Session Information
30 SES 07 C, Environmental exposure and ESE
Paper Session
Contribution
Context and Research Question:
Teachers in India are under tremendous pressure to constantly take on the burden of student success. This pressure is multiplied in a densely populated and competitive country such as India. As such, teachers are often directly held responsible for the shortcomings in student academic outcomes.
What is often overlooked is that there are many external factors that limit or restrict teachers' ability and agency to perform their work in a meaningful manner. While many factors such as policy (Datnow, 2012), curriculum (Priestley et al., 2012), and assessments (Poulton, 2020) have been studied in India and globally, one factor has consistently been ignored: weather-related school closures. In particular, extreme weather conditions that recur yearly, and are incrementally worsening.
In Delhi, extreme temperatures (cold and heat) every year leads to schools being closed for multiple days in January and May. Additionally, extreme weather exacerbates existing hazardous smog conditions in Delhi from the month of September through November (Basu, 2019); making in-person schooling untenable for weeks. Hence, in the context of this high-pressure education environment, coupled with weather-related repeated school closure, we ask the following research question: How have weather-related closures at schools impacted teachers' agency to work with students in Delhi, India?
Theoretical Framework:
While the concept of agency and more specifically, teacher agency has been discussed richly over the past decades, there have been a few different ways in which agency has been understood and utilized. While some have theorized that agency is an object that resides inside a person (Giddens, 1986; Bandura 2001), others have argued that it is the structures around the person that impact their agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). However, in the past few decades, the concept of agency as something ecological and to be achieved by interacting with the environment actively has taken prominence (Beista and Tedder, 2007). This paper uses a socio-cultural (Archer, 2000) and ecological approach (Beista and Tedder, 2007; Pantic and Florian, 2015) of agency, to unpack how teachers' agency might be restricted by contextual factors around them. More specifically, we use the ecological model put forward by Beista and Tedder (2007) to examine how the agency of private school teachers in India is impacted and mediated by school closures due to extreme weather conditions.
Method
Document Analysis: To calculate the number of days schools remained shut in Delhi due to extreme weather conditions, we carried out a thorough document analysis. Documents utilized for this source were policy documents, school memos, and local news articles from the area. Semi-Structured Interview: We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight school teachers from three private schools in Delhi. The three private schools selected for this study were purposely diverse. School A was a high-income private school. In comparison, Schools B and C were both middle-income to low-income private schools. Each interview was forty-five minutes long and focused on allowing teachers to highlight their classroom experiences over the past six months. In particular, teachers were asked about the challenges that they faced due to school closures (specifically around closures that were due to extreme weather conditions) and how that impacted their agency to work as teachers. Analysis: The interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. The analysis was carried out by utilizing a constant comparative method (Glasser, 1965) to surface overarching themes of challenges faced by teachers. Drawing from Charmaz (2008) the transcripts were first open-coded and then compared across interviews. Additionally, the documents were analyzed to display extra days that schools were shut.
Expected Outcomes
Through our qualitative analysis of the interviews, we saw four major themes emerging pertaining to how school closures due to extreme weather conditions restricted teacher agency: 1. Additional pressure on teachers by administration and parents Teachers expressed how absences in school days led to mounting pressure on them to finish their courses faster. This pressure was primarily exerted by the heads of departments/administrators and the parents of the students. 2. Lack of access to students during unplanned school closures Similar to results done by studies in the past (Themane and Theobejane, 2019), teachers spoke about how they felt restricted in their abilities to work with students when they did not have the resources/support to reach out to them. In instances where school closures were announced, teachers generally needed more time to plan on how to keep students engaged. 3. Lack of any systematic, structured planning from top management around these closures Teachers highlighted that most times, responses to these weather challenges/school closures were made on the spot by the government and/or the school administration leading to haphazard and confusing directions. Similar to other studies in the field (Datnow, 2012) this lack of clarity in policies seemed to lead to a negative impact on teachers’ agency. 4. More adverse impacts for lower-income school teachers One unfortunate but rather unsurprising finding was the differential impact based on the income levels of the schools. While teachers in school A were inconvenienced by these school closures, in general, they could shift online or plan for alternative classes more easily. Teachers from schools B and C faced a higher level of difficulty when trying to get their students to attend online classes and carve out time for additional classes during school time.
References
Archer, M. S. (2000). Being human: the problem of agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 1-26. Biesta, G. & Tedder, M. (2007). Agency and learning in the lifecourse: towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults, 39(2), 132149. Basu, M. (2019). The great smog of Delhi. Lung India: Official Organ of Indian Chest Society, 36(3), 239. Charmaz, K. (2008). Grounded theory as an emergent method. Handbook of emergent methods, 155, 172. Datnow, A. (2012). Teacher agency in educational reform: Lessons from social networks research. American journal of education, 119(1), 193-201. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency?. American journal of sociology, 103(4), 962-1023. Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration (Vol. 349). Univ of California Press. Pantić, N., & Florian, L. (2015). Developing teachers as agents of inclusion and social justice. Education Inquiry, 6(3), 27311. Poulton, P. (2020). Teacher agency in curriculum reform: The role of assessment in enabling and constraining primary teachers’ agency. Curriculum Perspectives, 40(1), 35-48. Priestley, M., Edwards, R., Priestley, A., & Miller, K. (2012). Teacher agency in curriculum making: Agents of change and spaces for manoeuvre. Curriculum inquiry, 42(2), 191-214. Themane, M., & Thobejane, H. R. (2019). Teachers as change agents in making teaching inclusive in some selected rural schools of Limpopo Province, South Africa: Implications for teacher education. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(4), 369-383.
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