When teachers take notice of the schoolscape: a Q method study of teacher perception of schoolscape of Indigenous Tribal Minority (ITM) schools of Chhattisgarh, India

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Indian Constitution and the Directive Principles for State Policy (DPSP) aspire that individual states with Indigenous Tribal Minority (ITM) populations take special care to promote education and economic interests of the ITM communities. Despite Art 350(a) which explicitly guarantees (only) the ITM child education in its mother-tongue, the ITM child finds itself in an institutional space that operationalises the monolingual mindset in the literacy-semiotic environment, most obvious of which is the schoolscape. Educational programmes designed for the ITM child in these schools proceduralise institutional mechanisms that subscribe to specific orientations to languages (and political disposition to the notion of linguistic accommodation – both of which are visibilised in the schoolscape. Teachers, as primary implementers of the educational programme, then, are expected to calibrate their pedagogies for the child within the ITM child’s linguistic environment. Therefore, this study explored teachers’ understanding and interpretation of the signage of the ITM child’s schoolscape. Using the Q-method approach, teacher subjectivities associated with the schoolscape reveal four ways of understanding the schoolscape: the pedagogic, the reductive, the homogenising and the silencing effect of the schoolscape.