the classes. High social class schools have
the privilege to devise a method for teachers and students who get to the
system well adapted. In the case of schools, where students from working
classes read, these possibilities are less and with the rising competition,
coming from other forms of online teaching methods, new emerging dis-
ciplines are well taken by the equipped class who don’t have to engage in
the manual labour. The student-teacher relationship for the working-class
students had not yet created the possibility of social class mobility at the
grand level and many class constraints impel them to unstructured manual
labour. However, the changing consciousness, coming of the social policies,
and involvement of the community give the hope of social climbing with
the tools of dialogue and activity-based engagement along with the teacher
to these students. We will further elaborate on this aspect in the next chap-
ter on critical pedagogy, curriculum, and social justice, a debate that was
hardly part of mainstream educational psychology at the movement and
activism level. In the process to demystify the regimes and power dynamics
in education, the debate was limited to critical social science. Educational
psychology adopted the metatheory of individualism to be placed in the
domain of science which largely ignored the social context, identities, and
power dynamics which heavily influenced educational psychology opera-
tionalization of human aspects.
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of the published article “Sinha, C. (2013).
The sociocultural psychology as a postformal theory of academic achieve-
ment:An interrogation into the legitimacy of formal education. International
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8 Critical pedagogy,
curriculum, and social justice
Reflective educational
psychology in action1
The importance of pedagogy and curriculum is immense when it comes

to representations of identities. The overpowering neoliberalism has made
these representations a victim of meritocracy and nurtured hidden curric-
ula and hidden reservations in educational domains defying the agenda of
social justice. As we saw in the earlier chapter, the education domain is
dominated by the formalist assumption of educational psychology. This
assumption reduces the human agency into competencies, abilities, and
sometimes into caste and race-based superiority and inferiority. They more
or less have a strong link with constructivist, deficit, and positivist assump-
tions. This chapter will argue for new educational psychology which is
social change oriented, adopts a critical pedagogical approach (e.g., Singh,
2017) respects the basic rights of minorities and is transformative.
During the discussion with students from working class, 2 studying in an
alternative school as mentioned earlier, one of the students indicated the
need of student-friendly pedagogy through which one can achieve what one
want in the future. He expressed the meaning of success as:
Humko kisi bhi kaam ko karne ka woh hai, passion hai

Jaise ki hum ko wildlife photographer banana hain
Aur jus din hum uss uplabhi ki taraf badh gaye aur hum ko laga ki hum
uski taraf jaa rahen hain
Jarroori nahi hai ki hum pahuch gaye hai, woh hai
Agar uske taraf step badha rahe hain
Under se feeling aati hai success ki taraf badh rahe hain
Phir humko pressur nahi rahta
Hum santusth ho jaate hai
Agar hum badhiyaan photographer ke saath intern kar rahen hai
To hum success ki taraf badh rahen hain
[We have a passion to do any work
For example, we wish to become wildlife photographer
And the day we orient towards that achievement and felt that we are
moving towards that goal
DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-12 171

Not necessary that we actually reached, that is the thing
If we are making step towards it
A feeling come from inside that we are moving towards the success
Then we don’t have pressure
We become satisfies
If we are interning with good photographer
Then we are moving towards success]
Education is one of the most important tools for social change but at the
same time due to the continued devaluation of historically disadvantaged
students, schools may become a site of disidentification and lowered self-
esteem requisite for future social mobility. The recent circulation of the
draft on NEP 2020 under the influence of current political power nowhere
gave a proper standard for self-affirmation intervention to help these stu-
dents. Current neoliberal discourse in the school in the form of pedagogi-
cal exchanges, policy interventions, and curriculum design is removing the
possibility of any self-affirmative intervention in the school. How do one’s
group identification and school climate provide a self-affirmative context
and how does this help affirm their social identity and improve identifica-
tion and performance in the power domain of advantage? Schools’ inclusive
capacity-building programme, facilitation of students from disadvanta-
geous communities, and improvement in academic performance through
academic identification matter in tackling the blatant power divide.
Leadership and power in education: shaping of

critical pedagogy
Can a teacher be an authentic leader who enhances the capability of the
students to be critical? In the context of educating others, the tool of subju-
gation is none other than some form of pedagogical intervention. Generally,
pedagogical style relates to the action of powerful educational authority
directed towards the students who are supposed to be the taker of the given
values, either willfully or not. Students’ and teachers’ relationships emerge
and are primed in the context of power dynamics. The interesting aspect is
the way they perceive the power dynamics in schooling when the priming
is already been done at the societal and cultural levels. However, the role
of schools and teachers as activists can offer a better platform to politically
introduce a pro-diversity and empowering approach to encountering the
rise of neoliberal values. The task needed in the school is to understand
the link between power as a relational process and leadership as a social
influence process, empowering and justice-oriented. Leadership in itself
is the term that broadly denotes empowerment, representations, belong-
ingness, changes in orientation, and identity dynamics (see Jogdand &
Sinha, 2015). However, it is sometimes translated under the realm of power
dynamics of haves and have not. The arguments are in favour of leadership
Critical pedagogy, curriculum, and social justice 173
that is authentic and as a collective process with the transcending power
of equal distribution rather than capitalizing on one person representing
the dominant groups. Teachers are leaders and have the potential to be a
justice agent in their forwarding of the idea of social change. The roles of
educational leaders such as teachers, principals, and mentors in handling
the negative stereotypes and prejudices about the marginalized students
through inclusive curriculum designs and representative pedagogical prac-
tices. Educational leadership can be defined as a process of social influ-
ence that happens among various actors in an educational context. The
actors can be teachers, students, principals, or parents who together agree
about the meaning of schooling and education. However, the story of lead-
ership in an educational context doesn’t end in this agreement only but
there is an acute role of social structure and the sociopolitical system. The
impression and intervention of the dominant system regulate the meaning-
making of the actors about their leadership roles. The meaning of leader-
ship seems to be in the eye of the beholder and the way this appreciation is
communicated to the agent who is expected to bring the required change.
The basic question “who is my leader?” comes out with many associated
answers and fundamentally points towards the need for change among the
followers (Sinha, 2020). Change is not just the revolutionary ideas or acts
but change sometimes also denotes the authentic resistance towards the
dominant and powerful ideologies that may be perceived to be oppressive
to the culture and identities of the people or collective. The attempt is to
understand the role of leaders in the educational domain in bringing social
change by resolving prejudice and discrimination and creating a culture of
democratic expression and learning. According to Fullan (1993), teachers
are the change agents who mobilize new ideas and moral purposes. He
recommended that teaching and teachers’ development are fundamental to
the future of society (p. 11). In the opinion of Lieberman (1988), teachers
must be organized, mobilized, and led. However, it matters to understand
that teachers are the most important change agents with the capacity to
empower students. There are narratives of the marginalized and stigma-
tized students where the role of the teacher was immense in terms of stu-
dents’ emancipation. Though the majority of incidents in the Indian school
context also show the teacher’s bias towards the caste of students leading to
negative and positive stereotyping. It is significant to critically acknowledge
the role of teachers as educational leaders who manage these stereotypes to
help students understand the curriculum better and in a democratic envi-
ronment. There are incidents when students of marginalized backgrounds
face rampant discrimination, both open and subtle, resulting in large-scale
dropouts and disidentification (see Bandyopadhyay, 2017; Gupta, 2017;
Gupta, Agnihotri & Panda, 2021; Mishra, 2017; Shah, Bagchi, & Kalaiah,
2021; Shah & Bara, 2021). The research in India also discusses how the
major policies have the potential to improve the situation of marginalized
students in the classroom. It is important to know how various educational
policies are understood at the social-psychological level of students, parents,
and educational leaders and in what way they engage in dialogue without
any psychological barrier. Deriving from Joe Kincheloe’s postformalist and
Tajfel’s and Ogbu’s social/collective identity approach, it is argued that the
need for understanding the educational identity of marginalized students
matters.
One of the versions of teachers’ leadership is its significance to represent
the psychology of the followers such as students. For example, teachers are
the representative of identity and they engage in activities that show maxi-
mum variance for the student’s needs. However, it is another matter when
these leaders’ activities got intervened by other factors leading to the height-
ening of individuality. Broadly, leaders are representative of the followers’
identity in the context and when the context changes the expectation about
leaders changes and thus the leader’s behaviour. Similarly, the current trends
in the educational leadership literature discuss the teachers’ role as a leader
and their actions in the classroom as political initiatives. When teachers
are considered a leader in the classroom, for example, their interaction pat-
terns, perception of roles, values, and norms are viewed from the cultural
and societal point of view leading to the expectation of them as an agent
who changes, sustain, or resists the classroom dynamics. The presence of
a teacher in the classroom can be dominating and empowering depending
upon the contexts such as social class match and mismatch, caste and gen-
der structure, and administrative burden. The teacher-student interaction
signifies the programme of social influence in the classroom through the
pedagogy style and curriculum management. However, this social contract
has a greater impact on the social structure which led to stereotyping and
prejudices. Though in some schools the power displayed from the teach-
ers’ side is shown to be discriminating in terms of marks distribution, dis-
couragement of students to other extracurricular activities, and sustaining
the unhealthy social relationship in the classroom among the students. As
this is not the case always, few students from marginalized backgrounds
located their leaders in discriminating environments and became conscious
of their oppressed identities and struggled for social mobility. This signi-
fies the chain of leadership exemplars, inciting the motivation among the
generation of marginalized students to improve their social status. The role
of teachers in the classroom is of immense importance and they are the
important identities in which paradigms of discriminatory worldviews get
shifted.
Teachers as an educational leader: how they can bring

change?
Teachers, as a leader, display power and extend the horizons of their politics
into different matters connected to education and other social domains. In
some of the incidents where students were bullied or discriminated against
based on their affiliation to the marginalized social group, the role of edu-
cational leaders became quite important in the development of sensitivity
among the students and the development of the common ingroup identity
(see Royal & Davis, 2010). The domain of education was not unaffected
by the control of the orthodoxy of the religion and there are stories about
anti-paganism. Scholars and teachers in both ancient and modern India
faced the threat and most of the time unrecognition due to their belong-
ingness to the social group lower in the social strata, for example, Dalits in
India. In the post-industrial society, the effect of colonial expansion and its
method led to the metaphorization of labour as a mechanical system and
not as an experiential being. The same effect intervened in the mindset of
people associated with the educational setting. The rules for profit in indus-
tries as described by F. W. Taylor (1911) influenced many other domains
too. Taylorism in the educational context was bringing in the era of system-
atization and monitoring and gradually more corporatization (see Wrege &
Stotka, 1978). It was reflected more politely in NEP 2020 as:
The culture, structures, and systems that empower and provide ade-
quate resources to schools, institutions, teachers, officials, communi-
ties, and other stakeholders, will also build concomitant accountability.
(p. 31)
The effect of scientific management theory was so strong in the history of

organizations that the dominant philosophy of management had missed out
on the meaning of social identity and group effect, which to some extent
found a place in the human relations movement. Scientific management
theory is a theory constructed to explain the nature of labour and the goal
of an organization, that is, to increase profit and individual sensemaking.
In the education domain, the reframing of formal education is made in
such a way as to train the students who can compete or give maximum
output to the industry. Education is the programme that develops a sense of
we-ness, collaboration, love, empowerment, and democratic learning prac-
tices (Dewey, 2004; Freire, 1970; Kincheloe, 1999) and not just commer-
cial and market-oriented type of competency-based learning (see Gadotti,
2008; Mayo, 2013b).
The identity of being a teacher and as an agent who influences the stu-
dents’ thinking process has a categorical implication too. The role of the
teacher is also as a social category manager. The influence of teachers may
be in one group to portray a bias and in another group as a pro group. In
an Indian educational context, there are instances when teachers’ identities
and group stereotypes are reflected in the classroom discourses. Teachers in
the school and other contexts represent themself as identical to the identity
of students who generate biased viewpoint about their fellow students from
a marginalized background. One of the many experiences of Dalit students,
reported by the Human Rights Watch report (2014) highlighted that:
teachers asking Dalit (marginalized and socially oppressed) children to

sit separately, making insulting remarks about Muslims and tribal stu-
dents, and village authorities not responding when girls are kept from
the classroom.
(From India Today report)
The teachers’ leadership influencing the students to form a democratic and

common ingroup is a difficult movement. Since this influence is itself regu-
lated by many intervening factors such as teachers’ caste and class associ-
ation, sociopolitical affiliation, value orientation, and religious affiliation.
The role of teachers to create identity binaries such as cultural and sub-
cultural matches and mismatches led to stereotypes and prejudices which
may mark the classroom dynamics. In the educational literature, we often
find educational leadership and academic identification as important fea-
tures of educational epistemologies. If one is on the leeward side then the
other is at different positions. It was however unfortunate that it has not
been pointed out in any literature dealing with the psychology of educa-
tion. Educational leadership has been narrowly confined to the leaders’
traits or political vanguards or both and it has also never been tried to
get associated with the children’s performance. What educational leader-
ship presented was confused and unfocussed orientation towards look-
ing at the broader educational context. Similarly, the progeniture of the
psychology of academic achievement never focused their attention on the
facets of educational leadership irrespective of their frequent observation of
the social side of the educational psychology like stereotyping or discrimi-
nation. It has been observed that factors or dimensions associated with edu-
cational leadership have heavily given way to the cultural and contextual
features posing a challenge to the individual traits or critically following
the inclusive agenda for traits and other individual markers of academic
excellence.
Educational leadership when limited to the school context concentrated
all its efforts on the principal or head of the institution. This incomplete
observation of school conditions limited its agenda for the satisfaction of
teachers and staff who are the main units answerable to the higher author-
ity. This higher authority having all the power collapsed under its arms is
the main agent of a hierarchical system. This authority however was very
much an imposed figure and manages the institution with the skills vicar-
iously borrowed from the old colonial but very much valued bureaucratic
system of leadership. The nature of authority was to sustain the system as
it is and to make it more controlled. Any effort for change was taken as
undisciplined and challenging to the system. Though this scenario is taking
a turn and making a vibrant effort to understand the present structure of
school organization, as in the NEP 2020 proposal:
In order to improve and reach the levels of integrity and credibility

required to restore the prestige of the teaching profession, the Regula-
tory System shall be empowered to take stringent action against sub-
standard and dysfunctional teacher education institutions (TEIs) that
do not meet basic educational criteria, after giving one year for remedy
of the breaches. By 2030, only educationally sound, multidisciplinary,
and integrated teacher education programmes shall be in force.
(p. 42)
Teaching as a political action

A critical inquiry of educational leadership is vital in the context of the dom-
inant beliefs, curriculum imposition, and teacher-student power dynamics
from the social-psychological and critical interdisciplinary perspectives.
This is required to make the current policies workable and addressing to
the need for democratic educational psychology. The role of the school in
the present neoliberal context is to frame and impart knowledge that may
lead to economic growth, capacity building, and usefulness. The role of
the teacher, when approached from the metaphors of systems, is observed
by some form of input-output entity. It seems that the teacher is a result of
a didactic system of education and he/she transfers knowledge to the stu-
dents. They operate on the efficiency principle where knowledge is taken as
a commodity to gain and pass on successfully. Teachers’ role becomes lim-
ited to a bearer of information rather than as a leader who visualizes change
and develops critical ability among students. The school’s expectation from
teachers is to comply with the school administration and hierarchy. The
vision of teachers systematically limits the dos and don’ts of school policies.
The idea of teaching is bounded to the delivery of knowledge, complet-
ing the syllabus, and engaging in the given administrative responsibilities.
Teachers in the Indian school system are respected but they are not seen as
a leader by the conventional definition of leadership. Leadership is seen in
the position of principal or head of the institution (Sinha, 2007). Even the
definition of leadership is culturally embedded and context-driven. Since
India is a hierarchical society, the incumbency and holding of power posi-
tions matter more in the leadership. The task of the teacher is expected to
deal with the curriculum and be bounded by the classroom proceedings.
It is a stereotypical understanding that the teachers are not the vehicles
of decision-making at the policy level. Critical pedagogy research empha-
sizes the systematic deprivation of teachers in mainstream educational
psychology. Since teachers are the facilitator and shaper of the students’
aspirations, their role as a pedagogical leader is simplified as a pedagogical
manager, who manages the course taught effectively and assess or grade
students. It is revolutionary to see the teacher as a critical pedagogue who is
not limited by the power position but goes beyond. Critical pedagogy is an
approach and a way of life. It is the process that guarantees a justice-oriented
outcome. Somewhere it was reflected in the progressive attention to school-
ing insisted by John Dewey’s pragmatism, John holt’s unschooling, Paulo
Freire’s (1970) dialogue and conscientization, Martin-Baro’s (1994) “Liber-
ation psychology”, B R Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of caste”, Gandhi’s Nai
Talim, and Jyotirao Phule’s denouncement of Brahmanism in education.
Bagade (2021, p.197) in his work on “seeking freedom from slavery and
ignorance”, inspired by Phule’s philosophy of education, restated that:
Phule’s method imbibed the analytical and conceptual tools from

enlightenment rationalism and combined it with critical directedness
of anti-caste tradition.
(Bagade, 2010, p.158)
This is exactly the core of critical pedagogy which is needed for emanci-
patory education in India from the bondage of caste superiority and infe-
riority and leading to “Sarvajanik Satyadharma” (Bagade, 2006). Critical
pedagogy’s meaning can be culturally situated. In collectivist countries, it
may be inferred that pedagogy is situated in the act of silent acceptance and
respect towards authority. In contrast, individualistic cultures are expected
to be expressive and dissenting. However, we have seen how in both cul-
tures people have raised their voices against oppression. Critical pedagogy
is an act of resistance to something which is oppressive, whether, any ideol-
ogy, action, or attitude. This act of resistance is non-violent but persistent
and it matters in all the states of affaire where violence, discrimination,
and oppression exist. Schools may be an undemocratic space where the
facilitation of discriminatory ideology may be encouraged and an emanci-
patory approach towards oppressed diversity is systematically suppressed.
There are other examples where people in the schools’ encouraged dissent
and persisted in imparting value education despite the crisis and difficulties
(e.g., Skovdal & Campbell, 2015).
Paredes-Canilao (2017) indicated how the culture of silence and passiv-
ity of the East is misunderstood when it comes to social movement and
critical pedagogy. Silence is not always passive and has the potential to be
liberating from ignorance. When any system nurtures ignorance through
the impositions of dominant values, which is the pedagogy of social con-
trol, then silence and ignorance are facilitated through the hegemony of
power. Narasu (1907) inspired by the essence of Buddhism, called for the
sharedness and free acceptance of one another which is also the marker of
progressiveness. Thus, critical pedagogical engagement through the teach-
er’s leadership is the co-construction of an idea that emerges through the
facilitation of the space of equality. It is like unconditional acceptance of
one another which results in liberation. The silence that is the result of lib-
eration and emancipation is a form of Dharmakaya, which is:
the totality of those laws which pervade the facts of life, and whose
living recognition constitutes enlightenment.
(Narasu, 1907; p. 212)
Thus, it
is the norm of all existence, the standard of truth, the measure of right-
eousness, the good law.
(p. 213)
In this context, Paredes-Canilao (2017) stated that Asian and indigenous

culture has the culture of critically engaging pedagogies. She wrote:
First, Asian liberationist knowledge(s) can engender truly critical and

radically utopian pedagogies that help create new forms of ethical and
political communities. Second, they can offer fresh solutions to cur-
rent aporias faced by critical pedagogy, namely, how to bridge the gap
between knowledge and emancipation (theory and praxis), and how to
effectively engage/direct differences whether marked as racial, ethnic,
gender/sexual, political, and cultural under the goal of radical democ-
racy. Third, Asian and Western critical pedagogies substantively dif-
fering in their conceptions of freedom can share resources to engender
truly transformative and emancipatory pedagogies.
(p. 2)
It was visualized for critical pedagogies and the teacher’s intervention as

a pedagogue of resistance against oppression and as a political identity is
not some postmodernists’ language game but a pragmatic attempt to bring
change in the educational innovation. It is needed that theoretical construc-
tion must critically advance the movement for social change and this is
possible through the acceptance of the teacher as a political being and not a
mechanistic entity who works in the school like an assembly line operator.
In the Indian educational domain, an attempt to decolonize the pedagogy is
possible through critical pedagogical interventions. There is an avenue that
encourages activism, both in the critical silence and the voicing of argu-
ments. The history of India indicates the critical engagement in the philos-
ophies such as Lokayat and Nyaya. In the Lokayat, it was resistance and
opinion of the masses which was seen as passivity. The concept of liberation
(moksha) was rejected by the Lokayat. However, this form of liberation is
difficult to explain and is mostly unclear. Critical pedagogy initiates activ-
ism that showed responsibility and accountability to the students and soci-
ety. It led to the liberation psychology where the social change matter. In
the Nyaya, it was seen in the Vad-Vivad, Vitanda, and Jalpa. Though there
was one more category of engagement which is Samwad, which may be
connected to the Freirean critical pedagogies. The difference in expression
is a matter of culture, however, the critical sensemaking with the phenom-
enon and the object of contention depends upon the context and domain
which is facilitative or inhibitory. In the words of Kincheloe (2008):
The development of a theory-driven conceptual framework that helps

us implement critical complex professional education is essential. Inter-
action with such frameworks is important to everyone involved with a
teacher education program-students in particular.
(p. 121)
The role of the teacher is not limited to passively following and commu-
nicating the mainstream values but involves constructing a new partici-
pative identity through critical pedagogical engagement and by acting as
an active agent of social change. Much of the discussion in educational
debates in India has been based on norms that assume teachers uncritically
follow the established value system. The expectations about the teachers
as a passive follower of schools’ policy and curriculum are a social con-
struction that does not reflect the praxis of politics shaping the role of
teachers. For example, in one of the studies conducted in the Vidyashram,
Varanasi, it was noted that teachers were following the discipline of the
school but got immense freedom in their educational praxis. The idea was
to empower teachers in the school so that they will empower students.
Teachers use to engage students in the class and then discuss their everyday
memory of classroom activities with the peer group that included teachers
from the different classrooms, the director, and the manager on regular
basis. There was an efficient system of accountability and responsibility
which was directed towards making students efficient and capable in dif-
ferent subjects including drama, dance, music, sciences, social sciences,
English language learning, and speaking. To say that alternative schools
are soft schools shows the dominance of educational psychology with its
emphasis on cognitive ability and merits. These alternatives schooling also
emphasize cultural aspects of learning (Lave, 1988). However, there are
certain number of alternative schools that help in the collective critical
engagement with the disciplines like natural science and social science.
They are in the process of critically understanding the established mod-
els and coming out with a novel understanding of the phenomenon with
the help of teachers. Martin (2014) noted that anything like self-esteem,
self-concept, ability, and self-regulation are not the private property of an
individual as it is portrayed by mainstream educational psychology. It has
two meanings that need to be understood. One is that these facets of edu-
cation are highly recognized in the school system and advertisement does
not get enhanced linearly by the schooling. They are simply the preferred
attributes for future career enhancement and the school portrays itself as
a rightful facilitator. Second, these attributes are social constructions and
they are socially represented through everyday discourses. These are the
capitals that are reproduced in the educational and family environment.
Most of the marginalized students become deprived of the conducive situ-
ation, capital, and proper support system, leaving them in a state of disad-
vantage. Fewer children from Dalit and marginalized communities succeed
in the occupations which were usually occupied by the higher castes and
upper-middle classes (Thorat & Neuman, 2012). Most of the disadvantaged
children are Dalit girls and boys, labourers, and domestic worker children
who don’t find a better opportunity for their social mobility. The pathways
here are linear starting from the school’s pushout, underachievement, low
achievement, and future career choice, despite their effort to engage and
identify with the education. Ogbu’s (2003) active white notion of reject-
ing what was not emanating from their cultural experience of oppression
doesn’t apply to all contexts. In India, children from deprived groups want
to study and fulfil their aspirations but the crisis in the leadership, lack of
teachers’ intervention, and school reluctance make them fit into the cate-
gory of an underachiever. In one of the study, research has shown how the
children from poor weaver community when given proper opportunity and
attention from teacher excels in mostly all the subject which their par-
ent and their community member never imagined. It was observed that
the children of minority community’sdon’t have proper resources to carry
on their education in the schools usually meant for higher classes. Their
parents are usually in debt, do unstructured jobs, and are mostly the
victims of prejudice based on their social and occupational identity. For
example, the parents of these children are not even able to complete their
school education and most of them are limited to primary level schooling.
They engage in their parents’ businesses, for example, meat shops, motor
mechanics, bicycle tyre puncture makers, carpenters, leatherworkers, and
workers who make musical instruments like drums (dholak) and tables.
With the rise of a more conservative political regime, their work got heav-
ily affected and they become the victims of social ostracization, financial
crisis, and ghettoization.
Educational reform didn’t particularly focus its attention to cater to the
needs of these children. The attributes of likeability and self-regulation are
loaded with social contextual features like poverty, exclusion, prejudice,
and discrimination. The neoliberal agenda emphasizes that it is within the
person’s choice and has pushed the role of the social context of poverty
and context aside. For the enhancement of children, the new policies have
started the curative business derived from individualistic educational psy-
chology. People are reduced to a machine that is assumed to run efficiently
with proper fuelling and maintenance. Schooling has taken responsibility
for this curative agenda which most of the time homogenizes diversity and
those who are not able to cope are rejected as less emotionally intelligent,
cognitively deficient, lazy, or not able to self-regulate themselves. As Martin
(2014) stated:
consistent with this emphasis on psychological explanations, highly

publicized research and intervention programs in educational psy-
chology in areas such as self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy, and
self-regulated learning have promoted inner psychological and biologi-
cal causes of student conduct, experience, and learning and minimized
social and cultural constituents of student’s educational experiences
and outcomes.
(p. 168)
The expression of teachers’ beliefs and sociocultural experiences in the

classroom has rarely been acknowledged in formal education (Myers,
2009). The critical pedagogical discourse highlighting teachers’ sociopo-
litical experiences and social identity has found less space in mainstream
policymaking. There has been little examination of the context in which
teaching practices are shaped and the extent to which it corresponds to the
identities which help students identify with the educational domains. This
has resulted in the reinforcement of stereotypes and stigmatization in the
educational domain based on student identity and has led to student disi-
dentification (see Steel, 2010). Smith et al. (2005) argued that much of the
focus on teachers’ learning has emphasized formal subject knowledge (e.g.,
Shulman & Shulman, 2004) rather than teachers’ relevant life experiences
and informal learning outside school. The aim is to create a space of action
where the teacher acts just not as a facilitator but also as an active partici-
pant in enabling social change by developing critical consciousness among
students. It is based on the premise that teacher-student collaboration is the
result of sociocultural matching and a process of social identification where
the teacher acts as an agent of collective struggle striving to cultivate a
common identity for social change. However, the tendency of the individual
to see oneself as an authentic representative of identity may lead to an end
to the nurturing of diverse values. It is argued here that the teacher’s role
should be seen to be nurturing diversity and not propagating a dominant
identity in the name of a global identity. In one way, the teacher’s role as
a critical pedagogue and educational leader is not an individualized and
agentic understanding but indicates the culture of participation, inclusion,
and equity. Though this is reflected in our NEP 2020 very clearly, however,
its implementation avenues become unclear under the paradoxical inten-
tions. NEP 2020 states clearly that:
What is also required is a change in school culture. All participants in

the school education system, including teachers, principals, administra-
tors, counsellors, and students, will be sensitized to the requirements
of all students, the notions of inclusion and equity, and the respect,
dignity, and privacy of all persons. Such an educational culture will
provide the best pathway to help students become empowered indi-
viduals who, in turn, will enable society to transform into one that is
responsible towards its most vulnerable citizens.
(p. 28)
It becomes difficult to understand at one point how reshuffling the struc-

ture will cater to equity and at the same time reliance on derivation from
traditional Brahminic ideology shall bring social change. Even though the
Indian philosophies had many variations from orthodox to heterodox, the
meaning adjusted in the NEP 2020 was limited to the one way of regulation
derived from the dominant scriptures. So, when it emphasis knowledge why
it doesn’t explore deeper into the critical understanding of caste and occu-
pation-based dominance (e.g., Pal, 2015)? Also, what limits NEP 2020 to
explicitly stating the importance of people philosophy laden in the everyday
meaning-making and dissent . It seems that the following assertion by NEP
2020 needs further critical dialogues from different stakeholders to make a
better praxis of shaping the educational system of India and transforming
the power dynamics.
Teaching-learning processes in India are mostly based on one-way inter-
action between teachers and students, where it is assumed the authoritarian
work style of the teacher fosters leadership ability among the students (see
Chamundeswari, 2013). Sometimes teachers engage in coercive methods
to deal with students leading to academic disengagement and eventually
loss of interest in taking formal education. There have been some incidents
reported where teachers’ discriminatory behaviour against the minority
and marginalized students in the classroom led to dropout. These drop-
outs occurred because low-status students belonging to a lower caste and
class background perceived they were being discriminated against because
of teacher-student social identity mismatch (e.g., Redding, 2019). Many
observations and studies have reported caste-based discrimination among
Dalit students (the historically oppressed and low-status group who are
conscious of their caste identity) in India, with students being made to
sit and eat separately in schools and face psychological humiliation from
upper-caste peers and teachers (see Gupta, 2017; Jogdand, 2016; Nambis-
san, 2009; Ramachandran, 2021; Sharma, 2015). In India, together with
religious diversity, the caste-based social structure has played a major role
in educational settings. Caste cannot be reduced simply to the available
structural hierarchies such as that which distinguishes between Brahmins,
Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras, for example, but has deeper connota-
tions concerning the position on the social ladder (see Jodhka, 2015). Its
effect has been witnessed in different religious groups. This perception of
people on the social ladder has created many divisions and inequalities in
society, especially in the educational context. Awareness of the importance
of societal structure in the present educational context and how people
identify with the social structure plays a major role in understanding the
available interaction pattern and can also act as a catalyst to cross the
boundary in pursuit of better social mobility and change.
Historically the approaches to educational reform were teacher-stu-
dent discourses under the dominant paradigms of transformation. This
neglected the subtle dynamics which shaped the experiences and created
many divergent viewpoints (see also Billig, 1987). Thus, the accuracy of
knowledge is also decided based on communication processes whereby
teachers authenticate the knowledge. It is assumed that the validity of any
system of knowledge was inferred from the identity of the teacher-student
discourses. However, it has also been observed from ancient and contem-
porary texts that knowledge-building and authenticating processes depend
upon teachers and students identifying with the dominant value system.
So, it also depends upon the situational and sociopolitical context in
which the values, emotions, and awareness of the available knowledge are
constructed. Thus, the reification of knowledge and the emerging conse-
quences, such as inequalities, stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and
aggression, have left little room for the other possibilities brought by having
an understanding of the knowledge and theory for the same observable
phenomenon. For example, the compulsory inclusion of the Hindi language
(derived from Devanagari Script and spoken in most of northern India) in
the course curriculum across the Indian States, despite the states having dif-
ferent mother tongues, created many protests across India against the dom-
inance of one language. This was perceived as a bias against the children’s
sociocultural experiences. There has been some flawed analysis of teachers’
practices in diverse cultural and political settings, for example, on peda-
gogical practices in India as a marker of the Guru-Shishya (teacher-student)
relationship, where this has been exaggerated as the only act of deference
and purity and not as identification with values. This relationship between
teacher and students operates in a context of power relationships where
identity dynamics nurture a hierarchical relationship in which one ideology
is eulogized in the name of authentic knowledge and cultural adaptations.
The rhetorical process, begun during the pure Sophist tradition, affected
the basic nature of teaching and many of the inferences made were just
the persuasive effects of language. The different philosophical schools that
explain the context within which education is conducted, such as empir-
icism, rationalism, constructivism, and social constructivism, have not
interacted in such a way that they might provide a common platform for
understanding the issues of inequality in education. Schools of thought
and metatheories that support western capitalism in modern society have
a marked impact on the educational system. Since contemporary thinkers
consider collaborative interaction between teacher and students to be ideal,
the stratification of the Indian society in terms of caste, social class, gender,
religion, and so on has only featured as categories in educational psychol-
ogy and has not been subjected to active experiential analysis. Researchers
suggest that corresponding methodological approaches such as critical eth-
nography, the collaborative narrative-building approach, or experimental
understanding can be used to capture the current educational scenario.
Here teachers and students do not passively adapt to the curriculum but
create human beings who cognize and rationalize the curriculum, develop
pedagogies catering to the need for diversity, and engage in critical activi-
ties. As teachers are the product of society, they are not beyond prejudice
and thus need to be critically conscious of their prejudiced selves, formed by
society, and engage in dialogue with students to protest against culturalism
and conformity to a dominant ideology that has led to various prejudices.
In a research article, Leix (2015) reported that multicultural education
places a demand on teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices which influ-
ence students’ beliefs and multicultural competence. Hence, the meaning
of education is co-constructed together by teachers and students, where
teachers’ understanding of diverse identities becomes the dominant marker
of student representations. However, teachers have the potential to develop
students’ ability to raise critical points, go beyond the established para-
digms of science, cross the boundary of laboratory-based understanding,
and connect with society using an evidence-based approach. For example,
the development of critical consciousness among computer science students
enables them to connect with the societal culture and develop their under-
standing of the meaning and dominance of technology for those who can-
not afford to access it.
It has been reported that the middle classes in India were very receptive
to the western values of enlightenment and modernity (e.g. Harriss, 2008),
where it was assumed, social challenges were to be tackled with the help of
modern education without giving in to the oppressive rationalities of tradi-
tional discourse on caste, class, and gender issues in India (see Fernandes &
Heller, 2008). The modernity that had its hold on the mindset of educators
became a mode of production for a tool for the progressive future society.
So, the methodological assumptions and the urge to search for objectivism
had an important impact on teachers’ values, leading them to be influenced
more by the dominant discourse as a means of survival. The current discus-
sion does not explore the assumptions of modernity as many teachers have
but moves away from the norms of conformity and calls for a social change
in which the teacher’s pedagogical style, language use, and interaction with
students. It could be combined to create a conscious mode of persuasion, a
kind of politics that teachers could use to persuade and mark their identity
as a teacher. The concern here is to consider the nature of that persua-
sion and the tools and intentions which drive the interactional processes
and reflect on the praxis of empowerment, justice, and wellbeing. As has
been reported in some of the studies on values, action, and psychological
consequences that people in individualistic and collectivistic cultures feel
dejected when their embedded values are violated. However, it also shows
a more promotion focus in an individualistic culture than in a collectivist
culture like India, where the promotion and prevention focus goes together
(see Higgins & Spiegel, 2004). Beliefs about the self in terms of society’s
aspiration and prescription play a very important role in terms of the match
and mismatch of values held by teachers and students, leading to the mobi-
lization of matching social categories for different ends.
Studies show that the teacher acts as a mediator, linking the values of the
society with the individual values of the students and engaging in collective
meaning-making. One of the studies on the risk of caste-based stereotypes
emphasized the situational priming of the ability stereotype among low
caste students in an evaluative context (Hoff & Pandey, 2006). However,
when the value is altered through instructional manipulations the effect of
the stereotype threatamong ability-stereotyped low caste students can be
managed. The Indian context is believed to be a collectivist one in which
values are interdependent and connected but this forms the basis of the
individual’s identity in any sociopolitical context. It was observed that the
Indian context is driven by the dominant values of caste, class, and gender,
leading to rigid stratifications in which the hierarchy of values can be felt in
family and work contexts.
Legitimacy in education and practice

The present educational system has legitimized its mainstream ideology
which inadvertently deprives the groups portrayed as “others”. The inclu-
sion of different theoretical models in national educational programmes
without any understanding of the metatheoretical assumptions of these
approaches may limit the agenda for open and democratic forms of edu-
cation. Thus, pedagogy and the role of the teacher as a leader for change
are limited by the structure shaped by the social categories dominating the
social, economic, and cultural boundaries. Turning to the meaning of the
legitimacy of the institution and the broader social systems, under which
the teacher’s role seems to be manipulated, we must go beyond the pres-
ent philosophy of empiricism and see the identity of the teacher as part of
a global movement seeking social change and respecting diverse forms of
expression and representations.
In explaining legitimacy, psychologists French and Raven (1959) referred
to it as a social influence induced by feelings of “should”,“ought to”, or
“has a right to”, through anappeal to an “internalized norm or value”. This
has been observed in teachers’ approaches where the actions of the teacher
embedded in the mainstream and dominant caste and class structure, and
an opposing awareness of the diversity issues, have created a greater cogni-
tive load leading to a subtle rejection of alternative voices in the classroom.
However, the ambivalence of teachers from different backgrounds is neither
representative nor even part of the mainstream value systems. This ambiv-
alence has been expressed in two forms of behaviour, either as a carry-over
effect in terms of accepting authority or in terms of becoming separated
from the domain. Suchman (1995) argued that “legitimacy is a generalized
perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper,
or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values,
beliefs and definitions” (p. 574). Referring to legitimacy as “authorization”,
Kelman and Hamilton (1989) argued that when an authority is legitimate,
“the duty to obey superior orders” replaces personal morality, with peo-
ple allowing legitimate authorities to define the boundaries of appropriate
behaviour in a given situation (p. 16). Or, more simply, legitimacy is the
perception that one “ought to obey” another (Hurd, 1999). Hence, legiti-
macy is an additional form of power that enables authorities to shape the
behaviour of others distinct from their control over incentives or sanctions
(Ford & Johnson, 1998, French & Raven, 1959). Therefore, the construc-
tion of educational artefacts such as curriculum and pedagogy absorbed
legitimate content, as expressed in the sociopolitical discourses, thus tap-
ping into the roots of the prevailing constructivist paradigms. However,
there are some observations in the critical pedagogy traditions that have
gone beyond constructivism to include social content highlighting critical
issues about the sociocultural aspects of teacher and student engagement
(see Kincheloe, 1993, 2004).
In the context of the legitimacy of mainstream pedagogy which seems to
be hegemonic in its discourse, Giroux (2010) emphasized that critical ped-
agogy provides the context for generating a critical thinking ability among
students that goes beyond the fear of consequences and is reflective of and
reflexive towards the knowledge the students gain and the obligations they
have in terms of social responsibility. Critical pedagogy recognizes that
pedagogy is not about passively receiving (often empirically based) informa-
tion but about engaging in a dialectical process of gaining a better under-
standing of the social issues from a multicultural and diverse perspective
(see Banks & Banks, 2010; John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Mayo, 2013a). In
contrast to this pedagogy of conformity, Kincheloe (1999, 2004) encourage
teachers to adopt a critical pedagogy as an agent of change by expanding
the imagination and the appropriation of knowledge in the form of self-re-
flection and self-determination, and thus collectively and critically shaping
the social order which intervenes in the everyday pedagogy and teacher’s
classroom management.
Critical pedagogy recognizes that the standardization of curricula,
knowledge, teaching, and social relations does an injustice to the multi-
ple and varied narratives, histories, and experiences that students bring
to schools. This is a pedagogy that begins from an understanding of stu-
dents as individuals with enormous capacities to be critical, knowledgeable
and informed citizens, workers, and social agents. The critical pedagogical
approach evident in John Ogbu and Joe Kincheloe’s work (see Sinha, 2016)
seems to have ample potential to help students from diverse ethnic and class
backgrounds to engage in the classroom process with the help of teachers,
without the feeling of acting like White and without disengaging their self
from the educational domain (see Freire, 1970; Gallagher, 1999; Kaščák
et al., 2012; Kincheloe, 1999). Consequently, schools and the presence of
a teacher are viewed as crucial resources in a developing democracy, and
teachers are valued as the front line of professional workers responsible for
educating young people on the ideals, goals, and practices of a sustainable
democratic society.
Contextualizing role of the teacher

The act and philosophy of teaching are not contextual processes and are
driven by the situations, cultural backgrounds, and sociopolitical factors
regulating the institutions. Some major aspects of identity, as emphasized
by Ogbu (2003), that is, voluntary and involuntary identities, have a major
impact on the teaching and learning processes. For example, the invol-
untary aspects of caste or gender or both in teacher-student interactions
and relationships (see also Myers, 2009) and social class divisions and the
impact they have on the teaching-learning process or other factors such
as religions, regions, and languages are important contexts that should
be looked into. Attempts to understand the teacher’s role in situating the
teacher-student relation in the wider social context of multiculturalism are
well reflected in the philosophy of critical pedagogy. From the perspective
of the philosophy of education, where questions are raised and the nature
of knowledge is directed, the focus is on investigating the history which has
shaped teaching methods and their political intentions. The basic tenets of
the psychology of education, philosophically derived from the school of
behaviourism, have limited it to shaping student behaviour under the pre-
vailing mainstream value system, rather than encouraging it to develop the
freedom to raise critical points. In this context, teachers were found to be
the representative voice of the dominant discourses of the dominant iden-
tities, for example, social class, which overemphasized ability, meritocracy,
authority, and paid less attention to sociocultural experience (Vygotsky,
1978), the development of critical ability and problems associated with the
social structure and curriculum.
Critical pedagogy and hidden curriculum

The framing of the curriculum and the teacher’s role as mediating between
the acquisition of textbook knowledge and what goes on in the classroom
has been a contested issue. Teachers, it seems, have been looked at as pas-
sive elements representing the dominant values of society, but it is also
imperative to understand that teachers have a much larger role in bringing
about social change in terms of facilitating critical consciousness among
students. Teachers are educational leaders and their sociocultural expe-
rience and consciousness may not correspond to the students’ conscious-
ness but the context in which teaching and learning occur provides ample
potential for a critical environment to develop where a common consensus
can be built. This is not to oversimplify the fact that teachers are the most
important element in social transformation through the act of educating.
School teachers in India are positioned on the lower rungs of the social class
ladder, and teachers from lowerstatus backgrounds in government schools
are also often the victims of discrimination. Their role is limited to facilitat-
ing rote learning, and they are not paid enough to perform other activities,
including buying and reading books. It has been observed that teachers and
students from lowerstatus backgrounds are susceptible to many kinds of
stereotypes and prejudices, and as we have discussed earlier are categorized
as passive followers of the mainstream curriculum.
There are hidden curriculums, which rarely come in real tangible forms
and hidden biases, stereotypes and prejudices, and many other things that
remain invisible in terms of policymaking and curriculum design. The hid-
den curriculum has been linked to teachers and their critical pedagogical
style. There have been instances where students from lower caste back-
grounds have become the victims of discrimination in school through
various curricular sources, such as mathematics, where they are ability ste-
reotyped (e.g., Hoff & Pandey, 2006). They have learned and internalized
negative ability stereotypes about their social group and these have been
associated with the mathematics curriculum. Teachers have a major role
to play in crossing the boundaries of these kinds of stereotypes and they
can either concretize the stereotype or help students to cross the barriers of
these deep-seated stereotypes by ensuring an inclusive classroom environ-
ment. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paul Freire (1970) called for a new
kind of education that would create an empowering partnership between
the teacher and the students through active dialogue and humanization
processes.
Teachers are to be considered agents of social change and, with the help
of the curriculum, they give new meaning to the social-psychological dis-
course rather than simply endorsing the cultural legitimacy. For example,
some of the work conducted in an Indian context has shown that teachers
are the carrier of cultural resources in both a positive and negative light
(see Gupta, 2006). Teachers’ pedagogical styles may vary because of the
changes they encounter in the classrooms in terms of student diversity
(see Ogbu, 1992). Their expectations thus undergo tremendous cognitive
load and teachers sometimes find themselves succumbing to bias. These
biases, for example not paying attention to students from lowerstatus back-
grounds, scolding, beating, or giving fewer marks, are practices that may
emerge due to the disconnect between expectations and the teachers’ own
sociocultural experiences. Thus, the sociocultural imperatives are the result
of a legitimate endorsement of beliefs and values which are not truly scien-
tific but loaded by larger social structures.
There are other cases in which teachers from diverse backgrounds
have not been well accepted by the authorities and students from the
dominant value system. However, it is rare for teachers from oppressed
identity groups to deal with students with socially privileged identities.
Most teachers from lower social class backgrounds deal with children
from the same social class background. For example, recently Tukdeo and
Babu (2015) have highlighted the restricted work conditions of teachers in
Aanganwadis (courtyard shelter meant to take care and educate children
and families in health and non-formal preschool activities) and depicted
the reality of boundaries imposed on teachers contrary to the envisioning
philosophy which drives the real teaching task. The point of contestation
here is that the teacher’s role has been reduced to that of the bearer of infor-
mation and not as a leader who should have the vision to highlight critical
points and work on collaborative elements for social change (see also Sinha,
2013a).
The basic teaching agenda has been hindered as the social structure has
legitimized the continuity of differences. In other words, the role of the
teacher and pedagogic intervention generally has not highlighted the hid-
den nature of the curriculum and has buffered critical viewpoints of the
divisions in society. The teaching agenda has more or less been reduced to
legitimizing identity and its sociocultural manifestations (Sinha, 2013b).
Attempts to cross the boundaries of oppressed identities based on the con-
tingencies of caste, class, and gender have more or less been resisted or have
generally not been debated in mainstream school culture (see also Deshkal
report, 2010). Dalit scholars in India have found that the social space,
including the educational domain, is humiliating and historically exclusive,
and shifts from the subtle to the blatant (e.g., Guru, 2009). The lived-in
experience of students and teachers from oppressed backgrounds reveals
the victimization that has occurred historically in educational discourses
where higher status identities have rejected another person’s identity. There
is therefore a need for individual identities to be asserted to ensure social
mobility and consciousness-raising to regain self-esteem, and this is only
possible if oppressive politics is rejected and a new kind of emancipatory
politics is adopted (see Reicher, Jogdand, & Ryan, 2015). However, social
identities play an important role when there is mutual interaction between
identities in the shared space which is not yet the reality but is slowly turn-
ing into subtle discrimination and microaggression as a result of the open
political participation and self-assertion of oppressed groups.
The curriculum and teachers’ pedagogical styles intersect implicitly
at the point where minimum learning happens. For example, Srinivasan
(2015) has critically highlighted the issue of quality learning in schools
under the supervision of higher administrative bodies, where the curric-
ulum load is greater, and the role of education is one of memorization
and repeating the tests. This information overload is more visible now,
and students and teachers find themselves under increasing pressure. The
freedom to bring about social change and identify issues of social justice
in the culture is under the strict control of bureaucratic logic. Hidden
curriculums containing particular forms of knowledge, cultures, values,
and desires which are taught but never talked about or made public (see
also Bergenhenegouwen, 1987). Schools increasingly function as part of
a power circuit that produces a school-to-prison pipeline (Giroux, 2010).
Critical pedagogy provides the conditions under which students can think
critically, take risks, and reflect on the connections between the knowledge
they have gained and the obligations of civic and social responsibility while
recognizing that pedagogy is not about passive reception. In this context,
Giroux (2010) suggests that any form of transformative pedagogy can be
viewed as dangerous by the established system. It can be inferred that crit-
ical pedagogy completes the missing link between formal and postformal
education. An attempt is made to locate the pedagogical vehicle in the con-
scious activity of the teacher, who is believed to shape student awareness
and knowledge and develop critical abilities. Thus, it has been questioned
as to whether the task of the teacher is limited to teaching the curriculum or
going beyond it and highlighting underrepresented issues in the educational
system through activism and social action.
According to McLaren (1998), teachers must engage in the critical and
revolutionary pedagogic perspective by developing critical consciousness
among students. In some post-colonial contexts, the issues of identity pol-
itics have raised immense discussion among people about the issues of rep-
resentations and created subtle divides. The effects of colonization and the
model of education sustained throughout history created a mechanistic
outlook on education and the teacher-student relationship. In this context,
Adams et al. (2015) have expressed the need to decolonize the mindset and
invite us to see the diverse perspectives across the entire domain which has
an important role to play in the politics of social change. Thus, the task of
teachers as leaders of positive change is to help develop discourses that can
raise and articulate the issues of identity in education (Giroux & McLaren,
1992) and the need for a social movement in an educational domain where
the issues of marginalization in education (Sleeter et al., 2012) are clearly
understood both at the level of critically conscious discourses and the level
of the practices of teachers and educators. One example Kasten (1992) pro-
vides concerns with the high dropout rate among Native American children
caused not by their having a physical or learning disability but by the incon-
gruence between the Native American value system and the mainstream
American educational system. In a similar context, Tandon (2000) high-
lighted an anti-colonial, grassroots, and ecologically sensitive approach in
the Indian educational context. However, the importance placed on curric-
ulums that represent the cultural values denoting dominant value systems
and their compatibility with teachers’ educational experiences overlooks
aspects of underrepresented identities. The need arises for an active
re-categorization of social categories in the Indian educational context
(Gillespie, Howarth, & Cornish, 2012). For example, the match/mismatch
between teacher and student identities could be transformed if teachers
were to transcend their hierarchical roles and merge their identities with
student identities to empower participation.
Sleeter and Stillman (2005) emphasize a pluralistic form of education
that includes cultural and historical respect for the entity involved in the
learning processes. This includes curricula and pedagogies which are com-
patible with all students from diverse backgrounds, historical roots, and
cultures. These students will find that they use different tools to supple-
ment their cognitive processes when dealing with knowledge to achieve
the same results with equality and equity. This form of education rejects
the inflexibility of an education system based on a one-fits-all notion of
state-sponsored pedagogies and helps students pursue indigenous ways (see
Kennedy, 2013; Korteweg et al., 2014; Oppong, 2013) of dealing with their
environment.
Conclusion
Teaching in a culturally responsive way is representative to the extent it also
addresses to the lived experiences of socially marginalized. To be a critical
is to see critically the social order which has hegemonized our being. The
major goal for today’s serious educators is to empower and not overpower the
diverse identities and cultural experiences. It is in their efforts to fill the gap
created by the banking system of education which is generally on the pro-
posed agenda of the standardized educational system and leads to the
same social reproductions in classrooms and education (Collins, 2009). As
group membership and identification are important precursors to collab-
orative interaction in the Indian educational context, there is a need to
re-categorize powerful identities. Healthy participatory relationships are
important. Thus, it is a major task for educational reformers and teachers
to encourage a new kind of diversity in which a common ingroup identity
and critical consciousness are created, so that all groups can identify with
the learning process in the broader political discourse (see Bowskill, 2013;
Tapper, 2013; for another view see Kelly, 2009). Thus, the task of teachers
is to promote critical discourses and satisfy the need to produce a bricolage
of experiences by integrating social identities (Sanchez-Burks, Karlesky, &
Lee, 2013) and making an understanding of the educational task clearer.
Thus, the role of the teacher as an entrepreneur of identity and an entrepre-
neur of awareness and change is one of the most important voices fulfilling
the agenda of education.
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of the published article “Sinha, C. (2016)”.
Teaching as a Political Act: The role of critical pedagogical practices and cur-
riculum. Human Affairs: Post-disciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences
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Index
Aanganwadis 190 animal-based labelling 124

ability-based stratification 48 anti-discrimination policy 70
abuse 98, 101–102 antinomies 5, 96
academic achievement 86–89, 91, anti-Roma prejudice 114
137, 143, 150–153, 176; academic anxiety 4, 6, 30, 36, 111, 161; anxiety of
achievement divides 17 incompleteness 84; parent anxiety 39
academic achievement gap 30, 87–88, Apple, M. 7, 106, 137
148–149 apprenticeship development 146
academic engagement 148 ascribed identity 3, 125
academic failure 82 aspirations 9, 12, 35, 41, 43, 110,
academic performance 36, 58, 71, 87, 114, 132, 149, 154, 161, 177, 181;
90, 111, 124, 172 schools’ aspirations 133
academic self-efficacy 112 authentic knowledge 184
academic socialization 57 authentic leader 110, 172
accentuation effects 78 authoritarianism 80–81
accessibility 59, 89, 146 authoritarian styles 151
accountability 4, 10, 12, 69, 105, 160, autonomy 62, 146, 162
175, 179, 180
activism 1, 9, 165, 179, 191 Badheka, G. 49
activity-based learning 44, 68 Bal Katai Divas 110
activity-related emotions 58 banking system of education 22,
adult imagination 24, 40 41, 164, 192; banking style of
affirmative action 7, 65 education 151
affordability 29, 59, 147 behavioural control 26, 55, 136
aggression 64, 81, 98, 101, 108, 123, behavioural markers 34, 35
184; general aggression model 98 belongingness 7, 34, 57, 60, 74, 80, 90,
alienation 7, 83, 99, 102; academic 110–111, 133, 172, 175
alienation 111 Berger, P. l. 78
Allport, G. 7, 74, 99 beti bachao, beti padhao 147
Altemeyer, B. 81 Bhojmata 84
alternative education 29; alternative bigotry 80
schooling system 65 boredom 58
Ambedkar, B. R. 70, 74, 99, 115, 178; Bourdieu, P. 157
annihilation of caste 178 brain 98, 135, 155
amelioration 4 bricolage 9–10, 33–49, 192
American Psychological Task Force on bricoleurs 47–48
Socioeconomic Status 158 Bruner, J. 70, 80, 81, 164
anger 56–59, 63–64, 66, 69, 75, 96, bullying 82, 101, 124, 133
101, 109, 127 Buniyadi Shiksha 86
200 Index
capability 19, 37, 115, 172 Covid–19 11, 21, 57, 130–131,
care 75, 106, 129, 160, 190 164–165
career choice 35 critical consciousness 1, 7, 20–21, 85,
caste-based: atrocities 45; backwardness 125, 182, 185, 188, 191–192
12; discrimination 102, 183; critical dialogues 183
identity 108; prejudice 84; roles 49; critical educational psychology 9,
stereotypes 186 30, 42
categorization 78, 80, 84, 92, 115; critical ethnography 185
re-categorization 115, 191 critical pedagogy 9, 11, 21, 33, 165,
choice 2, 9, 11, 21, 25–26, 30, 35, 58, 171–172, 177–179, 187–188, 191
66, 85, 128, 137, 143, 147–148, 165 critical thinking 12, 26–27, 42, 48, 58,
choiceless 134, 149 59, 61–62, 147, 187
choice of food 133 cultural ecological 152
Chomsky, N. 58 cultural-historical 9, 125, 156, 164
classroom management 187 cultural identity 26, 112
co-curricular activities 61, 146 culturally responsive teaching 110
coercion 4, 12, 96 cultural morality 121
cognition 11, 48, 59, 68, 87, 107, 125, cultural symbols 103
155; social nature of cognition 88 curriculum 2, 4, 22, 29, 30, 39, 44, 46,
cognitive ability 1–2, 28, 36, 42, 87–88, 48, 58, 61, 68–69, 77–79, 81–82, 85,
143, 180 112, 129, 131, 135, 143, 147, 149,
cognitive justice 10, 144 163–165, 171–174, 177, 180, 184,
cognitive load 49, 186, 189 185, 187–191; curriculum design
collective consciousness 10, 61 7, 146; curriculum engagement 44;
collective emotions 10, 59, 72 inclusive curriculum 173; official
collective inquiry 48 curriculum 39
collective learning 12, 159
collective mindset 1 Dalit cook 84
collective movement(s) 61, 135 Dalit(s) 4, 68, 74, 82, 99, 102, 114, 122,
collective victimhood 98 125, 127, 130, 133, 134, 136, 162,
colonialism 26, 59, 127, 128, 135 175, 176, 181; Dalit community 114;
colonial powers 46 Dalit christians 122
common ingroup identity 175, 192 Dalit students 63, 82, 84, 85, 102, 107,
compassion 69 108, 109, 120, 121, 176, 183; Dalit
competence 30, 89, 149; multicultural scholars 190
competence 185 Dalit teachers 57
competency-based learning 175 decategorize 4, 49, 122
competition 3, 4, 11, 30, 34, 61, 78, 90, decentralization 146
106, 129, 165; social competition 90 deception 97
conscientization 18, 125, 178 decolonizing 9, 11, 110, 113, 120
consciousness 1, 6, 8, 9, 17, 33, 35, deficit 70, 87, 152–154, 171; deficit
49, 61, 80, 100, 128, 136, 137, 155, model 36, 87, 151
165, 188 dehumanization 9–11, 115, 120–137;
conservative modernization 7 signs of dehumanization 133
constitutional preamble 99 demeaning 38, 64, 66, 70, 102, 124,
constitutional rights 74, 124 133, 134, 136, 162
constructivism 28, 47, 151, 184, 187 democratic educational psychology 46,
constructivist 151, 156, 171, 187 49, 177
contagious emotions 99 democratic learning practices 175
continuous and comprehensive denotified tribes 102
evaluation 144 Department of school education 147
cooperative learning 11, 88 Deshkal report 190
courage 38 despair 99; collective despair 108
Index 201
devaluation 36, 69, 80, 90, 91, 172 eclectic approach 39
devalued identity 115; devalued ecological fallacy 69
group 90 education 2; expensive education 4
developmentalism 28, 46 educational leaders 69
Dewey, J. 48, 70, 175 educational leadership 40, 110, 112,
didactic 24, 46, 82, 91, 177 113, 173, 174, 176, 177
dignity 1–2, 6, 20, 35, 85, 99, 103, 105, educational system 7, 18, 22, 45–46,
114–116, 121–122, 124, 127, 136, 48, 60, 75, 79, 86, 110, 120, 146,
144, 157, 183 148–150, 152–153, 155, 163,
dirty jobs 130 183–184, 186, 191–192
disability 2, 57, 147; learning disability education for all 85
163, 191 efficient choice system 21
disadvantaged 10, 20, 22, 26, 44, 66, egalitarian 24, 41, 57, 134
69, 102, 106, 123, 143, 145, 149, Eklavya 45, 101
154, 161, 172, 181 Eliot, J. 39–40
disciplining 98, 106, 109–110, 159 emancipation 12, 23, 33, 35, 39,
discovery learning 27, 164 113, 136, 165, 173, 179; social
discrimination 10, 22, 39, 40, 43–44, emancipation 39
65–66, 70, 75–77, 80, 86, 101–104, emotional engagement 60
107, 109, 112, 114–115, 123, 127, emotional episodes 57
133, 149, 173, 176, 178, 181, emotional intelligence 70
183–184, 189–190 emotionally safe space 67; bullied and
disengagement 89, 122; academic victimized 68
disengagement 112, 183; emotional recognition 59
psychological disengagement 89, 90, emotional regulation 55, 66, 71
91, 111 emotion(s): collective emotions 10, 59,
disidentification 36, 60, 69, 82, 86, 90, 72; negative emotion 56, 62, 71, 79;
122, 131, 134, 172, 173, 182 self-conscious emotions 10, 55, 69,
disobedience 56, 60, 100, 125 71; toxic emotions 4–5
disobedient 55, 56, 101 empowering partnership 189
disruptive 55 empowerment 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 19, 20,
dissent 1, 4, 137, 162, 178, 183, 21, 29, 90, 120, 146, 147, 172,
pedagogy of dissent 6 175, 185
distinctiveness 78, 89 enrolment 25, 43, 131
distress 109 epistemic violence 10, 68, 103, 108
distribution of power 146 essentialism 80
district primary education eugenics 1
programme 86 Eurocentric values 136
diversity 1, 4, 6, 25, 28, 29, 33, 43, 44, European social psychology 77
48, 58, 61, 64–65, 69, 71, 77, 92, evidence-based research/approach
103–105, 110, 112–113, 124, 143, 36, 185
147, 152, 178, 181–183, 185–186, exam system 2, 149; exam-oriented
189, 192; cultural diversity 68; culture 42
emotional diversity 64; nep 28; excellence 2, 4, 12, 29, 148, 153, 176
pro-diversity 28, 172; religious exclusion 1, 7, 10–11, 71, 83, 86, 99,
diversity 183 105, 132, 135, 144, 147, 181
Dom community 114 experiential 12, 27, 68, 102, 147,
domestic workers 21, 68, 130–131 175, 184
Dronacharya 45
dropouts 27, 86, 99, 125, 173, 183 false consciousness 5, 124
Du Bois, W. E. B. 33 Fanon, F. 123, 135
dualism 22 fear 37, 57, 62, 67, 71, 99, 107, 109,
Dweck, C. 28, 47, 87, 89, 148–149 121, 161, 187
202 Index
felt emotions 62 human nature 64, 83, 98, 108, 121, 127
formal education 1, 21, 24, 61, 123, humiliation 56, 57, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71,
131, 143, 159, 175, 182, 183 92, 99, 101, 109, 122, 131, 134, 183
formalism 107
fraternity 99, 107 identification with schools 47, 74;
freedom of choice 144 school identification 70, 91
free will 108, 136 identity-based 3; segregation 48;
Freire, P. 6–9, 19, 23, 125, 128, 136, stereotype 27; subjugation 12, 62;
151, 175, 188–189 violence 110
fugitive pedagogy 125 identity construction 5
identity politics 92, 191
Galton, F. 1 identity process(es) 77, 78, 87
Gandhi, M. K. 74 ideology 2–3, 20, 79, 101, 103, 105,
Gandhigiri 115 115–116, 149–150, 178, 183–186
gender-based: oppression 12, 125; Illich, I. 8, 41, 109, 162
discrimination 44; identities 42; illusory correlations 106–107
stereotypes 133 inattentive behaviour 45
genetic analysis 155 inclusive 12, 22, 28, 49, 100, 147, 163,
ghettoization 145, 181 172, 176; inclusive classroom 189;
Giroux, H. 187, 191 inclusive curriculum designs 173
globalization 33, 85, 115 India 6–7, 11, 22–23, 25–26, 33, 43,
gossip 67; gossiping 57, 102, 108 45–47, 49, 57, 60–61, 64–65, 68,
group belongingness 57, 80, 90 75–76, 79, 82, 92, 101, 104, 109,
group membership 78, 114, 192 112, 114, 130–134, 136, 143, 146,
guided instruction 49 173, 175–181, 183–186, 189–190
guilt 35, 59, 69, 127 Indian 3–4, 11–12, 35, 38, 42, 44–46,
guru dakshina 101 48, 57–60, 64–66, 69, 75–77, 79,
guru-shishya 42, 46, 65, 105, 184 82, 84, 86, 90, 92, 100, 102, 104,
106, 109–110, 114–115, 130, 150,
happiness 56, 69 159, 162–164, 173, 175, 177, 179,
harassment 104, 133; sexual 183–184, 186, 189, 191–192; Indian
harassment 127 constitution 106, 112
Harre, R. 62 indigenous 7, 10, 19, 20, 22, 26, 29,
hate 57, 80 110, 128, 134, 136, 163, 179, 192
hidden biases 109, 189 indignity 121, 162
hidden reservation 171 individualism 7, 11, 165
higher mental abilities 155 industrial revolution 1, 58
historically oppressed 10, 11, 44, 57, information overload 190
64, 77, 124, 127, 134, 151, 183 infrahumanization 127, 130
Hizab 74 ingroup 74, 78, 84, 90, 111, 175–176
Holt, J. 162, 178 inhibition-confrontation process 62
homeschooling 159, 160, 162 innovative education 34, 79
homogenization 77, 79, 103, 108, 136 institutions 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 78, 98, 99,
homogenous 4, 47, 74 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 120,
homophobia 80 121, 126, 135, 143, 147, 149, 156,
honour 39, 59, 86, 124, 161 158, 175, 177, 188
hope 7, 29, 35, 37, 38, 104, 107–108, intelligence 21, 28, 47–48, 89, 137, 154
125, 130–131, 134, 136-, 137, 161, intentionality 1, 103, 107–108
162, 165 interdisciplinarity 7, 49
hopelessness 58, 111, 132 interdisciplinary 45–46, 177
human agency 11, 80–81, 97, 99, 121, intergroup relation(s) 76, 77, 78, 134
125, 128, 136, 151, 155, 171 intersectionality 99
human capital 20, 98 invisibility 109, 131, 133
Index 203
justice-oriented citizenship 61 migrant workers 21, 130, 131, 132
Milgram, S. 101
Kincheloe, J. l. 22, 33–34, 36, 39, 69, mindset 1, 47, 82, 105, 106, 121, 134,
110, 150–155, 175, 180, 187–188 135–136, 147, 150, 175, 185, 191
knowledge 2–5, 7, 22–24, 26, 29, 37, minimal guidance 49
39, 40–49, 57, 61–62, 64, 67, 69, minority groups 45, 80, 100, 114,
75, 78, 80, 82–86, 89–90, 96, 101, 120, 159
105–107, 112, 122, 128, 136, 143, minority influence 4
147, 150–154, 159, 163–164, 177, missionaries 22, 75
179, 182–184, 187–188, 191–192; monologic practices 42
regenerative knowledge 152; reified monological: methodology 34;
knowledge 152; vidya 105 reductionism 39
Kumar, D. 65 Montessori system 49
Kumar, K. 25, 29, 75 moral exclusion 135
Kumar, N. 2, 4, 146 morality 48, 58, 61, 121, 162, 187
Moscovici, S. 4, 17, 150
learners identity 70 motivated cognition 125
learnification 9, 136–137 motivation 30, 56, 58, 68, 78, 87, 89,
legitimation 1, 71, 100, 105 103, 111–112, 125–127, 131, 146,
liberation 5–6, 8–9, 12, 29, 68, 100, 149, 161, 174
113, 179; liberation psychology 178 multicultural education 48–49,
liberty 99, 107 163, 185
lifelong learning 136 multilingualism 79, 146
literacy 18, 144, 146, 153–154, 163 Muslims 74, 109, 176
Lokayat 179
low-status schools 44 Nagel, T. 80–81, 98
Nai Talim 86, 132, 178
macro-meso-micro 78 Narasu, L. 178–179
madrasas 74 national curriculum framework 44,
maktab 75 68, 149
managerialism 43 national educational policy 3, 24
Mandela, N. 97 national flag 104
manual workers 162; labour 165; national policy on education 68, 85
labourers 130; scavenging 162 Native American 191
marginalization 9, 18, 23, 77, 111, 143, Native American Indian children 163
144, 191 neoliberalism 4, 8, 12, 29, 34, 43, 79,
marginalized groups 11, 35, 64, 74, 83, 83, 86, 91, 108, 134, 162, 171
125, 128, 134, 137 non-cognitive 90, 148
Martin-Baro, I. 81, 120, 178 norm-governed schooling 29
Mead, J. H. 164 north-easterners 109
mechanistic learning culture 128; Nyaya 179–180
mechanistic outlook 191; mechanistic
worldview 151, 155 occupational status 145; occupational
mental health 4, 106 identity 181; occupational roles 160
meritocracy 7, 11–12, 33, 98, 107, Ogbu, J. 89, 111, 124–125, 128–129,
171, 188 149, 151, 164, 187, 188–189;
metacognitive monitoring 87 voluntary and involuntary
metaphors 49, 91, 127, 128, 177 identities 188
metatheory 6, 9, 11, 89, 164, 165 online learning 29–30, 165
methodological individualism 7 ontogenetic analysis 155–156
microaggressions 57, 67, 101, 107 ontogenetical basis 149
mid-day meal(s) 21, 84, 103, 125 oppositional culture 128
middle-class parents 58, 159 oppositional values 124
204 Index
oppression 8, 12, 29, 80, 99–100, 125–126, 130, 147, 151, 173,
105–106, 120–123, 125, 133–134, 181, 185; against girls 109;
178–179, 181; gender 12, 106, 125 anti-Roma 114
oppressive social system 107 prejudice neutralizer 80, 147
ostracized 99, 127 pride 59, 61–63, 69, 76, 104, 122,
othering 10, 72, 74, 78, 91, 121 134; authentic pride 134; collective
outgroup 71, 74, 79, 84, 89, 107, 108, pride 122
112, 120–121, 123, 154 pro-diversity 28, 172
outgroup favouritism 123 progressive education 48, 67
outlaw emotions 63 progressive schools 48
protest 7, 8, 69, 74, 82, 100, 102,
parental aspiration 43, 154 123, 185
parenting styles 47 psychological capital 137
participatory citizenship 60 psychological metrics 75
participatory relationship 192 punishment 56, 101, 102, 107, 108,
pedagogical agents 70 110, 115, 124, 136; corporal
pedagogical practices 7, 25, 47, 85, 108, punishment 124; Danda Pratha 115
137, 173, 184 punitive and violent action 56
pedagogical style(s) 39, 172, 185,
189–190 race-based superiority 171
pedagogy 4, 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 19–20, racism 33, 127, 164
21–22, 25, 30, 33, 39, 41, 43, 49, 57, rage 99, 121
68, 70, 77, 79, 81, 112–113, 125, rationality 61, 65, 98
136–137, 143, 146–147, 151, 154, reconciliation 7
165, 171–172, 174, 177–179, 186– reflexive 187
189, 191; state sponsored pedagogies regimental 48
163; transformative pedagogy 191 regulatory system 49, 103, 153, 177
pedagogy of dissent 6 rehabilitation 106
performance evaluative environment 111 rehumanization 125
Phule, J. 74, 115, 178 resistance 7, 10–12, 18, 70, 80, 85, 103,
Piagetian 28, 47, 151, 152 107–108, 115, 123–125, 134, 136,
policies and power 18, 22 159, 173, 178–179
positive distinctiveness 78, 89 respect 1, 35, 40, 65–66, 75–76, 97,
post-industrial revolution 58 103–104, 110, 114–115, 121, 137,
power and education 77, 128 143, 150, 157, 162–163, 178, 182,
power asymmetry 97–98 192; self-respect 86
power disparity 11, 30 revivalism 27, 86, 115, 132; cultural
power dominance 6, 33 revivalism 29
power dynamics 1, 2, 9, 23, 35, 42, 49, reward 71
59, 63, 71, 79, 80–83, 91, 97, 102, rights 4, 18, 21, 35, 60, 69, 74, 84, 97,
106, 121, 124, 126–127, 143, 165, 100, 103, 106–107, 120, 122, 124,
172, 177, 183 127, 147, 171, 176
power enactment 100, 105 right to education 12, 21, 25, 103
power influence 3, 44, 46, 49 Roma community 114
power relation 1, 2, 7–8, 10, 20–21, 35, Rorty, R. 80
42, 71; personal power 2–3; social
power 2–3 sarcasm 67, 107
power sharing 7 Sarvajanik Satyadharma 178
power structure 2, 9, 17, 39, 97–98, 126 sarva shiksha abhiyan 25
pragmatic 43, 48, 70, 179 scaffolding 29
praxis 22–23, 100, 105, 107, 179–180, school-based interventions 104
183, 185; praxis of empowerment school chalo abhiyan 147
185; praxis of liberation 100 school climate 38, 39, 44, 124, 172;
prejudice 10, 22, 66, 74, 76–85, 99, school as a therapeutic agency 108
102, 107–109, 114, 120–123, school readiness 71
Index 205
school structure 10, 49, 61, 69, 87, 91, social groups 1, 12, 20, 24, 44, 57, 74,
103, 105, 109 77–78, 98, 110, 124, 133
school-to-prison pipeline 191 social hierarchy 5, 45, 64
school uniform 109 social identification 3, 90, 153, 182
self-actualization 60 social identity 3, 9–10, 18, 28, 64, 66,
self-affirmation 47, 59, 172 69, 71, 75, 77, 78, 83, 86, 89–92,
self-categorization theory 78 112, 114–115, 122, 133, 172, 175,
self-concept 84, 180, 182 182–183
self-determination 187 social identity loss 112
self-discipline 110 social identity perspective 69, 77–78, 89
self-efficacy 44, 112, 125, 128, 182; social identity threat 28
self- efficacy belief 128 social influence 1, 3, 79, 81, 88,
self-esteem 44, 47, 59, 83, 90–91, 97, 172–174, 186
111, 116, 125–126, 145, 157, 180, social integration 106
182, 190 sociality 6, 63
self-government 123 socialization 3, 26, 57, 64, 67, 90,
self-handicapping 47, 68, 128 105–106, 108, 109, 134
self-injury 101 social justice 1, 10, 12, 22–23, 29, 33,
self-perception 127 86, 91, 151, 165, 171, 190
self-regulation 7, 58, 70–71, 82, social mobility 10–11, 21, 38, 89–90,
98, 180–181; self-regulated 103, 108, 125, 130, 134, 154, 172,
learning 182 174, 181, 184, 190; social mobility
self-stereotyping 25, 109 aspiration 134
self-threatening environment 111 social norms 5, 29, 39, 65, 84
Sen, A. 19, 66, 149 social-psychological 10, 75–76, 79–80,
sexism 80, 127 98–99, 143, 174, 177, 189
shame 59, 63, 69, 71, 122, 126, social representations 86; representation
127, 134 and reification 150
shared space 49, 190 social responsibility 187, 191
Sherif, M. 83, 129 social science 12, 24, 43, 123, 125,
Simon, B. 3, 78, 98 165, 180
situated self 63 social selves 83, 157
Sleeter, C. E. 163, 191–192 social stigma 84
social action(s) 33, 191 social support 41, 112, 122
social being 68 sociocultural approach 47; sociocultural
social categories 7–8, 25, 42, 44, 57, psychology 68–69, 159
77–78, 127, 186, 191 socioeconomic status 58, 59, 87, 112,
social categorization 79, 91 153, 158; socioeconomic barrier
social change 10–11, 18, 20, 27, 33, 36, 59; socioeconomic divides 58;
47–48, 61, 78, 83, 85, 99, 105, 137, socioeconomic mobility 7, 12
171–173, 179, 180–191 socio-emotional 43
social class 11, 19, 34, 41–42, 57, 59, sociopolitical context 44–45, 184, 186
67, 82, 106, 130, 132–133, 137, Sophist tradition 184
143, 145, 157–159, 165, 174, 184, special classes 38
188–190 special education 49
social class ladder 130, 132, 189 standardized tests 163
social class positioning 59 status quo 5, 10, 12, 20, 33, 63,
social cognition 98 100, 102
social comparison 78 stereotype threat 3, 28, 79, 87–88,
social construction 35, 62, 180 90, 109
social constructivism 184 stereotyping 10, 17, 57, 71, 74,
social constructivist 151–152 77–78, 86, 91, 173–174, 176; self-
social creativity 89 stereotyping 25, 109
social dominance orientation 124 stress 71
social dominance theory 87, 123 subjugation 7, 12, 62, 172
206 Index
suicide 101 unstructured work environment 44
systematic deprivation 106, 149, 177 upper-status schools 35
utilitarian 20
Tajfel, H. 78, 107, 90
Taylorism 175; scientific management Valmiki, O. P. 107, 121–122
theory 175 value education 17, 24, 27, 33, 55,
teacher education institutions 177 178; value-based education 48; value
teachers’ belief 182, 185 orientation 176
teacher-student engagement 56; violence 1, 8–10, 68, 82, 92, 96–110,
teaching as a political action 177 112, 114–116, 124, 178; cognitive
therapeutic education 24, 59; 10; epistemic 68; institutional 1;
therapeutic cures 9 physical 10
threat-free educational space 100 virtue and devotion 66
transformation 10, 22, 35, 36, 38, Vygotskian 29, 152–153, 156
100, 104, 115, 136, 156, 184; social
transformation 189 wellbeing 3–4, 6, 21, 60, 63, 74, 83, 85,
transformative schools 34 114, 124, 130, 148, 158, 185
transparency 146, 153 working classes 18–19, 21, 38, 70,
Trishanku model 65 75–76, 122, 129, 131, 144–145,
Turner, J. 3, 78, 90 148–149, 154, 159–161, 165, 171
wretched 130
underachievement 36, 154;
underachievers 59, 153 yoga 115, 147
unhealthy 33, 38, 174
unschooling 159, 162–163, 178 Zizek, S. 100

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“This study of power as imbedded in and as shaping the structure of school

Chetan Sinha is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the OP Jindal

ISBN: 978-1-032-13670-7 (hbk)

Preface and acknowledgement xi

Introduction: schooling and the power dynamics 1

1 Power and educational policies: rethinking NEP 2020 17

3 Emotions, authority, and education 55

7 Marginality, aspiration, and choice: an implication for

BBBP Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao

The advent of the industrial revolution and the dominance of industriali-

Education is the field of domination par excellence. Education is a prac-

Power dynamics, identity, and education

Addressing false consciousness

Structure of the chapters

Policies and power

Yeh bache bahut danger mein hain

1 Power relation turns around into empowerment and the rejection of

Revisiting educational policies

NEP, educational structure, and cultural identity

Previously, we addressed the issues of power relationships and new educa-

Kabhi insaan haar maan jata hai

Bricolaging, emancipation, and justice

However, he showed hope with the education. It is the student’s identifica-

Aadmi ko himmat nahi harna chahiye

Pedagogy, power, and bricolage

Critical understanding and transforming power dynamics

1 Education is the freedom to learn what one wants to learn.

Encouragement of bricolage signifies stability (Carstensen & Roper, 2021)

“hamara durbhagya hai ke aise chaatra kaksha me shiksha ke liye aate

The process of categorizing students as durbhagya is not new but it was

Pedagogical design and democratic educational psychology

Power and Identity

Emotion is a somewhat neglected topic in the domain of educational psy-

Emotion and schooling

“Either you should control your anger or leave the profession”

In the teacher-student relationship, emotion finds its way. Emotions usually

Control of emotions in schools

Emotion, education, and rationality

Emotions and identity

Understanding emotions and diversity in the classroom

74 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-7

It is through the internalization of the norms of the madrasa that stu-

He expressed his determination, confidence, and sense of pride in his chil-

Iska koi mukabla nahi hai

The response showed an integration of emotions towards the perceived

Identity process: social identity perspective

Power dynamics, schooling, and prejudice

Social identity, schooling, and performance: empowerment

Violence is a global problem and its presence is seen in different domains,

96 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-8

Understanding violence in education

While attending the schools and colleges, children of Denotified tribes

Both individuals and institutions may be viewed in intentionalist

The imposition of subjectivities of the powerful as an objective rule is an

We argue that schools cannot be viewed as a ‘magic bullet’ capable of

We point to differences in the views of contributors who suggest that

Though the paradox is sensed here, schools when working as a commu-

How schools as institutions, far from the social practices of everyday

Looking into the historical conundrum, schools promoted vidya or knowl-

The power enactment and legitimation of violence

Kinds of violence: school as a therapeutic agency

Role of educational leaders

Dehumanization is a process of reducing the agency of humans or depriving

120 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-9

74 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-7

96 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-8

120 DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-9

DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-11 143

DOI: 10.4324/9781003378297-12 171