Orientation

While we describe our individual motivations on the about page, our collective is also theoretically motivated by studying learning in contexts outside “the west” to deepen our understandings of what, how, when, and why people learn (Members of SALSRC, 2021). Situating ourselves in a long tradition of anti-oppressive work by critical scholars and activists, we are explicitly animated by an equity and justice frame. This means that (a) we understand social life to hold structures that stratify and oppress; (b) we attend to these structures as relevant to making sense of learning; and (c) we believe education should work to mitigate and undo these oppressive social structures. We position Manthan as an intervention into the universalising of learning theory and design that is largely developed in so-called “WEIRD” nations–those that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich et al., 2010). This project is part of a larger movement of transnational and multicontextual solidarity across “non-WEIRD” contexts (e.g., nations, colonies, regions as well as communities, Tribes, and peoples), particularly with regard to equitable teaching and learning (Tsovaltzi et al., 2022). Thus, our goal here is less to “bring India to the table” and more to participate in this larger movement. But to be clear, simply looking outside “the west” is not an equity project in and of itself. Doing so uncritically can inadvertently amplify oppressive structures –such as jingoism, casteism, colonial projects, and so on –under the guise of justice. Instead, in this project we value plurality, dialogue, and contextual specificity within our commitment to social justice. Thus, Manthan does not seek to advance a single, unproblematic “Indian way of knowing.” Rather, we surface multiple voices and a great many ways of thinking, some of which can help us unravel particular social injustices.

Approach

We began our process by reaching out to scholars and practitioners based in India that would be relevant to the learning sciences as it exists, as well as those who could push and expand our understanding in and of the learning sciences. Early on, our main approach was “snowballing” — that is, asking our contacts, networks, and interviewees to point us towards potential new interviewees. Here, we appreciated and built on our existing relationships within the South Asian Learning Sciences Research Collective. 

However, we quickly realised the impossibility of being exhaustive. We came to understand the futility of trying to build a comprehensive, “representative” sample of people and work relevant to the learning sciences in India; there was simply no way to “represent” the complex, diverse peoples that comprise (historical and contemporary) India and the Indian Diaspora. Furthermore, this project began just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which heavily affected our efforts. Our interviewees, and us too, faced the difficulties and challenges of the pandemic. These circumstances together prompted us to shift our focus from structured interviews to dialogical, story-telling, and inherently incomplete interviews (see next section, “Transitions in Process”). 

Our procedure, overall, involved listing many possible interviewees. Over 100 names were floated! We considered dimensions such as the potential interviewees’ background, area of research, positionality, and geographical contexts. We explicitly sought out perspectives from underrepresented groups and sought to maximise the diversity of our interviewee pool as best we could. Once we had selected someone as a potential interviewee, we reached out to them, explaining our project and why we had wanted to talk to them specifically. If they agreed to an interview, we next familiarise ourselves with the interviewee’s work and wrote questions specific to their background that might be interesting to our audience and might elicit stories about education research and practice in India. Our interviewees had the opportunity to collaboratively modify the questions in a back-and-forth conversation.

Once the interview was completed, we transcribed it. We asked participants to reflect on the interview and transcript, as well as provide a biography, so that they could approve the final website copy. Using grant funding from ISLS, each participant was paid an honorarium for their participation if desired. 

Transitions in Process

The project has entailed many transitions for us, as researchers, and our collective vision of the project. At first, we created a semi-structured interview protocol that was refined after a couple of pilot interviews. We had devised separate questions for people who identified as researchers, academics, or practitioners, but used variants of the same protocol for each interview. 

However, as the project progressed, the conversations led us to question this standardised format, and the investigative approach began to feel extractive in nature. We realised that our questions were sometimes stifling, rather than inviting, our interviewers to elaborate, whereas when we had a more dialogical conversation, the discussion felt better and more generative. This prompted a shift in approach in which we developed questions and comments tailored to the specific background of each person being interviewed. This in turn caused our mental categories of researcher/ academic/ practitioner to blur as well. 

Thus, we found ourselves embracing the complex intersectionalities and identities contributing to the work of each interviewee. The interviews themselves began to look like invitations for further dialogues and research, rather than a finished ‘deliverable’ in a museum for display only. This incompleteness became a generative platform to imagine newer questions and perspectives, rather than signalling a set directionality to the respective narratives.  

Conclusion and New Ideas

Despite the eclectic range of interviews in this project, it hardly captures the complex and varied dimensions of learning and equity-related issues in India. To assume anything else would be a sign of hubris. This project was meant to acknowledge and emphasise the need to move beyond Western contexts, and beyond deficit-oriented theories of teaching and learning in the learning sciences. Our effort is an invitation to other learning sciences scholars and researchers from related disciplines to develop new methodologies, theories, and perspectives to enrich the field based on multiple ways of knowing, being, and becoming. Rather than summarising all that surfaced across these many varied interviews, we invite you to explore the website and engage with the voices of our interviewees directly. In doing so, we hope it becomes easier to envision what the field of the learning sciences will become by embracing plural epistemologies and critical dialogues across contexts.