Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe Right to Education Act (2009) and school enactments of inclusion in India( 2020)This thesis is concerned with the landmark right to education legislation, which was included as a fundamental right in the Indian constitution, in 2002, and enacted as law as the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act, 2009). This Act makes free and compulsory elementary education of children between 6 and 14 years of age a fundamental constitutional right. It also details conditions for provision of education, specifying minimum standards of school infrastructure, teacher qualifications, teaching norms, assessment, and curriculum. Importantly, it includes a provision for the reservation of entry-level seats for children from underprivileged backgrounds in private schools, to create more inclusive school communities. At a time when policy focus is on learning outcomes and the issue of quality of education, this research instead draws attention to the objectives of inclusion and social justice implied by the constitutional mandate for the right to education and is concerned with the ways in which schools have responded to and enacted this provision for inclusion in classrooms. Using theoretical resources drawn from recent literature on policy enactment approaches, this thesis focuses on the materializing practices that enact the right to education in two school settings in India. School leaders’ and teachers’ readings of policy discourses, and teachers’ negotiations of multiple ideas and policy objects encountered in the post-RTE classroom settings, are explored. Concepts from new materialism are used to analyse interview and ethnographic observation data by mapping the meanings, discourses and affects assembled in practices of schooling. The role of affect in learning, and the ways in which it produces new capacities to teach, and learn, in school settings are explored. Pedagogies that include and exclude become visible at the confluence of policy discourses, practices of educational reform and institutional histories. The potential of ethical pedagogies of affect to enact inclusion in the context of the right to education in India is shown.
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ItemBecoming boy: A/effecting identity in a Catholic boys' school( 2015)This thesis examines how identities are effected specific to time and space. In particular, I consider different masculine student identities enacted by boys in a Catholic boys’ school. Motivated by my own experiences as a teacher in such a school, I address the dominant masculinity of the school, and how student masculinities are formed not only within this masculinity, but also how other student masculinities come into (and out of) existence. In considering how different masculine identities continually come together, and move apart, within and between school spaces, I draw on Deleuze’s concept of the assemblage, as understood through feminist new materialist notions of the posthuman. Through a post-qualitative autoethnography, I map the assemblages of my own encounters with student masculinities as a teacher in a Catholic boys’ school. In so doing, I consider three events and the masculine identities that are un/made through the affective flows that de/compose them. I attempt to locate myself and my own affective capacity within this entangled research-assemblage, considering the role that my own feminine-teacher position has played in events, and in knowledge production. In understanding identity as an affective assemblage, I suggest identity is nuanced and contextual, continually brought into being by specific acts and their effects at particular moments in time and space. Ultimately, this thesis recognises student masculine identities in a Catholic boys’ school as constituted (and de-constituted) through affective flows. It finds masculinity is multiple and contextual, that it comes together fleetingly, and can (but not always) dissipate just as quickly. It provides a means for thinking about identity through attention to the elements that make up an assemblage, including the non-human. Deleuze’s positive ontology makes possible a more nuanced understanding of identity as formed in the moment, contingent on time, space and context. Theorising identity in this way can contribute to improved social justice in the micropolitical practices of schools and their pedagogies, and to a politics through which dominant identities can be displaced. I seek appreciation for the many masculine student identities enacted within specific times and spaces, and to shift away from boys’ school practices that presume only one understanding of masculine identity.