Against the background to the current Indian education system, presented in the overview, this paper argues for a necessary complementarity between the education of the child and building the agency of teachers which has been missed in both educational policy and practice. An understanding that the spirit of the Right to Education Act (2009) cannot be implemented without teacher empowerment is slowly finding policy recognition. In order to revive our state school system of education, and facilitate larger goals of social and gender justice and equity, it is important that we enable school teachers to reshape the boundaries of curriculum, teaching and learning and redefine the professional concerns of their own community – providing a plural, inclusive and critical environment in which the goals of quality education can be realised. Teacher agency needs to be viewed in a frame that moves beyond the conventional notion of acting with willingness and the capacity for choice and self-determination (Applebaum, 2004). Scholars for instance, have theorised agency as productive power which involves resistance to authority (Butler, 1999/90) as much as proactive building of communities leading to social change (Young, 1990), where agency refers to ‘the socially constituted capacity to act’ (Barker and Willis, 2008) and enabling agency is intimately tied to principles of democracy (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2013). To achieve this, regimes of teacher education that foster norms of ‘teacher-as-obedient-technician’ will need to be challenged. Well-crafted pre-service programmes of teacher education can enable ‘self-constitution’ as a potent force that can provide teachers the opportunity to interrogate their existing roles, identity and position in society which, as argued by Pignatelli (1993), is ‘part of the larger project of democratic culture’. Developing the agency of teachers necessarily requires a series of structural reforms, beginning with the institution of mechanisms to draw linkages between elementary schools and centres of higher education. A multi and inter-disciplinary learning environment recommended by the Justice Verma Commission (2012) for preparing school teachers indicates developing a culture of learning that enables student interaction with multiple disciplines through the availability of diverse faculty and through an engagement with a curriculum that is inter-disciplinary in nature. This paper will present narratives of teachers who have been deliberatively prepared to engage with the complexities of diverse social and economic realities. The narratives highlight the need to subvert processes that encumber the intellectual agency of teachers within the challenges of a market-based economy.

Barker and Willis, 2008 Butler, 1999/90) Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2013 Pignatelli (1993) Right to Education Act (2009) Young, 1990