Dissertation

It Is About Time: Teacher Stories of Enacting Inclusive Education in India

Sarkar, Tanushree

2023

Overview

Inclusive education examines the ways in which educational policies and practices construct and respond to difference. Policies and practices for inclusive education challenge the spatial segregation of difference, emphasizing approaches for children with and without disabilities to learn together in the same school and classroom. However, there is little examination of the ways in which time and temporality segregate, exclude, and constrain responses to difference in schools and classrooms. In this dissertation, I examine inclusive education through a temporal lens. Further, as an approach originating in the global North, there is a need to examine the global and local tensions involved in inclusive education as a practice in the global South. I conducted ethnographic case studies at school-NGO partnerships across the two sites in India through a comparative case study approach, carrying out 78 interviews with teachers, 75 classroom observations, eight teacher workshops, and 16 interviews with NGO staff over eight months of fieldwork. The dissertation demonstrates how teachers’ inclusive practices and sensemaking around dis/ability and inclusion can be located within temporal structures that constrain teacher actions. I demonstrate how the operations of time in policies, schools, and classrooms exclude children in three ways, becoming out of pace, out of sync, and out of age. I highlight the two temporal responses to dilemmas of difference in enacting inclusive education described by teachers: inclusion as uniformity to achieve curriculum times and inclusion as a means to respect individual times. I propose the notion of dhyāna as a culturally sustaining concept to understand the contexts within which the dilemma of difference is determined and resolved in the Indian context. Further, teachers navigate their past experiences and schemas of whole classroom teaching and teacher-centered pedagogy and the futures of inclusive child-centered pedagogy introduced by the NGO. I argue that in this tussle between the past and future, the present material, structural, and temporal conditions of teachers’ work are obscured. Overall, this dissertation serves to balance the spatial turn in inclusive education, highlights the functioning of temporal biases and their interactions with difference, and outlines the limitations and possibilities of teachers enacting inclusion.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Disability studies / Educational sociology / Special education / Teacher education
• ISBN: 9798379539696