Cultivating dialogues for positive educational change

Rahul Mukhopadhyay: I come to my last few questions related to this discussion. If we were to think of a metaphor in the context of the work of many Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) who work with education bureaucrats at different levels, would there be a particular metaphor that you think could help them align their work in a constructive and productive way with how you have experienced the challenges of education administration?

Yamini Aiyar: I like the patchwork idea. We often go in thinking we want to make a big radical change. And then we get disillusioned because we are operating within a structure that has all these constraints. In fact, ‘patchwork’ is a very nice way in which you could introduce the topic by pushing people to think harder about questions of constraints. And it is within those constraints that we have to find these patches where little gardens can be made, and each patch will look different.

But then we also have to think about stitching it all together collectively into this beautiful piece of cloth. So rather than being disillusioned, we should think about patchwork, and ultimately the patchwork comes together to create this beautiful, appealing, dynamic change.

Rahul Mukhopadhyay: Another thought from your earlier work also comes to mind because you brought in the idea of culture also and you have spoken about cognitive maps. Again, that seems to be a space or an idea which can be worked upon by CSOs. Any thoughts on that from your work? Is there something that can be done on that front and how would that be possible?

Yamini Aiyar: Actually, just before we got on to do this conversation, I had to go to my daughter’s school. It is a CBSE school. She has gone into class 9, and they were doing an orientation. We all got an alert yesterday from the school saying that “It is important to come because the new curriculum framework of the National Education Policy 2020 is going to be implemented. The textbooks have changed. There are a lot of changes in the assessment system. So, please prioritize this meeting.”

So, we went to the school, and I was listening to the orientation that we were given. And, you know, at the end of it, we parents had a lot of questions. This is after all Class 9! So, Class 10 and Class 12 are on our minds. We were all especially thinking about assessments. Even my questions were around that.

There is a lot of transformation that is taking place. And I was thinking to myself, you know, what I describe even in my research work about cognitive dissonance. We all complain about rote learning. We want more open, critical thinking, and different assessment structures. But at the end of the day our frameworks through which we are assessing the education system, even as parents, are very much from the point of view of the marks and grades.

There has been so much written in the Delhi newspapers these last two days because the CBSE results came out and the Delhi’s overall pass percentages dropped by a few points. And again, you know, this is suddenly seen as a metric of good versus bad schooling. So, I was puzzling over this question and thinking, even between parents and teachers, we are also locked into thinking about the education system in a particular manner. How do we imagine a lot of these changes? I was thinking to myself, more dialogue is so necessary. Because education is something that is co-produced with society. We have to come together to collectively align on our goals.

And just recently, the Ministry of Education released new guidelines for school management committees (SMCs). It brought me back to some of my early work. I got into the education space largely from a governance perspective, where we were working on this question of citizen mobilization and participatory governance, and the early days of the SMCs. Coming back to some of the constraints that we were talking about, the SMCs could not really play an active role in the school system because the fund flows are designed such that they have no flexibility to plan for the school. All of that reminded me that perhaps we need to go back to remembering that dialogues are the key to actual change. CBSE may be imagining a completely different school system. However, it will never get implemented if parents and teachers are not able to collectively come to a shared understanding and that collective understanding in turn gets shared with our policymakers at the top.

I think for all of us, we are in this collective project of dialoguing, which is a hard thing to do in a world where social media and algorithms take away from the possibility of multiplicities of points of view and polarization makes the act of dialogue itself a much harder thing to achieve. So, we have a very hard task ahead of us. But I don’t think it could ever be more important than it is now.

Rahul Mukhopadhyay: I fully resonate with your thoughts. Thank you for sharing your time, your thoughts from your work and your extensive experience of working with the education administration at different levels, and especially your recent work with the Delhi Government.