ABSTRACT
For more than a century now, prescribed textbooks occupy a central place in school education in India. The exam-centric education system confers the status of a sacrosanct artefact on the textbook. Textbooks are the primary source of any encounter with a printed word for millions of children from the marginalised communities. But a comprehensive body of research and scholarship shows that textbook also becomes a source of marginalisation of the most marginalised children. Conformity to prescribed textbooks by teachers compromises their academic autonomy and barely creates any opportunity of challenging the ways of dominance and subordination intrinsic to textbooks controlled directly or indirectly by the state. This chapter, on one hand, analyses some tendencies of marginalising created by textbooks of Marathi language from the western province of Maharashtra in India. On the other hand, it traces pedagogical practices of 11 teachers from across Maharashtra to understand their ways of subverting these tendencies of textbooks and offering classroom practices that are more inclusive and culturally sensitive from the point of view of marginalised children. These practices are clubbed into three groups: (i) using digital media to expand or energise paper-textbook so that authors and poets of texts can be directly connected, (ii) using an approach of equality of languages in the context of standard Marathi language and its local varieties, and (iii) creating familiar contexts beyond textbooks by involving children as authors so that double disadvantage of unfamiliar context in unfamiliar language can be combated. Through these simple but innovative and culturally sensitive ways, the teachers create an inclusive classroom with which children can organically connect, thus subverting the prescriptions of textbooks which, intentionally or unintentionally, push the marginalised children to periphery of learning. This chapter also argues for the need of further research to understand the impact of these strategies on learning achievement of marginalised children.
