4.1 Dis/ability in the classroom and the school
4.1.3 Thinking between and across dis/ability typologies
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course was not only conducted via WhatsApp and Zoom. Once schools opened in person, teachers were required to set aside 30 minutes each day with the identified set of students.
Thus, teachers in Mumbai identify slow and weak learners for a variety of reasons – teacher accountability, school performance, and state-led remediation programs. For the school leader then, the purpose of the NGO-appointed Hope Fellows in the school is “to work with the slow, weaker, differently-abled children.”
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(Horn, 2007). These beliefs are prevalent in the Ahmedabad school. The school and the teachers are focused on ensuring “bare minimum” grade level proficiency for those considered ‘low rigor.’ However, teachers believe that low-rigor students need different, more creative, activity- based methods that cater to their learning styles, as opposed to the dominant, more traditional, chalkboard-based pedagogical methods. Regardless, a belief that children’s “prior preparation or innate abilities” (Horn, 2007, p. 44) preclude certain kinds of teaching for some has negative implications for equitable teaching.
Ahmedabad Mumbai
School type Unrecognized low-fee
private school
Public-private partnership school
Terminology for ability Rigor; slow, weak also used
Different across teachers;
slow, weak in common Ability categorization criteria
Pace; attention; classroom behavior; achievement of annual outcomes
Pace; attention; classroom behavior; formative and summative assessments School role for NGO Improve school standards Identify slow, weak, and
disabled children School-state relationship No reporting of student
performance to the state
Extensive reporting of student performance to the state Teacher accountability School; parents School; state
Table 3: Differences and similarities in ability categorization at the two schools
I argue that the mismatch problem in Ahmedabad arises from the school’s desire to be
competitive in the marketplace of private schools (Srivastava, 2008b, 2008a). Unrecognized low- fee private schools exist outside the state – the state does not monitor them, collect data about their performance, or officially recognize them as schools (Ohara, 2012). Operating in an independent market of schools, the Ahmedabad school seeks to enhance its reputation amongst other English medium elite, recognized private schools in the city (Srivastava, 2008a). It is for
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this reason that Teach for India and the Inclusive Schools NGO operate at the school, to enhance the ‘rigor’ of the school. At the same time, the school is committed to ensuring that Muslim girls in the community, regardless of class or ability, have “confidence and knowledge and that foundation to the girls, so that they can dream big” (Zababa, Ahmedabad school leader). The tension between the rigor of the school and the rigor of the child brings forth the tensions between the pace of the curriculum and the pace of the child (Horn, 2007; Walton, 2018b).
Importantly, this highlights the contradictions surrounding neoliberal education policies, which emphasize market-based policies, competition, standardization, and social justice ideals of inclusion and valuing learner diversity in schools and classrooms (Liasidou & Symeou, 2018). In examining the experiences of Black and Latinx parents of children with disabilities at charter schools in the United States, Waitoller et al. (2019) describe this tension as the ‘irony of rigor’:
‘no excuses’ charter schools are attractive to parents of children with disabilities because of their promise of ‘rigor’, yet parents find their children excluded based on the school’s expectations of
‘rigor.’
On the other hand, the Mumbai school is concerned with the identification of slow learners and weak learners. The notion of slow learners is not unique to this school – the term has origins in the identification of “normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow”
(arriéré), but not “sick” through intelligence testing carried out by Alfred Binet in France in the early 1900s (Nicolas et al., 2013). The category persisted through the 1960s and 70s, in the construction of learning disabilities in the United States (Sleeter, 1986). The term, no longer part of diagnostic categorizations, continues to pervade conversational category systems in the United States (Horn, 2007), Tanzania (Rugambwa & Thomas, 2013), South Africa (Walton, 2018b), and India (Sriprakash, 2009). In India, the concept of ‘slow learners’ is a part of state curricula for
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pre-service teachers and in official classifications of intellectual and learning disabilities. In Tanzania, for instance, teachers claim not to have children with disabilities in their classrooms.
Instead, teachers describe learners as fast and slow. Similar to the teachers in this study, teachers in Tanzania describe concerns of boredom for fast learners, and the need for extra time, extra classes, remediation, and mixed group learning for slow learners (Rugambwa & Thomas, 2013).
I argue that the focus on slow learners in Mumbai stems from the target-based equity and inclusion policies of the state (Mukhopadhyay & Sriprakash, 2013). As a public-private
partnership school, the Mumbai school is beholden to the priorities of the state to provide ‘free and quality education’. In fact, ‘free and quality education’ is visibly placed as the motto of the school at the school gates. Yet, teachers find that they are trapped between state and private ownership, not receiving state benefits or pay while being asked to carry out the work of the state. Mukhopadhyay and Sriprakash (2013), studying policy implementation in Karnataka, demonstrate how the focus on quality improvement within the Education for All movement quantified notions of equity, such that “target-driven projects produce the at-risk child in poor communities as an ‘entity’ for policy intervention” (p. 307). As I describe above, teachers in Mumbai are asked to identify slow and weak learners. However, given the targets of the state, limits are placed on how many students can be identified as slow and weak. Through report cards and competency forms, teachers are required to produce extensive data about the performance of each child. Yet, this data reflects the “interests of the education bureaucracy to showcase
achievement” (p. 314). The Hope Fellowship then is allowed entry into the school to aid the identification of slow, weak, and disabled learners and perhaps ultimately reduce their numbers through intervention. The targets-based, quantifiable equity policies within the Education for All paradigm reflect neoliberal priorities of efficiency and management (Kalyanpur, 2022;
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Mukhopadhyay & Sriprakash, 2013). Despite differences in dis/ability typologies and the institutional contexts that produce them, the tensions between neoliberal policies and social justice goals are observed across school sites (Grimaldi, 2012). The classifications of dis/ability at both sites reflect the problem of difference. The NGOs are recruited to address this problem.