40 CHAPTER 3
3 Methodology
To understand teacher stories of enacting inclusive education, I carried out participant observations, interviews, and teacher workshops for a school term as ethnographic case studies at two school-NGO sites (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). Ethnographic case studies or ethno-case studies involve thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) and engagement to examine how things are done (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). Using a comparative case study approach, I examined the layers of context through which schools and teachers enact inclusive education policies, such as school history and location, teacher experiences, school buildings, budgets, and infrastructure, and national and local policy contexts. The objective was to examine the relationship between the micro and the macro – between the classroom, culture, and policy (Alexander, 2001) and
between teachers, the NGO, and the state (Ball, 1993a) in the enactment of inclusive education.
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case emerged and evolved through the process of conducting this research, largely due to the constraints and challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The comparative case study approach involves studying processes through three axes of comparisons – the horizontal, the vertical, and the transversal comparisons (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) (Figure 1). The horizontal comparison contrasts cases while studying the relationships and connections across cases, the vertical comparison examines levels of influence from international to the local, and the transversal comparison focuses on the phenomenon over time.
The horizontal axes emphasize the local production of policy. I focused on the role of teachers as actors within education policy. From a policy enactment perspective, the horizontal axis represents the notion of policy as text (Ball, 1993b, 2015)– the creative translations and interpretations of policy carried out by teachers in schools and classrooms. Through interviews and observations, I focused on the perspectives of the teachers and the everyday realities of the school context.
Vertical comparison focuses on policy across micro, meso, and macro levels, following the phenomenon across scales and sites. This form of comparison examines mutual influences across different levels and scales. In this dissertation, the multi-scalar and multi-level vertical analysis compared the NGO interventions across the school sites while connecting the school- NGO partnership with influences across regional, national, and global sites of action. The comparative case study approach emphasized multi-sited and multi-scalar examinations of phenomena. The ‘case’ is not bound to particular teachers or schools or NGOs. Instead, I am interested in the processes enabled and enacted through networks and actors in enacting inclusive education. Through a comparative case study, I examined the processes through which inclusive education occurs at these sites and connect these local acts of doing inclusion across scales of
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influence and layers of context, highlighting how scales of actions mutually influence each other.
The transversal axis pays attention to the historical conditions underlying the processes observed at the sites. The transversal analysis of the discourses, processes, and practices identified across the two sites in India are situated within broader debates around temporality and inclusive education.
Following the comparative case study approach, different sampling strategies were adopted for distinct parts of the study. The NGOs were selected because of their networked nature (see section below) and their interventions on inclusive education with primary school teachers – as an operational construct case (Patton, 1990). On the other hand, the school sites were both convenient cases – in that they were the sites of NGO operations. However, as privatized schools serving Muslim students with young female Muslim teachers, the schools were homogenous cases as they allowed study within a population that is increasingly the site of exclusionary politics of the state.
The figure below depicts how comparisons were conducted across classrooms, between the public-private partnership (PPP) school in Mumbai and the unrecognized low-fee private school in Ahmedabad, the two NGO sites, at the level of national policies such as the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE), the 2020 National Education Policy (NEP), and the 2016 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPWD). At the global level, I consider the influence of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank over discourses and policies for inclusive education (Figure 1).
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Figure 1: Representation of the comparative case study approach used in this study
44 3.2 Doing research in a global pandemic
Schools in India were rapidly shifting from online to on-site instruction during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This rendered long-term onsite fieldwork untenable. Fieldwork was carried out between July 2021 and April 2022, that is, in the immediate aftermath of the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India and during the third wave. Fieldwork in Ahmedabad was carried out between July and November 2021. I visited Ahmedabad between 29th September 2021 and 11th October 2021, after which fieldwork continued online through weekly teacher workshops that culminated in the middle of November.
Unlike Ahmedabad, where research began online and remained largely online, in Mumbai, fieldwork began and was largely in person. The NGO program in Mumbai was in its first year of implementation, the teachers were required to be in school every day, and students were attending school in hybrid mode. However, fieldwork was interrupted by the third wave of the pandemic, which led to school closures during the month of January. During this time, I carried out interviews and classroom observations online. Teachers were required to be in
school, but students were not. There was little adherence to masking, so it felt unsafe to carry out data collection in person. During this round of fieldwork, I, along with several teachers,
contracted COVID-19.
I resumed in-person fieldwork in Mumbai in the first week of February. Although schools reopened for students on the 24th of January, I needed more time to recover from the infection.
During the second round of in-person fieldwork, the school schedule kept changing – initially, students were called to the school in two batches for two hours at a time. For a few weeks, students were called as one batch together for the entire day. During the centralized state school leaving examinations in March, all students attended school for only two hours a day. The
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schedule changed again during April, for Ramzan or Ramadan, a month of fasting and prayer marked by Muslims. Each time, teachers only received a day’s notice from the school and the state.
Drawing on patchwork ethnography (Günel et al., 2020), I adopted “short-term field visits, using fragmentary yet rigorous data.” Patchwork ethnography builds on feminist, decolonial approaches to challenge traditional distinctions between the field and home. The method allows for greater flexibility and care given the difficult balance of responsibilities that teachers and I undertook– cooking, caregiving, and working. Most pertinently, this involved negotiating times in the day when teachers and I could speak, alone and undisturbed.
Using approaches from digital ethnography (Howlett, 2021), my research approach emphasized flexibility and remote embeddedness. Fieldwork extended into online spaces used by the schools and NGOs, such as Google Classrooms and WhatsApp groups (Góralska, 2020). I established online co-presence with participants (Howlett, 2021) by conducting telephone, Zoom, and WhatsApp interviews, observing online classrooms, and attending school meetings, held in-person or online, via Zoom. Online interactions did not simply extend or replicate the field on-screen. Instead, the digital space transformed sites of interactions and relations of power between the researcher and the participants. Interviews and observations were inhabited and occupied by children, power outages, network issues, phone calls, caretaking responsibilities, calls for prayer, and calls to make meals for the family.
Because of the online nature of my relationship with teachers, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat also became field sites. WhatsApp was the site to coordinate all interviews and
observations. Teachers’ WhatsApp statuses became sites of first impressions and small talk – a joke, a meme, a prayer, a celebration, a function – I learned about what they wanted to share with
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their world about their every day through WhatsApp. Interviews were carried out for two teachers in Ahmedabad entirely through WhatsApp chats and voice notes. Due to caregiving responsibilities, the two could not find undisrupted time for Zoom or phone calls. Teachers would search for me and find me on Instagram, adding new layers of intimacy and information.
For instance, teachers in Mumbai discovered I was married through Instagram, which led to several subsequent staffroom conversations about balancing career and home after marriage.
3.3 Identifying sites of inclusive education in India