Teaching and Learning

This book is about teaching in schools in India, it is about the schoolteacher in the Indian classroom. While the influence of culture on pedagogy is generally assumed, the way in which culture constructs a teacher's thoughts and actions is rarely examined. Using cultural models developed in the fields of cultural psychology and social anthropology as a framework for analysis, this book explicates the culture of pedagogy evident in classrooms. Based on a qualitative analysis of classrooms in Bangalore, the author captures both the explicit and implicit cultural models of teacher thinking and teaching. Explicit models deal with teachers' goals for learning, their communication of knowledge to the classroom, and their verbal and non-verbal interaction with students. Implicit models interpret taken-for-granted models that include a teacher's relationship to textbook content, their attitude toward knowledge, and the rules that govern the teacher's interaction with students. These explicit and implicit models, the author argues, are embedded in four powerful cultural constructs: holism as a shared worldview that encourages openness to regulation; a hierarchical structure as a regulative social framework; knowledge as discovered and attested collectively; and the "sense of duty" that defines the role of the teacher (and student). A unique book that illustrates how culture powerfully and persuasively underlies teachers' thoughts and actions. It therefore questions the view that all of Indian education is "foreign", and suggests instead that there are many aspects of the contemporary Indian educational system which are rooted in a native pedagogical philosophy which survived British education.