Citizenship Education (CE) in India: Inclusive Policy, Exclusionary Practice.

My paper takes as its starting point the premise of the panel, ‘All learners possess concepts that enable them to orient themselves in the contexts of societal relations’ and poses the question- How do learners come to possess concepts of Citizenship and CE in a post-colonial setting? It seeks to answer the question in the context of teachers who must necessarily be learners at every stage of their career. I use literature review methodology (Snyder, 2019) to map existing research in the field, identify gaps and map agenda for future research which includes my own doctoral research. Part One discusses evolution of the concept of Citizenship and CE from the colonial to the post-colonial contexts and the transition from citizen-subject to national citizen, as constituted in education policy documents and subject matter of CE texts taught in schools. Part Two critically examines whether citizenship defined as ‘dynamic and performative acts of domination and emancipation’ (Isin) experienced ruptures or rather unexpected and unforeseen continuities in the transition from colonial state to independent nation (Batra 2020). One of these continuities is the concept of a “good citizen” as loyal to the nation state, prioritizing national unity. My paper adopts the post-colonial perspective, which proposes hyper-self-reflexivity as a strategy that acknowledges everyone’s complicities and investments in coercive and repressive belief systems (Andreotti & de.Souza, 2012), to explore and interrogate how teacher beliefs and pedagogies about CE may be influenced by distinct cultural values and dominant statist ideology as reflected in Education Policy and Curriculum frameworks. India is a postcolonial country with great socio-economic and cultural diversity and inequalities based on economic disparities and ascriptive identity markers such as gender, caste, ethnicities, religion and language. These challenge the stated goals of national unity, social justice and equality in the national education policies Part three elaborates understandings from below as a concept for Inclusive Citizenship Education. Teacher-learners experience and negotiate contradictions between stated policy of unity, justice and equality and contradictory practices in their own learning context - spatial, linguistic, pedagogic - where acts of inclusion and exclusion vary according to their status as members of elite dominant groups and “others”. Teachers are situated as a group who feel non-agential (Thapan, 2006). Sarohe (2021) points to the success of critical, problem-based CE units in teacher education, which connect student-teachers to marginalized and excluded communities. This led to vastly enhanced teacher understanding and inclusive pedagogies while teaching in their own classrooms with minority and marginalized children (Sarohe, 2021). Teacher beliefs undergo change from their interaction with these marginalized or excluded groups, which leads them to oppose the state ideology of civilizational unity steered by dominant elites. The paper argues that the concept of inclusive citizenship education may build up spaces for equality and inclusion only by using the bottom-up approach (Lange, 2020), by registering and understanding the beliefs of teachers grounded in their cultural context, didactic reconstruction of teacher ideologies and co-constructing acts and pedagogies of inclusion.