Child-Centred Pedagogies and the Promise of Democratic Schooling

Abstract

This chapter draws together the main threads of the book’s analysis to open up a space for rethinking the politics of educational development reform. It suggests that Bernstein’s notion of recontextualisation can help bring to light the translations and transformations of pedagogic ideals as they move through national and state policy arenas, as well as through school and classroom settings. The discussion considers how the democratic intentions of child-centred education produce new, challenging subject positions for learners, and explores how these subject positions are aligned to narratives of modernisation and development in India. The chapter then sets out the implications of the book’s analysis for ‘quality’ education reform in development contexts. It makes explicit some of the costs of child-centred education in Indian government schools and highlights the social and material investments that reformers need to make. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the overall project of ‘quality’ improvement as a social and political project, rather than a context-free intervention as it is predominantly constructed in development discourses.