The Social Context of Learning in India: Achievement Gaps and Factors of Poor Learning

Why are children from disadvantaged and minority communities overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts? This volume engages with this question and examines classroom learning as a process that involves a multitude of actors situated in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.

The volume covers an interdisciplinary spectrum of educational processes, contexts, educational ambitions, and limitations of low-caste, working-class, and middle-class students from different Indian communities and regions. The volume delves into the problem of academic underperformance from a social identity perspective and probes into social context-based variability in classroom learning, systemic disadvantages in the form of negative stereotypes, and the family as an under-studied social group in all discussions of schooling. It also examines the teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards Adivasi students and other minority groups in primary schools and their effect on children’s classroom engagement.

The chapters in this volume provide insights into unresolved and critical research questions that require the attention of teachers, school management, educators, and policymakers alike. This book will also be useful for academicians, policymakers, teacher educators, pedagogic practitioners in India and abroad, and state and central government institutions working on school education, educational psychology, policymaking in education, learning methods, and research on educational enhancement.

Manoj Kumar Tiwary is an educationist and research fellow for a number of organisations based in India and the Netherlands. His research explores the social history of education, teacher training, and learning achievements, with a particular focus on Bihar.

Sanjay Kumar is a scholar, practitioner, and founder of Deshkal Society, Delhi, India. He has been working in the areas of social diversity, inequality, and education for more than one and a half decades both in practice and scholarship. His articles, monographs, and occasional papers have been published in journals and magazines. He is the co-editor of various books: Interrogating Development: Insights from the Margins; School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives; and Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India. His recent co-edited publication is The Marginalized Self: Tales of Resistance of a Community.

Arvind Kumar Mishra teaches Social Psychology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the co-editor of four books: Interrogating Development: Insights from the Margins (2010); School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives (2012); Dynamics of Inclusive Classroom: Social Diversity, Inequality and School Education in India (2017); and The Marginalized Self: Tales of Resistance of a Community (2020). His research papers have been published in prestigious journals such as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. His research interest focuses on theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology, resistance to modernity, self, and identity processes among marginalised communities.