Disciplining difference (or not)
Meeting on February 1, 2020
Readings: Totto-chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (pgs 1-10 and 19-21): the book is an autobiographical memoir recounting the experience of studying in an alternative school.
Preface (Being in Trouble by Shirley Steinberg) to Re-theorizing Discipline in Education: This book aims to reinvigorate thinking on ‘discipline’ in education by challenging the notions, foundations, and paradigms that underpin its use in policy and practice. It confronts the understanding of ‘discipline’ as purely repressive, and raises the possibility of enabling forms and conceptualizations of ‘discipline’ that challenge tokenistic avenues for students’ liberation and enhance students’ capacity for agency
3. Excerpts from Mothering a Muslim, Nazia Erum: this book presents accounts of bullying, negative stereotyping, and segregation of Muslim children within schooling contexts.
Our discussion primarily revolved around how we thought of ‘discipline’ in educational contexts: how it is informed by socio-cultural biases, how it tends to pathologize difference as deviance, and how it is frequently de-contextualised from a reflective understanding of the teaching-learning process.
Totto-chan provided a certain alternative model for pedagogic engagement with a child: an approach attuned to the particularities of the child, gently probing instead of imposing, trying to condition the child towards a self-realisation of the consequences of their own behaviour.
However, a few concerns were brought up:
a) that while a pedagogic method attuned to individual behavioural traits may be useful, the process of understanding the individual child is fraught with problems. The child may not transparently reveal information that the teacher can learn from--many children are, in fact, already performing what’s normatively expected of them. How does the teacher have access to the particular subjectivity of the child; how can individual differences be observed outside normative cultural and psychological frames?
b) the story, where Totto-chan is considered a difficult child in one school and creatively conditioned by a maverick teacher-principal in another school conveys how there needs to be an alternative school and an exceptional teacher to hone the potential of the child. We discussed three issues with such an assumption: that alternative schools are not necessarily accessible to a large section of people; that our enjoyment of the story is premised on the fantasy of such an exceptional situation, not necessarily rooted in an understanding of how this may be practically translated in other schools; and how the consequences of such a conditioning may mislead the child from practically understanding how social norms assign social power and might also entail a kind of narcissistic self-validation. One of the members made a point about how she studied in a school where they were taught English at a level higher than what’s expected at the state board level (or at least that was the dominant narrative perpetuated by the school)--and while writing the board exams, there was a pride assumed in having to consciously dumb down one’s answers
3. In contrast to the last point, we discussed how Shirley Steinberg’s essay offered a slightly different approach. While not agreeing with dominant disciplinary codes enforced in schooling/educational contexts, she made a point about how she could teach her own children to negotiate the system better--to be aware of what the disciplinary codes are (to not be naively affected by them) but at the same time, develop a critical disposition towards them. However, there were concerns raised about who has to play such a role: should it be teachers or parents or students themselves? Given how the existing disciplinary codes are internalized by teachers, students, and parents in different ways, how is it possible to open up a critical conversation on the same?
4. For teachers, it becomes difficult to stay calm, navigate noisy classrooms, and many are not aware of how to intervene in a situation where students may get bullied or negatively stereotyped. While teacher-education courses now incorporate reflection exercises, there needs to be more emphasis in helping teachers observe student behaviour/difference in a critical conversation with normative cultural/psychological frames. Also, given that existing disciplinary norms actively work to discourage ‘noise’ and aims to steer conversational energy towards more controlled ways of speaking, it throws up a conundrum about how to encourage active conversations within large classrooms--it becomes important to re-think norms of classroom sociality/civility in relation to pedagogic goals. While discussing Mothering a Muslim, we noted how it is important that teachers encourage cultural self-expression of various students (apart from actively combating negative stereotypes in the classroom), but the approach in the book seems to be heavily influenced by a liberal diversity management discourse: that everyone gets the opportunity to validly represent themselves, but it not clear whether that facilitates a critical conversation around themes of cultural identity and power. Teachers may not be adept at moderating conversations in situations of conflict, to be able to distribute power in the classroom--this needs to be taken up as a problem in teacher education courses too. Further, there might be existing biases of the ‘liberal’ institution/teacher where a certain degree of cultural expression is allowed (or there are norms underpinning what counts as acceptable cultural identity)--for example, a ‘good’ Muslim vs ‘bad’ Muslim binary might still operate in a setting where negative stereotypes are combated. However, it is definitely instructive for teachers to consciously recognise how certain biases get almost invisibly reproduced and reinforced within classrooms--and to reflect on how and why that happens to be able to mould their pedagogies. Parents, too, need to be made aware of the various social and disciplinary processes through which children are being conditioned--the relation between parenting and teaching discourse has to be probed towards this end.
For the next meeting (15 Feb, 3-5 PM, JNU), we decided that the broad theme will be ‘digital literacy’.

















