Table Of ContentSCHOOLING AND ASPIRATIONS
IN THE URBAN MARGINS
This book presents a detailed ethnographic study conducted in an urban
slum in India. It explores how a State school, as a social and pedagogic
institution, shapes the aspirations and worldviews of children in the urban
margins.
The volume engages with the children’s experience of marginality and
exclusion as they negotiate the intersecting axes of caste, class, gender,
and citizenship. It further explores how their everyday school experience
is mediated by the power asymmetries between the teachers and the
community. In this process, it makes sense of the political dynamics between
the State and its margins while highlighting the role of schools and locating
childhood in this context.
Based on ethnographic feldwork, the book will be of interest to
researchers, students, and teachers of education studies, sociology and
politics of education, teacher education, childhood and youth studies,
and urban studies. It will also be useful for education policymakers and
professionals in the development sector.
Gunjan Sharma is a faculty member at the School of Education Studies
(SES), Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India, since 2011. She teaches
courses at the research, postgraduate, undergraduate, and professional
development levels, in the areas of education studies, education policy,
teacher education, curriculum studies, child rights, and action research. Her
research and professional focus is on education policy–politics particularly
at school and teacher education levels. Her doctoral research examined
educational aspirations in the urban margins in a post Right to Education
Act context in India. During 2016–2017, she completed her Fulbright-
Nehru Postdoctoral research on policy implications of publication networks
in teacher education in the United States and India, while exploring teacher
education as a special sub-set of higher education. Dr. Sharma has worked
with various government and non-government organisations on matters
of education policy and served in various capacities on the national-level
teacher education policy framing process in India.
SCHOOLING AND
ASPIRATIONS IN THE
URBAN MARGINS
Ethnography of Education in
the Indian Context
Gunjan Sharma
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Gunjan Sharma
The right of Gunjan Sharma to be identifed as author of this work
has been asserted by her 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
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ISBN: 978-0-367-90365-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-00478-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02801-7 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Shyam B. Menon vi
Acknowledgements viii
List of abbreviations ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Education and urban marginalisation: international
comparisons 13
3 Studying the non-linear: ethnographic explorations
in education 23
4 Constructing and deconstructing the slum 39
5 The idea of sarkari school: negotiations and aspirations 65
6 The teachers and the school culture 84
7 Experiencing childhood in the margins: meanings
and aspirations 98
8 Concluding thoughts 127
References 135
Index 144
FOREWORD
The economic growth that India has seen since liberalisation, particularly
in the frst decade of the millennium, is linked critically with large-scale
migration of labour from rural hinterlands to urban centres. Most of the
migrant workers, being in the unorganised sectors that account for more than
90 per cent of India’s work force, are grossly undercompensated and pushed
into the margins of urban spaces with not even minimum civic amenities
extended to them. The emergence of the phenomenon called urban slum is a
consequence of this. Much as the slum continues to be held as a problem in
the popular imaginations, there is now an increasing acceptance to reversing
this perspective and looking at slum as a creative, albeit grossly suboptimal,
solution that the poor have devised for themselves. What is notable is that
this project is with minimum support from governments and none at all
from the organised sectors of the economy, although the economic activities
associated with the slum are critical to their sustenance.
There is a growing body of research literature in India on slums. Public
policy studies have paid a great deal of attention to the provisioning of ser-
vices and interfaces with governments. Health, sanitation, and livelihoods
have evoked considerable research interest. Many of these are by way of
surveys that paint the big picture with broad strokes of the economic and
demographic aspects of slums. Life in slums with all its complexities is made
sense of by a relatively new genre of research characterised by a methodology
that adopts ethnography and other qualitative methods. There are not many
studies of this kind. Yet, whatever body of work, it brings up interesting
insights into the complex social dynamics in which caste and gender struc-
tures and relations get played out. There is very little in the literature by way
of understanding the child and the school in an urban slum location. This
is the critical gap that this fascinating book by Gunjan Sharma seeks to fll.
The book is an outcome of a painstakingly and patiently conducted eth-
nography that extended for more than a year. The author has had to go past
an array of gatekeepers within both the governmental and non-governmental
spaces to access the child and the school. The world that reveals itself to her
in this process is a complex and diffcult one, all the same a fascinating one.
vi
FOREWORD
She has been both effective and elegant in communicating through this book
some interesting glimpses of this fascinating world to the readers.
School is essentially a creature of the imagination of the privileged. The
book shows a clear disjunction between the school and the community that
it purports to cater to. It is almost as though the compound wall of the
school separates two distinct worlds. The child transits between these two
worlds day after day, and this is hardly seamless. There is always the lurk-
ing possibility of the child being forcibly weaned out of school anytime and
pushed into the world of work, but the irony is that she also looks at that
possibility as inevitable and sometimes even as a kind of deliverance. All the
same, the child assimilates the messages of the school, some overt and much
hidden, and struggles to make sense of the horizons that the school seems to
open up for her, located as she is on the margins and given the limited aspi-
rations that her socialisation permits her to have even at an ideational level.
It is this delicate and troubled complexity of the child’s fractured world that
this book tries to capture.
Gunjan Sharma’s perceptiveness, patience, and perseverance make it
possible for her to gain access to the otherwise inaccessible niches of the
school–slum interface. She also gets to engage with others in the commu-
nity, particularly women as well as some critical actors in the governmental
spaces who do the gatekeeping.
The book comes across as a sensitive rendering of the perspectives of the
critical informants. The rigour and the eye for details are its essential charac-
teristics. The book will be a signifcant addition to the growing scholarship
in the area of education of the urban poor. It will be an essential reading for
scholars and practitioners in education, childhood studies, urban studies,
and public policy.
Shyam B. Menon
Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been supported by several individuals and institutions. Fore-
most among them are Professors Shyam B. Menon and (Late) Gaysu Arvind,
who mentored me during this study. They introduced me to ideas and ques-
tions that helped in shaping the work and how I think about education
and marginalisation. Professor Menon’s continued interactions with me as
a colleague for now over a decade have been critical in writing and refning
this volume.
My interactions with Dr. Jayshree Mathur and Professor Rama Mathew
were also critical in developing this work. I have also learnt immensely
from Drs. Geeta Menon and Ajay Kumar Singh, both of whom facilitated
several opportunities for a close engagement with the feld and practice of
education.
My association with my alma matter, the Department of Education, Uni-
versity of Delhi, was immensely facilitative in developing this manuscript.
It was only because of my association with the Department that I could
meaningfully situate myself in the feld. Ambedkar University Delhi, where I
work, was very supportive in the course of writing this book. AUD provided
me access to scholarly discourse and academic resources for completing the
work. Both these universities hold a special place in my life and learning.
I am indebted to the informants of this study, especially the children of
M Block and Sitapuri, whose contribution to the work is equivalent to, if
not more than, mine. My experience with the children, teachers, and NGO
workers continues to shape my intellectual growth as an individual and a
professional in education. This book is dedicated to them.
Gunjan Sharma
October 2020
viii
ABBREVIATIONS
BLO Booth Level Offcer (Election Commission)
EWS Economically Weaker Section
FCRA Foreign Contribution Regulation Act
FGD Focus Group Discussion
GAIL Gas Authority of India Limited
GNCTD Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi
GoI Government of India
IFCI Industrial Finance Corporation of India
JJ Jhuggi Jhompri
LIC Life Insurance Corporation
MCD Municipal Corporation of Delhi
MHRD Ministry of Human Resource Development
NCERT National Council of Educational Research and Training
NCF National Curriculum Framework
NFE Non-Formal Education
NGO Non-Government Organisation
NLF New Light Foundation
OBC Other Backward Classes
PTR Pupil Teacher Ration
RtE Right to Education
SC Scheduled Castes
SSA Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan
ST Scheduled Tribes
UEE/UEEM Universalisation of Elementary Education Mission
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural
Organization
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
ix
