4.1 Dis/ability in the classroom and the school
4.1.1 Rigor as ability in Ahmedabad
In Ahmedabad, the typologies of ability are discussed in terms of "rigor." Rigor is used as a catch-all term in the school, an adjective to evaluate children, teachers, curriculum and
instruction, and the school itself. The idea of rigor is discussed often – in the staffroom between teachers, in meetings between the teachers and the school leaders, and in meetings between the school and the NGO. Given the varied usage and contexts of its use, rigor might broadly be understood as a term synonymous with standards or exacting criteria through which the school aims to evaluate its students, teachers, and itself. As I explain below, rigor is used both as a description of how difficult and thorough the standards and benchmarks and as the means to classify a child’s ability.
Rigor lends itself to a classification of children as possessing different levels of “what a child can do”, “their capability”, “what they can achieve”, and “expectations.” Rigor refers to the
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ease with which a child learns, and how easy or difficult it is for a child to grasp the curriculum.
It is most often spoken in a binary of high and low – but teachers often include “average rigor”
as a third category, or “lower, a little higher, a little higher, a little higher, and highest.” The determination of rigor in the classroom is a relationship in time, “if I child completes their work in 5 minutes that’s the rigor of the child.” Thus, rigor is most often determined by speed, “high rigor catch things quickly” and low rigor “have trouble reading and complete their work a little after everyone else.” Further, high rigor "do things with a lot of speed", they write quickly, understand quickly. High-rigor students are also able to "understand things on their own", and
"understand directly by reading.” High-rigor children do not have to be told things multiple times, nor do they need multiple explanations. The low-rigor child, on the other hand, is slow.
They are slow and weak because they do not practice, have irregular attendance, lack motivation, and have parents who did not support their learning. Such children "do not move forward nor do they know what they are supposed to know." For teachers, the low-rigor child raises questions,
"in my heart, I feel, why can't this child do it? This question is for me, why can't these children do it?"
The institutionalized language of rigor appears to have originated from the ongoing presence of Teach for India at the school. TFI fellows have been at the school for over 5 years.
Further, TFI assigned an Assistant School Leader at the school, replaced by a teacher, Raha baji, once the TFI appointed Assistant School Leader left to pursue higher education in the United States. According to an NGO staff member, also a former TFI fellow, “high rigor means those who are good at studies and low rigor means those who are not good at studies”, that is, low rigor students are not “up to the mark” in their “performance in the exam or performance in the classroom.” The staff member explains that the term rigor is a part of TFI training, “My
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understanding would be this has come from TFI somewhere because this is one thing even during our training or in the space itself it's talked about in differentiation, what are you doing for higher rigor and low rigor students.”
Established rigor in the classroom, measured in the time taken to perform tasks, further determines expectations of the child to acquire grade appropriate curriculum. As the school leader suggested in a school-NGO meeting to determine learning outcomes for the academic year, “we need to create learning outcomes so that the low rigor children can achieve the bare minimum 30-33% understanding to reach the next grade.” The 30-33% figure refers to the minimum grades a child needs to obtain in a final examination to pass. The school is thus concerned with determining curricular standards such that all children, regardless of rigor, can continue the established age-grade trajectory. At the same time, the school leader wants teachers to not “lower their rigor for the child, but to grow the rigor of the child.”
Overall, the school is preoccupied with the problem of being “too diverse” and a desire to
“include the lower rigor child or every child of the class, also” to “give more strong foundation to the children.” In the marketplace of private schools in Ahmedabad, this low-fee unrecognized school seeks to compete with elite recognized private schools in the city (Srivastava, 2008b, 2008a). However, the school leader acknowledges that,
the challenge is that my class is too much diverse…if you go to a good elite school you might not see so much of diversity…but my class is too much of diversity you know I have a student who is at the minimum the lowest rigor also then I have children who are at the highest rigor also…for the teacher, of course, the challenge is always there…that how do I cater to them. We are always struggling with that, even now…but yeah I don’t
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think we’ll ever be able to eradicate that because as we are always open to all…this diversity will stay…that is the beauty of the school. (Zababa, Ahmedabad)
Unlike elite private schools that can “eradicate” ability diversity by being selective in their admissions process, the school mission is to be “open to all.” In doing so, the school tries to find ways to attain the highest rigor as a school while trying to “include the lower rigor child” whilst dealing with a lack of resources and “low rigor teachers” without professional teaching
qualifications. That is, the school struggles with the desire to grant admission to all Muslim girls yet the presence of low-rigor students is a “threat” to the performance of the school (Liasidou &
Symeou, 2018).
The challenge is to plan for this diversity. As the assistant school leader remarked, “But still for one person to take all these learning styles together within 40 minutes is a very big challenge. That if you plan for the low-rigor child, they can do it…but if we plan for the high rigor the low-rigor child suffers. So, what I want is that we find a standardized way through which we can challenge children of every rigor in the classroom. If they are low rigor, then the next level is defined for them, in any class. This is what I want.” The teachers echo this belief,
"If you are giving me 40 minutes to teach. I am making 3 different plans but to do it in a way that my high-rigor child is doing it, can my low-rigor child do the activities I have planned, or can she not do it? That thing ma'am is a challenge” (Noor, Ahmedabad).
As teachers understand it, "When we talk about teaching, then we don't see if the child has low rigor, then they will be taught the low rigor thing. Or that average will be taught average rigor thing. No, each class runs barabar (equal, can also mean exact). Whatever the child's level is they learn according to that, they learn that.” (Faiza, Ahmedabad) Thus, the curriculum is designed to teach the “average rigor thing” and it is upon the child to “learning according” to
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their rigor. Discrimination, for the teachers and the school, would be to alter the curriculum based on rigor. At the same time, it is challenging to keep the high rigor "occupied" while the teacher helps the low rigor learn. One strategy is to pair students or make groups so that the low rigor can learn from the high rigor. Another, as Sofia did, is to create different groups for high and low and teach them differently. She adopts a teaching strategy from madrasas where children at the same level of reading the Quran are grouped. She created two groups to get the low
rigor/weak children to reach the same level of reading as the ‘high rigor’ children. Another approach is to give extra time and attention to slow and low. There is extra time, and then there are different ways of teaching, such that rigor is not just speed but also 'learning styles.' That is, some children are fast while others require different teaching techniques.
Teachers mention that they plan their lessons based on rigor, with a particular focus on ensuring that low-rigor students understand. Yet, the challenge of difference remains, "In 5 years of teaching, it has never happened that I can get all children to the same rigor by the end of the year, some difference always remains and sometimes the gap widens." At the same time,
teachers expect certain "rigor" from the students in return for all the hard work they put in, "there is a lot of effort and hard work that goes into it, creating the lesson plan, making the PDF file, preparing to execute everything, giving time. There is a lot so that's why teachers have
expectations that yes from the students' side, we should get some rigor" (Khadija, Ahmedabad).
Given the problem of learner diversity and the presence of low-rigor students, the school leader and teachers understand the operations of the NGO, Inclusive Schools, as “creating benchmarks” and “maintaining the standards of the children and the teachers both so they are improving the children and the teachers both” (Zababa, Ahmedabad, school leader). Thus, the school is caught between a desire to be a competitive, English-medium, high-performing school
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while trying to fulfill its mission of including class and ability diversity across the Muslim community. This motivates the school to hire the NGO to undertake teacher professional development that can improve the rigor of the school, the teachers, and the students.