The Right to Education Act (2009) and school enactments of inclusion in India

© 2020 Ajita MattooThis thesis is concerned with the landmark right to education legislation, which was included as a fundamental right in the Indian constitution, in 2002, and enacted as law as the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act, 2009). This Act makes free and compulsory elementary education of children between 6 and 14 years of age a fundamental constitutional right. It also details conditions for provision of education, specifying minimum standards of school infrastructure, teacher qualifications, teaching norms, assessment, and curriculum. Importantly, it includes a provision for the reservation of entry-level seats for children from underprivileged backgrounds in private schools, to create more inclusive school communities. At a time when policy focus is on learning outcomes and the issue of quality of education, this research instead draws attention to the objectives of inclusion and social justice implied by the constitutional mandate for the right to education and is concerned with the ways in which schools have responded to and enacted this provision for inclusion in classrooms. Using theoretical resources drawn from recent literature on policy enactment approaches, this thesis focuses on the materializing practices that enact the right to education in two school settings in India. School leaders’ and teachers’ readings of policy discourses, and teachers’ negotiations of multiple ideas and policy objects encountered in the post-RTE classroom settings, are explored. Concepts from new materialism are used to analyse interview and ethnographic observation data by mapping the meanings, discourses and affects assembled in practices of schooling. The role of affect in learning, and the ways in which it produces new capacities to teach, and learn, in school settings are explored. Pedagogies that include and exclude become visible at the confluence of policy discourses, practices of educational reform and institutional histories. The potential of ethical pedagogies of affect to enact inclusion in the context of the right to education in India is shown