Dept of El. Education

Tribal education in India, especially in West Bengal, lays stress on the improvement of access through the adoption of various policies and strategies. As an outcome of these, during the past few years, tribal education has witnessed a rapid change in the area of access, teaching-learning process and community participation. In this context the field study conducted on the Santal tribe of the village Mahisdal in the Birbhum district of West Bengal provides an opportunity to introspect into the status of educational backwardness among Santals, a tribal society Particularly, when the process of urbanisation and modernisation has set into the tribal areas, the relevance and acceptance of modern, formal education assumes crucial significance. The main thrust of the paper has been to capture the state of schooling among the Santali children. The study is an endeavour to identify the deep-rooted inter-linkages between the school and the home factors and their cumulative impact on the overall process of formal learning among the children to assess their level of schooling from a micro-stand point. The paper provides an account of the perceptions of Santal parents on formal schooling of their children as parental views are crucial to understand the community's attitude towards education. The paper further captures the home and the school related factors that affect the Santali children's learning to present the actual scenario of the conditions of schooling in the village. Insights of children and those of the teachers are also presented wherever they are found useful in enriching the understanding of the theme of study. gathered pertaining the 72 variables was processed through the SPSS package. Statistical analysis has been presented through the tables showing frequency distributions, percentages and cross-tabulations. It was then followed by an elaborate interpretation, which is descriptively reflected through the paper.

Olchiki is the indigenous script of Santals, a dominant tribal community of West Bengal, formulated to promote and represent ‘adi’ cultural heritage and traditions in their mother tongue Santali. The script was recognised by the Government of West Bengal in 1978 and was introduced at the primary level of education. However, there have been contestations around its appropriateness as the medium of instruction for the migrant tribal community in the emerging context of the city and globalisation. These discourses have led to the formation of two distinct groups—those who support the introduction of Santali language in Olchiki as a means to formal education and those who resist usage of its script for schooling. In my article, I will present these conflicting views prevailing among the migrant Santals of a settlement called Santragachi, in Kolkata.

The inherent nature of any form of art lies in its innate or organic ability to reproduce itself. Testimonies from history reveal how replicas of art helped in wider diffusion of the craft at different periods in time. However, in the modern era, reproduction/replicability of art has taken a different turn, a new direction in the way it is understood, perceived and practiced. However, the concern emerges from the perturbed relationship art shares with technology and the tension impacting the reproducibility of art in the modern times. The paper therefore aims to critically understand the role of mechanical-technological reproduction in shaping art, its aesthetics and
representation in the modern era.

As a social science faculty and a teacher educator in a four-year integrated programme (Bachelors in Elementary Education) under University of Delhi, one finds that year after year, fourth year students of the course express a deep sense of anxiety undertaking their research projects. The anxiety is concerning the theoretical texts they read as part of their course which they feel do not help them provide an anchoring to the layered ground realities as they undertake their internship in government school settings where children largely come from the margins of the city. Interns collectively echo their angst on how the programme prepares them for a rhetorical and polemical understanding of the realities that are disconnected from the school milieu, the complex classroom truths, and the diverse social contexts of the children. This paper is not limited to the concerns of the interns of Bachelors in Elementary Education Programme, the paper attempts to address the issue as a larger concern that social science researchers are struggling with. The present paper examines the anxieties that social science researchers confront using theory to make sense of the field. The epistemological claim has been that theory is significant to make sense of human action. The burden of intelligibility lies with theory in the claim that it is only through a theoretical framework that field can be understood and interpreted. There is a constant tension that the researchers experience experiencing the field and it becomes visible when they do not find data to make sense of the theory. Similar angsts can be seen among research scholars when they try looking for theory to make sense of the data. The paper explores this theory-practice divide that social science research is grappling with.

The present paper examines the relationship that children at the margins, their multiple lifeworld, rooted in their community practices shares with urban, modern schooling. School-milieu relationship emerges as an important site of research that needs to be explored sociologically to understand its impact on children, their marginal social setting and the education system at large. In the context of this background, the research intends to study the lived realities of a lower-class settlement in south Delhi, Kusumpur Pahari. The study intends to capture the schooling processes and practices of the children from this fringe settlement. Some of the pertinent questions that the study aims to explore are: how do the residents negotiate everyday life in the settlement as peripheries of the city? How schooling shapes their experiences as urban margins? What are the parental perceptions, dilemmas, anxieties and practices vis a vis their children's schooling? How do the children understand/perceive their schooling? What is the relationship that school shares with the community as they educate children from the margins?

The idea of equality is not new to the disciplines of social sciences and education. The notion penetrated into the lexicon of the modern democratic societies through the Constitutional and the legal frames since the need for treating all citizens equal had been the cherished goal of the states in democratic systems. However, in India, the situation is different or rather complex. The historical fault lines along ascriptive/ primordial identities continue to persist. Yet, some of the social welfare reforms post-independence did take the initiatives to address the discriminatory, hierarchical and stratified conditions that posed hindrance towards attaining education. But, despite the efforts at the policy level, the counter claims of exclusion and marginalisation rooted in the policy-practice/implementation gap remained or rather got intensified with the rise of neo-liberalism. The unscrupulous privatisation, driven by capitalist mode of thinking and market oriented ideology that the neoliberal turn brought in, entrenched the divide further in complex ways between the privileged and the marginalised. Today, the notion of equality is experiencing a conceptual void that further becomes critical in the welfare-neo-liberal conundrum. What got missed or rather neglected is a certain engagement with modernity as the void can be traced to have its roots within it. The pertinent questions therefore that need to be asked are: what is the relationship that modernity shares with education? Can something new emerge in the discourse of education if we attempt to critically understand equality from the realm of modernity? Can it create possibilities to emerge new ways of thinking, understanding and practice to address the anxieties around equality in the contemporary educational discourse? These are some of the questions the paper would attempt to reflect and delve upon.