Adivasi Resistance as Curricular Resistance: A Case from an indigenous land in India

Abstract

Activism and education have always been intertwined in India— a simultaneous land/context of multiple colonialities and sustained resistance against those. Cohn referred to the colonial formation in India as “a conquest of knowledge” (1996, p. 16). Another colonial force was the inherent Indian-societal Brahminical hegemonic caste-system, against whose educational oppression we have historical activism-oriented voices from Dalit visionaries like Jotiba Phule (Phule, 2002, p. 105), ‘Periyar’ E. V. Ramasami (Ramasami, 2021), Dr B R Ambedkar (Rege, 2010, p. 93) and the likes. Contemporarily, ‘Pedagogies of Brahminism’ suppresses the students from the oppressed classes with newer discriminatory, neo-capitalistic, and neo-liberal educational policies justifying those suppressions (Singh, 2023, p. 56). There also is contemporary evidence of the curricular pain that entails while trying to accommodate Dalit voices in the educational spaces (Rege 2010; Sukumar, 2023). Other Dalit-Bahujan scholars expressed that their “worldviews are near-invisible in the current curriculum” (Darokar & Bodhi, 2022, p. 304). Under these threatening historical/contemporary contexts, drawing from curricular theories like “method of currere” (Pinar, 2004, pp. 35-40), proposed as a “systematic study of self-reflexivity within the processes of education” that can provide “a strategy (...) to study the relations between academic knowledge and life history in the interest of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (p. 35), paying heed to the call-of-duty to not become damage-centric researchers (Tuck, 2009), in this paper I propose to share stories of desire-based endeavours in curricular terms, as curricular activism. My specific context is an Adivasi land in India, where I was invited to help in tutoring school-going kids (grade 1 to grade 8) in some informal learning spaces organized by Adivasi community youths. Inspired by recent learning theories with ecological and spiritual turns (Nasir et al., 2021; Bang, 2020; Gutiérrez, 2022), engaging with those spaces around the framework of organizing informal learning (Rogo et al., 2016), employing “light pedagogical touch” (Gutiérrez & Calabrese Barton, 2015), we were able to systematically document and analyze our effort in imagining a community-oriented educational safe-haven not only providing safety, but also becoming a space to talk-back to the existing state-sponsored (and imposed) curricula (Santra, 2023)— overall we chose to name it as an ongoing politico-epistemological resistance, a curricular activism.

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Jun 13th, 10:15 AM Jun 13th, 11:45 AM

Adivasi Resistance as Curricular Resistance: A Case from an indigenous land in India

Room 2

Activism and education have always been intertwined in India— a simultaneous land/context of multiple colonialities and sustained resistance against those. Cohn referred to the colonial formation in India as “a conquest of knowledge” (1996, p. 16). Another colonial force was the inherent Indian-societal Brahminical hegemonic caste-system, against whose educational oppression we have historical activism-oriented voices from Dalit visionaries like Jotiba Phule (Phule, 2002, p. 105), ‘Periyar’ E. V. Ramasami (Ramasami, 2021), Dr B R Ambedkar (Rege, 2010, p. 93) and the likes. Contemporarily, ‘Pedagogies of Brahminism’ suppresses the students from the oppressed classes with newer discriminatory, neo-capitalistic, and neo-liberal educational policies justifying those suppressions (Singh, 2023, p. 56). There also is contemporary evidence of the curricular pain that entails while trying to accommodate Dalit voices in the educational spaces (Rege 2010; Sukumar, 2023). Other Dalit-Bahujan scholars expressed that their “worldviews are near-invisible in the current curriculum” (Darokar & Bodhi, 2022, p. 304). Under these threatening historical/contemporary contexts, drawing from curricular theories like “method of currere” (Pinar, 2004, pp. 35-40), proposed as a “systematic study of self-reflexivity within the processes of education” that can provide “a strategy (...) to study the relations between academic knowledge and life history in the interest of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (p. 35), paying heed to the call-of-duty to not become damage-centric researchers (Tuck, 2009), in this paper I propose to share stories of desire-based endeavours in curricular terms, as curricular activism. My specific context is an Adivasi land in India, where I was invited to help in tutoring school-going kids (grade 1 to grade 8) in some informal learning spaces organized by Adivasi community youths. Inspired by recent learning theories with ecological and spiritual turns (Nasir et al., 2021; Bang, 2020; Gutiérrez, 2022), engaging with those spaces around the framework of organizing informal learning (Rogo et al., 2016), employing “light pedagogical touch” (Gutiérrez & Calabrese Barton, 2015), we were able to systematically document and analyze our effort in imagining a community-oriented educational safe-haven not only providing safety, but also becoming a space to talk-back to the existing state-sponsored (and imposed) curricula (Santra, 2023)— overall we chose to name it as an ongoing politico-epistemological resistance, a curricular activism.