Teachers

This paper examines the experiences of Anglo-Indian women teaching in Bengaluru’s English medium private schools to understand how they negotiate professional constraints by drawing on Diane Reay’s feminist extension of Pierre Bourdieu’s “forms of capital.” It argues that her concept of “emotional capital” can be used to explain how interviewees attempt to overcome their limited cultural and social capital. We also suggest that Arlie Hochschild’s notion of “emotional labour,” distinct from Reay’s emotional capital, when deployed alongside the latter, highlights the complex negotiations that interviewees undertake. In doing so, this work attempts to contribute a minority perspective to research on schoolteachers’ lives. In the process, it also seeks to extend emotional capital (a concept Reay deployed to explain mothers’ investment in their children) to understand women’s professional experiences.

Over the past one month, the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University, with the JNU Teachers’ Association standing in solidarity, have built a mass movement against the proposed hike in hostel charges, as they realise that what is at stake essentially is the very idea of public-funded higher education.

The brutal rape and killing of Jisha, a Dalit law student in Kerala on 28 April 2016, leads to the question of what the method is to prevent the many other “Jishas-in-waiting,” and whether both teachers and students on campus can put their heads together to build a system of “student community-caring” so that another woman student does not meet a similar fate.

Recruitment of Teachers in Universities A Proposal H SRIKANTH In the debate in EPW on the relevance of UGC-NET, the critics (K M Seethi, June 3, A K Bagchi July 29 and Sajid Ibrahim October 7, 2000) have examined how the external actors like the UGC, the central government, the Hindutva forces, etc, have been facilitating the recruitment of not-so-deserving candidates as teachers in the universities. While the points they have raised are not without merit, I feel they have given very little attention to the actual processes that determine the recruitment of teachers in Indian universities. The NET model is no doubt elitist in its approach, but the earlier system of recruitment was no better. There is a need to ensure that our opposition to the anti-people educational policies of the government does not end up as endorsement of all that is polluted and rotten in the university system.

The paper explores the political economy factors that influenced the evolution of educational institutions and shaped the legislation that now governs the education sector in UP. The study focuses on the extent of and reasons for teachers' participation in politics, the evolution and activities of their unions, the size of their representation in the state legislature and the link between these and other factors such as the enactment of particular education acts in UP, teacher salaries and appointments, and the extent of centralisation in the management of schools. It attempts to draw out implications for the functioning of schools. The first part of this paper looked at the role of teacher's associations and their evolution as a powerful political pressure group in UP. The second part now analyses the impact the teacher's associations have had on the system of finances in UP, and its impact on general educational levels in the state. Even as strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins in support of more emoluments and benefits have become powerful tools in the hands of these associations, schools see a large degree of absenteeism and apathy towards students, while the state government remains unable to meet non-salary expenditure. [The paper has been published in two parts, this being the second part. The first part appeared last week.]