Reimagining Education for Equity

Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) via Coursera

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Details

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

20 hours 38 minutes
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Intermediate
Subtitles

English

Found in

Overview

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This self-paced course examines how India's education system sustains multiple forms of inequalities, and equips teachers, administrators, and policymakers with frameworks and tools for transformation towards a more just, equitable, and sustainable society. The Indian education system faces varied challenges with issues of access, teaching-learning environments, curriculum design, and teacher preparation. As of academic year 2024–25, the system reaches 250 million students across 1.5 million schools, while also systematically reproducing inequalities of caste, class, and gender. Reimagining Education for Equity, derived from the results of a four-year, four-country research programme ‘Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures’ or TESF, examines how education policy and practice reproduce social hierarchies, many among them products of India’s colonial past. Central to this examination is a critique of meritocracy—interrogating how social mobility is imagined within education systems, how power operates between privileged and disadvantaged groups in learning spaces, and how inequality manifests in a system that positions education as a tool for equalisation. Across seven modules, the course centres the lived experiences of children, and engages with the progression of the Right to Education (RTE) act in safeguarding their agency and well-being. It also positions the education of teachers as foundational to any improvements in curriculum and pedagogy, and facilitates their engagement with complex ideas relating to education and social justice to make teaching and learning more equitable. You should enrol, if you are: • An educator, or a student-teacher • A school administrator • An education policymaker • A development practitioner working in or around formal education systems Why you should enrol: The course offers insights into the ways in which our education system is continually being shaped by historical, cultural, social, economic, and political factors, and how this impacts the way children learn and teachers teach in the classrooms. By the end of this course, you will: • Be able to trace India's education policy trajectory and its continued impact on schools and teachers • Know what children's rights mean in practice, and develop a sensitive and socially responsible lens to view their social and material conditions • Recognise how curriculum and pedagogy can act as tools for inclusion and social justice • Understand what environmentally and socially just societies require of their education systems

Syllabus

Welcome to the Course

In this introductory module, you will learn a few important details about the course, including the objectives of this course, who the instructors and the course team are, as well as important information to navigate the course. You will also find a link to a Pre-Course Survey – please do fill this as it will help us get to know you better and prepare the course accordingly.

Module 1: Education Aims, Policy and Teachers: Evolution of Perspective, Measures, and Impact

In this module, you’ll become familiar with the development of the education system from Colonial India to Independent India and the continued impact of policy trajectories on school and teacher education. You will also have the opportunity to reflect on the potential role of teachers in achieving high-quality education.

Module 2: Childhood, Child, Curriculum, and Pedagogy: Evolution of Perspective, Practice, and Challenges

By the end of this module, you would develop some insight into how the concept of childhood evolved and how this understanding is critical to designing school curriculum and pedagogy. Engaging with the progression of the Right to Education Act would help in understanding how children’s rights are sought to be met in a plural and hierarchised society and how the role and accountability of the state is critical in safeguarding children's rights and their well-being.

Module 3: Teachers, Curriculum, and Pedagogy: Subject Content, Context and Interdisciplinarity

This module helps you recognise children as epistemic entities and the importance of encouraging children’s voice and agency in achieving their true potential. This module will assist you in cultivating capacities and dispositions to appreciate the diversity of children’s backgrounds and to integrate their lived experiences in the teaching-learning process.

Module 4: Education and Inclusion: Identity, Caste, Inequality, and Education

In this module, you will develop tools and capacities to understand, engage with and integrate diverse lived experiences of students in the teaching and learning process. You will be able to understand how formal schooling processes, communities, larger social and political contexts facilitate or hinder the inclusion of children in classrooms.You would also engage with ideas of decolonising school curriculum as part of a wider project of ‘decoloniality’ which implies dismantling relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that tend to reproduce hierarchies based on caste, gender, class, community, and region.

Module 5: Gender, School, and Society: Perspective in Curricula, Pedagogy, and Educational Arrangements

This module of the course offers you opportunities to reflect upon the nuanced and deep influence that socio-cultural structures of class, caste, and community have on gender and how classroom pedagogy can be reinvented to equip teachers to become sensitive and socially responsive to the unequal nature of gender and to seek transformative pedagogies.

Course Assessment and Conclusion

In this final module, you will get the opportunity to check your understanding of all that you've learnt so far with the graded assessment in the form of a multiple-choice questionnaire. You will also hear from our instructors on what they hope the ideal key takeaways are for you from this course. Finally, please fill in the Post-course Survey – this will help us understand your journey during the course and improve it to make learning more meaningful.