I have written several essays on the education of children from the Adivasi and fisher communities on this forum. But what about other sections of the poor and the marginalized? What about the children belonging to the Dalit and other backward communities? In fact, the number of children who face challenges of retention or learning in schools belonging to the Scheduled Castes or other backward communities is much higher than those belonging to the Adivasi people.

Almost all children from the middle-class and a significant share of those from the lower middle-class have shifted to private schools and most of the children who attend government schools in India belong to the poor and marginalized groups. For this reason, improving the quality of teaching and learning in government schools would mean improving the quality of schooling for the poor and marginalized. In that sense, organizations such as the Azim Premji Foundation, which works only with government schools actually work towards the quality schooling for the poor and marginalized.

It is the teachers in government schools who are (should be) at the forefront of the public education system. In fact, it is these teachers who can identify and take important actions to address the educational challenges faced by children from the poor and marginalized communities. There are a number of teachers who go beyond their expected roles and take pro-active steps to see that these children attend school regularly and demonstrate better learning achievements. There could be a teacher who makes efforts to provide residential facility to the children of poor migrants; another who takes action to prevent child marriages in his/her locality; one who spends extra time to train these children to get admission in to good-quality high schools; and yet another, who uses locally available materials to create science laboratories in his or her school. Anurag Behar and S. Giridhar—my friends and colleagues—highlight such cases of exceptional teachers in their newspaper columns.

Much more needs to be done about the experience and practice of these exceptional teachers. First, the practices that they follow have to become part of the culture of the majority of school teachers in India, in order to realize the objective of `quality schooling for all’. Though the efforts of the higher-level governmental machinery and non-governmental organizations are important, the real success and its sustainability depend on the practice of school teachers. Hence, there is a need for the practices of these exceptional teachers to get disseminated widely and accepted by more and more teachers.

Ideally, the actions of such teachers who make classrooms inclusive should become part of the teacher education. This is important in developing countries where schooling cannot be improved simply by focusing on the classroom processes neglecting the familial and social conditions of each child. This becomes a complex issue in India since there is a diversity of poor and marginalized groups, and each faces challenges that are somewhat unique to them due to the historically-shaped discrimination and under-achievement in education. Ideally, teacher-education in India should have an adequate focus on how to address these challenges within and outside the classroom. However, the reality is different. My friends in the School of Education tell me that there is not enough focus on the specific challenges faced by children from poor and vulnerable groups in teacher-education. Instead, it focusses on a homogenous curriculum and pedagogy, as if, these can be operationalized everywhere with equal ease without taking into consideration the specific social context of the children. (In this sense, education science would be similar to medical science as most of the teaching in medical schools, barring the courses on public health or community medicine, focus on the human body as a universal construct. Poverty, gender discrimination, poor quality of drinking water and sanitation, non-availability of reasonable quality medical services and so on, which affect the health of a person in a specific context, are not considered while deciding the medical treatment of a person. In fact, one outcome of this approach is that most Indians do not have access to cost-effective medical services near their habitations.) This issue has to be addressed for the teacher-education programs to be effective in meeting the needs of the country.

One reason for this state affairs is that there are not enough learning materials on the challenges faced by different groups of children and how these can be addressed inside and outside the classroom in India. The developed countries are much ahead in this regard. We can see a number of scholarly articles not only on the challenges in terms of schooling but also on the efforts to improve the conditions of children belonging to racial or ethnic minorities or urban poor in the developed world. However, there have not been many such efforts in India. There could be historical reasons for this situation. Until a few decades ago, schools in India were used primarily by a minority, who were interested in and exposed to education. These parents would create enabling conditions for the learning of their children at home and the responsibility of teachers was to instil knowledge in different subjects. Teachers did not have to encounter the difficulties in dealing with many children from the poor and marginalized groups since they were out of school. The school enrolment from these groups has gone up only recently, that is, within the last two to three decades. Hence, the real need to provide quality schooling for the poor is a relatively new challenge faced by the country.

For all these reasons, many of my colleagues—Ankur, Rajashree, Ritika, Sharad, Shipra and Umashankar Periodi—have started writing reflective documents on the practice of such exceptional teachers who work towards inclusive schooling and thereby, towards an inclusive society. The identification of such teachers is not too difficult because of the presence of field institutes of the Azim Premji Foundation in many districts of the country. This documentation was carried out with the support of the resource persons in these field institutes. We would be publishing a series of such documents on teachers and the first one is available here. There are a number of insightful cases documented under this series.

It is not as if these teachers do everything right. They also function with several constraints. Hence, there is a twin focus in these reflective documentations—the first is to highlight and draw important lessons from their practice, and the second, to assess them critically and reflectively.

Education is a `practice; it should be a discipline of the practitioner and the professional. This requires that the actual practices and challenges of `teachers’ should become part of the education of these `practitioners’. There are many hurdles in this regard. Some the teacher-educators have very little experience as teachers, especially in dealing with children from poor socio-economic backgrounds. There are very few school teachers who acquire high qualifications and become teacher educators. Higher education, especially in social sciences and humanities, has a tendency to be theoretical in nature without incorporating practical experiences. Even when empirical experience becomes part of academics, the theoretical lenses that are used to interpret these experiences are evolved in the developed world. There are only limited attempts to theorize the empirical experiences in countries such as India. Higher education in social sciences seems to have lost the orientation to address specific social issues directly, and such a tendency can be socially harmful if education science in the country does not have a focus on the `quality schooling for all’.

The effect of all these is a disconnect between what can be called `education science’ and the actual practice of teaching in schools. A significant share of Indian children is in private schools, where the practices followed need not be in tune with what educationists recommend as normatively desirable. A significant part of learning in India happens in coaching centres and through private tuitions and here too the role of `education science’ is uncertain. There can be a set of elite schools but the teachers there need not have any roots in the education science taught in Indian universities. The formal qualifications in education science are important in government schools but these schools are not preferred by the affluent sections of the Indian society. There are problems with regard to quality in the education departments of universities and colleges, which may reflect in the quality of teacher education programs. Much more needs to be done to address these issues. One important step is to strengthen the link between good practices in school and the `education science’ taught in higher education institutes or universities. The reflective documentations on teachers prepared at the Azim Premji University are an important first step in this direction.