Vidya Subramanian | O.P. Jindal Global University (original) (raw)

Journal Articles (Peer-reviewed) by Vidya Subramanian

Contemporary South Asia (Taylor and Francis journals), 2022

This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi... more This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are fostering diverse aspirations of service, entrepreneurship and charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a well-known corporate supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme. Mostly with commerce, engineering and management educational backgrounds, the TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite youth to not just serve underprivileged children through 'acts of compassion' but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. Through examining the trajectories of these individuals, I foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become prominent in advising the Delhi state government, under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to improve public education through discourses of enterprise and performance.

International Studies in Sociology of Education (Taylor and Francis journals), 2019

Over the past decade the Teach for India (TFI) organisation has emerged as a prominent non-govern... more Over the past decade the Teach for India (TFI) organisation has emerged as a prominent non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved in Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) with ailing urban municipal government bodies across select cities in India. An off-shoot of the Teach for America (TFA) programme, TFI aims to improve quality of education in
under-resourced municipal government schools through English medium education. Through in-depth interviews with members associated with TFI, some municipal school teachers and information accessed through Right to Information (RTI) applications, this article delineates the modalities of the PPP arrangement within municipal schools in Delhi. It examines how the intervention is institutionalising parallel governance structures, accentuating class-based tensions and exacerbating pedagogical inequities within these long-neglected schools.

Contemporary Education Dialogue (Sage journals), 2018

The 'Teach for India' programme, an important offshoot of the 'Teach for All'/ 'Teach for America... more The 'Teach for India' programme, an important offshoot of the 'Teach for All'/ 'Teach for America' global network, began as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) in 2009 in poorly functioning municipal schools in urban Pune and Mumbai. Like its prominent American counterpart, the programme has similar ideas of reform where it recruits college graduates and young professionals to serve as teachers in under resourced government schools and low-cost private schools as part of a two-year fellowship. Over the past seven years, the organisation has expanded its reach to five other cities in the country – Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad – and is emerging as a focal point among a growing network of urban not-for-profit organisations seeking to infuse new logics of reform within municipal school administrative bodies. This paper seeks to situate the emergence of the programme in the Indian context and map its links to local, national and global actors and organisations using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Through the use of SNA, the paper seeks to highlight the growing network of non-state institutions in metro cities – most notably Mumbai and Delhi - that are playing a key role in school reform focusing on school management, school leadership, advocacy and teacher training.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2011

This study based on my Masters thesis uses thematic content analysis to study news items publishe... more This study based on my Masters thesis uses thematic content analysis to study news items published in the Times of India newspaper, Mumbai edition, between 2008-2009 to understand the range of concerns emerging particular to education. The time frame is important as it is during the course of 2009, that the Right to Education Act was passed in India.

Commentary by Vidya Subramanian

Kafila, 2016

This opinion piece examines questions of 'nationalism' that became an overpowering part of public... more This opinion piece examines questions of 'nationalism' that became an overpowering part of public discourse in 2016 following the arrests of JNU student activists Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid on sedition charges. In this public debate, the Indian Army came to be embodied as the true site of 'nationalism', while JNU and student activists came to be branded as 'anti-nationals'. The piece highlights the socio-economic and historical position of the Indian Army jawan on whose body and labour, tropes of 'nationalism' are built and reinforced. (click the URL link to read the piece).

Book Reviews by Vidya Subramanian

The India Forum, 2023

Innovative school programmes to build more appropriate ways of learning and teaching ultimately f... more Innovative school programmes to build more appropriate ways of learning and teaching ultimately floundered on the question of integration with the formal education system. Sign up for The India Forum Updates Get new articles delivered to your inbox every Friday as soon as fresh articles are published.

Policy Futures in Education (Sage journals), 2022

Over the past decade, scholarship on the Teach for America (TfA) programme and its global offshoo... more Over the past decade, scholarship on the Teach for America (TfA) programme and its global offshoots has highlighted its interlinkages with a range of neoliberal reforms in school education. This research has connected the programme with the rapid increase of privatisation in public school systems, the deprofessionalisation of school teaching and the introduction of an array of managerial reforms to streamline learning towards narrow market-driven outcomes. Examining Teach for All expands existing research to draw critical attention to the complex adaptations of the model across education systems in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania. Drawing on a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, the volume bridges education policy studies with frameworks from sociology of education and globalisation studies. It offers nuanced social and political insights into how the TfA model is translated within regional educational terrains focusing on varying processes of funding, governance and implementation. The key themes in the book are organised into four main sections. In the first section, the authors (Thomas, Rauschenberger and Crawford-Garrett) provide a comprehensive overview of the history and evolution of the model in the US, UK and the global Teach for All (TfAll) network. Based on the Peace Corps and other related public service volunteering initiatives, Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp began TfA in 1990 as an intervention to address teacher shortages in public school systems in the US. Over the years, the programme gained prominent corporate philanthropic support and was instrumental in shifting the gaze of school reform initiatives from larger systemic issues to localised concerns of teaching quality, school management and leadership. Its proximity to global corporate funders and malleable managerial template led to a partnership with London-based entrepreneur Brett Wigdortz who initiated the UK offshoot (Teach First) and co-founded the TfAll organisation in 2007. The next chapter delineates these affiliates in relation to broader discourses of neoliberalism and public education reforms in their respective countries. An important point that the authors raise through these discussions is the difficulty most researchers across countries face in gaining access to study the organisation and its work, as well as the limited public data on these affiliate programmes. In the cited instances where researchers have gained access, they have explored deeper questions on the nature and impact of the respective affiliate programmes. These pertinent concerns on researching TfAll affiliates highlight larger questions on the transparency of the corporate private sector and the accountability of private interventions working within under-resourced public school systems.

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education (Taylor & Francis), 2019

International Studies in Sociology of Education (Taylor & Francis), 2018

Economic and Political Weekly, 2009

Book chapters by Vidya Subramanian

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia, Global Education Systems, edited by Padma M. Sarangapani & Rekha Pappu (Springer), 2020

Globally and nationally, teachers and their work are key to realizing equitable, quality, and lif... more Globally and nationally, teachers and their work are key to realizing equitable, quality, and lifelong learning for all. Teachers are considered key determinants of education quality – playing a vital role in nation building and identity construction and providing meaningful learning to young children and youth – responsive to changing global and national economic, social, and cultural imperative. This recognition and increased attention on teachers and their work feature prominently in public and policy discourses. Yet very little attention has been paid to how teachers are framed and positioned in such discourses. It is this gap which this chapter seeks to address by considering the discourses that inflect and infuse teachers and their work in the public media and policy text across three countries of South Asia: Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The chapter maps out the common themes and ideas that frame teachers and their work in diverse national policy texts in the South Asian region, and specifically in the media, using discourse analysis. At the level of national policy, the chapter focuses on the comparative analysis of policy of the National Education Policy 2010 in Bangladesh, the draft National Education Policy in India 2019, and the National Education Policy 2009 and 2017 in Pakistan to argue that policy and popular media project contradictory, multiple, and contested statements of the work of teachers in the South Asian region, oscillating between portrayals of teachers as villains or saviors. Moreover, the work of teachers is increasingly subject to tightening regulations which challenge teacher professional identity and autonomy.

Teach for All Counter Narratives: International Perspectives on a Global Reform Movement, edited by T. Jameson Brewer, Kathleen deMarrais and Kelly L. McFaden (Peter Lang publishing), 2020

This chapter maps the development of the TFI programme against the backdrop of the complex landsc... more This chapter maps the development of the TFI programme against the backdrop of the complex landscape of formal teacher education in India. An important part of this chapter examines the key aspects of the TFI leadership model. Through in-depth interviews with two cohorts of TFI Fellows, I focus on how the programme connects school teaching to building leadership, which is increasingly being seen as the panacea for education reform.

Podcast by Vidya Subramanian

Pedagogy by Vidya Subramanian

Understory: Stories without a home (www.understory.in), 2022

This piece is a reflective response engaging with questions of pedagogy and the higher education ... more This piece is a reflective response engaging with questions of pedagogy and the higher education classroom. The response is part of a larger discussion around Ashwin Prabhu’s book: Classroom with a View: Notes from the Krishnamurti schools (https://www.understory.in/invitations/classroom-with-a-view-conversations/). It is part of a series initiated by Understory: Stories without a home (https://www.understory.in).