Movement Actors in the Education Bureaucracy: The Figured World of Activity Based Learning in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Tamil Nadu has gained international recognition for reforming its government school classrooms into active, child‐centered learning environments. Our exploration of the history of the Activity Based Learning movement suggests that this reform was achieved by social movement actors serving in and through the state's administration. Participants in people's movements and progressive education initiatives partnered with state officers to form an influential network, a “figured world” of counterhegemonic education knowledge, that ultimately transformed classrooms in over 37,000 schools.

Local Tea Party Groups and the Vibrancy of the Movement

“…Alternately, media and information networks also contribute new ways for scholars of figured worlds to consider how these worlds can be fashioned. When reproduced through different sources and networked through broadcast media and social networks, the attendant identities and the figured worlds in which they are meaningful can be remarkably consistent and durable across many spaces of local practice (Niesz and Krishnamurthy ).…”

Social Movement Knowledge and Anthropology of Education

“…These studies were formative to my thinking in the late 1990s, and I returned to them more recently when my own research uncovered the powerful roles of social movement knowledges in informing a successful (and fairly radical) school reform movement in South India (Niesz and Krishnamurthy ). The Activity Based Learning movement in Tamil Nadu, which aimed to rid classrooms of textbook‐ and teacher‐centered instruction, eventually extended to all 37,000+ of the state’s government primary schools.…”

“…Specifically, the Activity Based Learning approach was developed to reflect movement knowledges about learning (e.g., children must be actively engaged to learn, learning environments should be oriented around the learner rather than the teacher, children should feel comfortable and free in order to learn, etc. ), about the potential of all children (e.g., all children have imminent capacity to learn, no child is superior or inferior), and about democratic practice in schools (Niesz and Krishnamurthy ).…”

“…As such, they ought to be of great interest to anthropologists of education. Yet, only a handful of studies in our field have engaged directly with the knowledges produced in movements (see, e.g., Meek ; Mein ; Niesz and Krishnamurthy ; Skinner and Holland ; Trujillo ). This is despite the fact that, since the 1990s, the theoretical, methodological, and political conditions have seemed ideal for inquiry into the cultural production and circulation of social movement knowledges.…”

On Collapse and the Next U.S. Democracy: Elements of Applied Systemic Research

“…It did so here by (a) providing opportunities for panelists to share their meanings and dreams (the micro register) (b) in a deep democratic vehicle like a citizens' panel (mid‐range) (c) that will forward their suggestions to the federal government about how to implement a new nanotechnology law (systemic or macro). In granting policy‐initiating agency to citizens, the bottom‐up (Aigrain ; Alperovitz ) democratic machinery of a citizens' panel augments the vertical case study of Lesley Bartlett and Frances Vavrus (:131; see also Niesz and Krishnamurthy :153) by putting that agency in motion. So rather than waiting for cumulative force to build over time (Bucholtz et al.…”