Category Archives: Winter Academy

Schooling Women: Debates on Education in the United Provinces (1854-1930)

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Preeti.

Preeti is presently a PhD research scholar at Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As a member of the Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India”, she is working on “Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor – Between the State and Private Actors: Education Policy in India since the Nineteenth Century”.

This doctoral research is focusing on the school education of women (especially of poor and the underprivileged members among the Hindus, and comparison would be made with other communities) in the United Provinces between 1854 and 1930. The present work is confined to the intervening period when the formalization of girls’ education was being mapped out, institutionalized and debated as well. It will examine not only the governmental initiatives, particularly those aimed at the poor and marginalized communities, but also private and missionary efforts, early nationalist efforts, the reach of religious institutions and some of the nascent efforts made by women themselves to assist in the development and growth of women’s education more generally. Why did women’s education, and the education of the poor among them, become a concern of the colonial government at all? What were the social and economic structures which may have thwarted or stimulated the necessity for female education? Comparisons will be made between boys’ and girls’ education through debates regarding the curriculum, funding, special schools or co-education, compulsory education and the creation of demand of female education through the grant of privileges.

Against the socio-cultural environment of nineteenth and early twentieth century, this work is an attempt to explore women’s education in United Provinces. One thing that needs to be remembered is that the women being talked about here are the middle class women, as most writings on education are silent on the question of the education of rural and non-elite women. Female education was limited to middle class women during the late nineteenth century and that is the focus of scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, J. Devika, and Rosalind O’ Hanlon. These scholars have not explored the state of learning among the poor classes or low caste women. This work would try to explore caste and class differentiation in the field of women’s education. This can be explored through Missionary accounts of their assessment of and contribution to the field of women’s education.

Inequalities and the Production of New Cultural Forms at Government Secondary Schools in Kolkata, India

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Maya Buser De.

Maya Buser De is a PhD student at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. She works on the reproduction of existing inequalities and the production of new cultural forms by the students at government secondary schools in the megacity of Kolkata.

Indian cities like Kolkata are changing rapidly under the influence of globalization. Economic differences in the population have become more evident, not only in terms of the urban landscape but also in the educational sector. Elite and middle class students have moved to private schools, while government schools mostly cater to students from poor and marginalized backgrounds. Nevertheless, the efforts towards the universalization of primary education have paid off in many parts of the country, even though its quality often remains a concern. On the other hand, secondary schools have not yet received much attention, neither from the authorities nor from the academic community. However, in an increasingly competitive job market they are becoming more and more important for the future of youth from unprivileged backgrounds.

Through a multisite case study, this project attempts to understand how existing inequalities of caste, class and gender are reproduced in government secondary schools in Kolkata and at the same time how students produce new cultural forms to contest and creatively engage with them. This study relies on an approach in critical education theory, with a focus on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of power relations in and around the school, parallel to an intersectionality approach to inequalities. Moreover, it employs the concept of cultural production, derived from cultural studies, as theoretical framework to understand the agency of students in contesting inequalities in the school environment.

Who Studies What, Where and Why? Systemic Inequalities beyond Affirmative Action Policies in Indian Higher Education

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by V. Kalyan Shankar.

V. Kalyan Shankar is ICSSR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics, University of Pune (India). His doctoral research was based on the emergence and deepening of inter-country value-addition chains among select Southeast Asian economies.

In the delivery systems of higher education in India, there has been an attempt to counter social inequalities through implementing a system of affirmative action policies – implying positive discrimination – in favor of the disadvantaged. Lack of access to education is posited as a problem of those left out from the delivery systems, of inadequate representation and participation of certain social groups. The state intervention in countering underrepresentation has been through the constitutional provisions for reservations. The debates surrounding reservations and their implementation have been fought on several turfs. In addition to the more conspicuous divide of affirmative action versus meritocracy, academic enquiries have probed into reservations on caste versus class grounds, on the need for expanding the umbrella of reservations to a wider segment of the society and more recently, on the inadequacy and irrelevance of affirmative action once the turf changes from academics to employment.

Even as these debates are running their course, what about the delivery systems of education, the terrain on which the edifice of reservations is built? While socio-economic backgrounds do influence individual participation in education, can differentiated access to education be attributed solely to them? Can the systems be really termed fair in their attempt at creating equality of access? It needs to be recognized that the systems themselves generate their own set of embodied institutional distortions that get superimposed over and above socio-economic inequalities. This project seeks to explore the systemic dimensions of inequality in Indian education. This work has been centered on the distortions resulting from structural overlaps in the delivery systems and the restriction of choices in higher education based on the medium of instruction in schooling.

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Refugee Settlements and the Role of Education in Post-Partition West Bengal

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta.

Kaustubh Mani Sengupta joined the Max Weber Stiftung Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” after finishing his PhD in 2013. In his current project, he is looking at the ways West Bengal refugees negotiated with the post-colonial situation and the role of education in their lives.

The project studies the role of education and school in the lives of the refugees who settled in West Bengal after the partition of British India in 1947. Most of the early refugees from East Bengal belonged to the upper or middle caste groups–the bhadraloks. They tended to gravitate towards the urban centres, more specifically to Calcutta. An acute housing crisis forced a majority of them to forcibly occupy barracks and empty tracts of lands and to build up squatter colonies there. After securing the basic necessity of life, the members of the colony would look to establish a school, as they regarded education as the utmost important element for the children of refugee population to survive in the alien land. This was a common pattern without any exception – either a particular colony had a school for itself or a few colonies collectively would develop a school. The study explores the possible reasons behind the importance that education had among the refugees – was it their bhadralok baggage that made them invest their capital, labour and time in developing neighbourhood schools; or was educating their children necessary to ensure a job in the foreign land? Also, what were the cultural significances of building up a school in a colony, where did the money come from, who taught in these schools and what were their relations with the government sanctioned education board?

The bhadralok colony-dwellers formed only a section of the refugee population. Among the migrants from East Pakistan, there were poor cultivators, artisans, petty traders and others. They lacked the minimum means necessary for setting up squatter colonies. They took refuge in the government camps. These camps had government-run schools and training centres. The camp population was often transitory in nature as the government tried to rehabilitate the inhabitants somewhere permanently. Did the curricula in these schools and centres take into account the possible temporariness of the population? Often the pupils in these schools were first-generation school-goers – how did the primary education mould their life-cycles, what were the drop-out rates and how important was the vocational training among the downtrodden refugees – these are some of the issues that the project will address.

In brief, the project critically interrogates the role of education in the development of a group of people who were trying to carve out a niche for themselves in a new country. The post-partition period was a critical phase in the biography of the new nation as well. The refugees as well as the government, both were trying to work out a way to move ahead, leaving behind the tumultuous last few years. The broad sets of sources for this study include various government reports, school magazines and commemorative volumes, refugee memoirs and oral narratives.

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Transmission of Learning in Ilorin: A History of Islamic Education 1897-2012

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Sakariyau Alabi Aliyu.

Sakariyau Alabi Aliyu is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for History at the University of Leiden (Netherlands). His research interests include muslim education (particularly in the Nigerian context), Nigerian intellectual history and the philosophy of history.

Established as a citadel of Islam in the nineteenth century, Ilorin came under the colonial hegemony of the British at the end of the nineteenth century. Thenceforth the history of Islamic education became an unending dynamic of engagement with the challenges that the rival system of Western education has posed to Islamic education. Starting in the colonial period within Ilorin and lasting into the early decades of independence, also from outside Ilorin, the ulama responded to this challenge mainly in three ways, corresponding to schools of thought of Islamic education in Ilorin.

First, there is the tolerant Adabiyyah School favoring western education in conjunction with Islamic education, then there is the Zumratu Muminina (makondoro) school that was strictly against western education. The third school, Markaziyya, privileged Arabic/Islamic education as a standalone system; it tolerated Western education only independent from the Islamic system. From the colonial period thenceforth Islamic education followed this trifurcate system to a greater or lesser extent, even when a scholar does not categorically belong to any of these schools.

Although the ultimate aim of a positive hereafter for Islamic education, against material benefit, plays a crucial role in limiting the material strength of the system, this thesis argues that society’s attitude towards the system, absence of state support and the financial wherewithal unlike the Western system has been a major hindrance to progress in the system. Despite this limited capacity the scholars have been unrelenting, continuously adapting the system to the needs of the society, for example by transforming of the traditional Quranic schools into madaris from the colonial period, reforming the methods, curriculum and routes to be followed to running of the two systems with their madaris (sing. madrasah), especially since the government withdrawal from the provision of Western education from the late twentieth century. More than is credited to them the scholars have actually contributed to the development of western education even as the attention given to the Western system of education by the government and the society has been detrimental to its own development.

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Marketization, Managerialism and School Reforms: A Study of Public-Private Partnerships in Elementary Education in Delhi

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Vidya K.S.

Vidya K.S. joined the Max Weber Stiftung Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” in 2014. She is a doctoral student at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, where she works on the interaction between global and national discourses of privatisation in school.

Through the late 1970s, there was a fundamental repositioning of education in relation to the nation-state, most notably in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Part of larger processes of economic reforms initiated by New Right governments in these countries, a central feature of this trend was the move to “disempower centralized educational bureaucracies and create in their place devolved systems of schooling, entailing significant degrees of institutional autonomy and a variety of forms of school based management and administration” (Whitty 1997: 299). These reforms were advocated with the view of addressing the rising discourse of falling educational standards in public schools in these countries that blamed teachers and poor school management (Whitty 1997, Helsby 1999, Connell 2009, Maguire 2010).

In the run up to the reforms, various facets of the school came under public scrutiny. These included forms of management, kinds of curriculum, teaching and learning transactions and the structures of labour hierarchies within schools and across school administration boards. The project of educational reform led to new forms of partnerships between the state and the private sector. Principles of public management emphasising performance and outcomes popular in the corporate industrial sector were imported as alleviatory measures into the public school system. Increasingly, these typologies of reform are being imported into later developing countries, including India, as effective measures of repairing an increasingly maligned public school system. The modes through which these discourses of reform are interfacing with educational reforms in the context of a postcolonial country such as India present a complex picture today.

The focus of this research study is to examine these broader global discourses of reform and the complex nature of this interface with a heterogeneous government schooling system in India. The consequent changes that these reforms impose on the school will be examined through the lens of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) that are one of the key modes through which markets are entering elementary education in the country. Teacher training programs are an emerging form of PPP that are seen as central to improving school outcomes. Apart from a survey of the range and nature of teacher training PPPs, the study will examine the ‘Teach for India’ (TFI) intervention, one significant PPP in teacher training, that seeks to address educational inequity in teaching-learning transactions in the classroom.

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Educational & Professional Status of Scheduled Castes/Tribes: Attainment & Challenges

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Bharat Chandra Rout

Bharat Chandra Rout submitted his doctoral thesis on social justice and higher education in the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi. Currently he is a research fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and assistant editor of the journal ‘College Post’, a quarterly journal of the Indian Colleges Forum.

Scheduled Castes [SC] and Scheduled Tribes [ST] constitute around one-fourth of the total population of India. Both of these communities are considered as deprived and exploited for various reasons. While SCs were (and even now are) subjected to discrimination and marginalization through the processes of untouchability and rigid caste practices, STs were deprived and exploited because of their socio-cultural and geographical isolation in Indian society. The caste system presupposes a form of social stratification in which people in the society are divided into different ‘strata’. The essential characteristics of a caste-based division of society into different hierarchical caste groups are, amongst others, the rigid occupational entitlements by birth, rigid caste identity based on endogamy and a lack of social mobility. The dominant and depressed caste groups in India are characterized by the differential access to societal opportunities and entitlements, social mobility and larger social/public resources. It is the lower strata of the society, particularly that of SCs and STs, to which social opportunities and economic facilities have long been denied. Access to public resources, institutions and even to basic needs were structurally guided by the system of social stratification. In other words, the caste system legitimized the forms and contours of neglect and deprivation and wilfully rationalized marginalization and discrimination of SCs and STs.

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Recasting the Self: Missionaries and the Education of the Poor in Kerala (1854-1956)

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Divya Kannan.

Divya Kannan is currently pursuing her PhD in Modern Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her study seeks to examine the history of education and discourses on poverty in the late 19th and  20th century Kerala, particularly amongst so-called lower caste groups.

The history of education in India is relatively a new field of research compared to its counterparts in sociology and psychology. Although, there have been studies on the system of modern education in the country from the 19th century onwards, most debates have tended to look at policy shifts. These can be broadly classified into two categories. One category of research comprises chronological histories of Indian education, detailing major policy shifts and the impact of western education on Indian society and polity. This group has argued within the simplistic framework of impact-response of the benefits of English education for India. One of the debates which has occupied scholarly attention in this regard has been the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy of the 1830s. Another loosely defined category, particularly in the post-independence period, has mined rich sources (albeit a majority of them official) to understand the trajectory of schooling in colonial India by looking at aspects of technical, vocational and mass education. The historical study of education has moved beyond the noting of enrolment figures towards assessing the role of education in shaping political contexts and social relationships. Questions of inequality, poverty, discrimination, assertion, empowerment and politicization have come to the forefront of new research on education.

Despite their evangelical agenda, mission schools became an important factor in local societies by enabling formal schooling opportunities to hitherto excluded groups. These mission schools provided instruction in the three Rs as well as subjects such as history, geography, elementary science and basic vocational training. For labouring populations, this opened up new opportunities, albeit limited, to develop new modes of expression, participation in the literate public sphere and to aspire for social mobility through new jobs. Missionary schooling, particularly for Christian converts also had a dual objective. European protestant missionaries aimed at moulding a new sense of self amongst their converts by attempting to break down caste markers. Education was the domain to introduce new habits, patterns of work, social organisation, gender roles and language for Christian converts.

It is this aspect of forging a new ‘individual’ that characteristically marks the project of schooling the poor in colonial India. It can be argued that it was a ‘double civilizing mission’ on the part of European missionaries and colonial government.  On the one hand, in tune with the colonial idea of a civilizing mission for Indians, as a whole, and on the other, ‘the civilizing of the lower caste/classes’ in particular.  In villages, missionaries opened schools for marginalised groups, and vernacular instruction was often provided only up to the elementary level, owing to financial constraints, among other reasons. They, however, actively engaged in the secondary and higher education in the towns, chiefly aimed at attracting the upper castes/classes and providing an English education which many wanted to gain government employment. This gulf in the educational provision tended to perpetuate existing social divisions. This research seeks to examine these overlapping motives by directing the historian’s lens to the education of the poor in the late 19th and 20th century Kerala, in south-western India.

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Higher Education and Profit Logic in the Education System. Social Consequences of the Expansion of Low-cost-private-universities in Peru

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Carmela Chávez.

Carmela Chávez is a researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Catòlica del Peru (PUCP) and is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology. She is interested in the relationship between state and society and the development of citizenship, particularly in Peru’s post-conflict context of democratic consolidation.

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Education Protests (photo: Quetzal-Leipzig.de)

This project explores the changes in higher education in Peru since the neoliberal economic reforms during the nineties, especially in the offer of low-cost-private universities. My hypothesis is that those changes, related with organizational and academic changes, have been part of a bigger social change in which either university students or investors are part of a new social middle class that values higher education as a private good for social mobility. Because of that, all the university system has changed and a new institutionalism has arrived related with education. These new universities have developed in a completely different way to traditional universities and have created new institutional models in terms of organization-administration, the organization of the academic community and mechanisms for student participation within the university community.

Over the last 20 years, the major change to have affected Peruvian universities has been the rise and dominance of the private university. Today, in 2014, there are 140 universities in Peru, out of which 64% are private universities and more than half are profit driven. The majority of these are run as businesses and cost less to attend than their traditional counterparts. They are profit making universities that are being set up and promoted by the so called new educational businesses (who often own other pre-school centers, schools, technical colleges, etc.), important national and international corporations and even political leaders from national political parties.

There is a new type of university student who have high expectations for achieving social ascendency via higher education, but limited capacities for competing at an academic level and social restrictions (higher standards required in entrance exams, agreements signed with first class schools, language proficiency as a prerequisite for completing studies, etc.) which, in turn, means low cost, private universities bring down their standards of quality to allow for the admission and continuation of their university students. However, there are serious doubts about the quality of this higher education and the medium-term consequences of this in terms of how these new professionals will then access a labor market that is constantly more and more competitive and demanding. Within this context, it is important to study the transformation of the private university as a key institution for preparing new generations of young professionals and for developing a new type of educational institution. Underlying this question is the debate over whether or not higher education is a public good or a private exchangeable good.

 

Educational Governance and Inequality in Higher Education: The Case of the University for Development Studies (UDS) in Ghana

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Jane-Frances Lobnibe.

Jane-Frances Lobnibe is a lecturer at the University for Development Studies, Ghana. Her research interests center on globalization and international education, diversity and social justice, gender relations, ecofeminism and sustainability.

In 1992, the University for Development Studies (UDS) was established with a mandate to increase higher education access for students in deprived rural regions of the country and northern Ghana in particular. As the first higher educational institution in the northern part of the country, the siting of the university campuses in three regions of northern Ghana serves in part to address the structural inequalities brought about by both colonial and post-colonial development policies as well as helps to address issues of access and affordability to bridge the human development gap between northern Ghana and the rest of the country. After twenty years of its existence, how far has this pro poor university fulfilled the socio-economic and equity imperatives of the four northernmost regions? This question needs to be addressed  in the context of contemporary research on structural inequalities in higher education that concentrate on conceptualizations that locate the politics of governance in processes that include or exclude certain groups from participation, representation and access  to educational and social practices.

This paper draws on interviews conducted with university administrators, and an analysis of enrollment trends and profiles of the students admitted into programs of two major faculties (school of Medicine and Agriculture) to assess UDS’ role in addressing educational inequality in the country within the framework of national accreditation standards and university policies. It attempts to unearth the silences of UDS governance that include/exclude social actors, perpetuating the very inequality it is purported to address. It will examine the extent to which the potentially equalizing effects of education have been ordered by the national accreditation board and UDS’ governance, and the implications for students enrolling from the deprived regions. The paper contends that the university has paid little attention to issues of access and representation of groups of social actors, but has rather adopted the narratives and production of images and principles that have historically been used to exclude the very groups from higher education participation for which it was established. It further argues that attempts to correct inequalities in higher education created by British colonial and post-colonial development policies cannot be done without engaging and confronting the very mechanisms and structures that have created the divide. To live up to its mandate UDS will have to rethink its governance principles as well as the narratives and images that are used to qualify or disqualify specific individuals from entrance.

 

Hauptschüler. The Role of Education in Exclusion Processes in Germany

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Stefan Wellgraf.

Stefan Wellgraf obtained his PhD from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. His dissertation dealt with problems of exclusion in Berlin, Germany. In 2015, he will start a research project on the affective dimension of exclusion.

The German terms “Hauptschule” and “Hauptschüler”, loosely translated as general secondary school and its students, are associated with a range of negative associations. Consequently, the learning conditions at “Hauptschulen” have become increasingly problematic and reputation of those schools has deteriorated. Education plays a crucial role in this processes. In German, the term “Bildung” has a double connotation: On the one hand, it stands for an ideal of self-development, for the deployment of human capacities and for a transformation of the relations to oneself, to others and to the world. This ideal of “Bildung” can be traced back to German Idealism around 1800 and was therefore often regarded as a specifically German interpretation of “Bildung”. On the other hand, there is an idea of “Bildung” focusing more on the acquisition of those skills and certificates which promise economic benefits. This tendency has often been linked to an “American” or “neoliberal” model of education. Both models were never neatly separated, but coexisted – both in Germany and in the USA – in diverse and historically changing constellations. Taking both sides into account nevertheless helps to understand contemporary forms of exclusion in German “Hauptschulen” and reactions to them by “Hauptschüler”. The problem of the “Hauptschule” is that it cannot live up to either of the two versions of “Bildung” and has instead become an institution of only negative selection. A transregional perspective could help to compare these phenomena and situate them in a global context of historic and contemporary politics of education and labor. The role of the state as well as transregional processes of neoliberalization will come into focus from this perspective. Such a view is particularly relevant, given that the majority of “Hauptschüler” in Berlin are migrants. In a way, they transform the schools into transnational spaces from below.

Social Origin and Inequality of Opportunities in Colombia: Analysis of Educational Achievement and Occupational Attainment among University Graduates

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Andrea Cuenca Hernández.

Andrea Cuenca is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Education, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In her dissertation, she examines how socio-demographic factors, institutions and contexts influence educational achievement and occupational success.

This doctoral project analyzes the impact of social origins (SO) on educational achievement and occupational attainment of higher education (HE) graduates in Colombia. The questions addressed are: to what extent and through what mechanisms do SO determine the educational outcomes of individuals in the completion of a first university degree and the attendance of postgraduate education? To what extent and through what mechanisms do SO determine the occupation destination of graduates? And more generally, is the Colombian educational system contributing to equalize opportunities among individuals or reinforcing the inequalities associated to SO?

The research design consists of two main parts: (1) a statistical analysis of large existing datasets from the national information systems at the secondary and tertiary education levels, and; (2) of primary data collected from an online graduate survey. The first method allows capturing an overall scenario, by identifying the trajectories of university graduates (n=16,892) since the last year of school until their entrance into the world of work. The second part provides a deeper analysis on the explanatory mechanisms lying behind the reproduction of inequality of opportunities among a sample of this population (n=1,086).

Results from the first part suggest that SO have a significant impact on educational outcomes during secondary school but also at higher educational levels and in the later transition into the world of work. They point out that SO operate directly through socioeconomic status and cultural capital. The effects from the latter are particularly strong on the academic achievement at secondary education. SO also operate indirectly, through the segmentation of educational paths, on the academic quality of the institutions attended, and on income.

Two main complementary interpretations follow form these findings. On one hand, they are in accordance with the reproduction theories: highly-educated families through the parental credentials along with their economic capital, promote efficient learning environments for their children, who are more likely to reach the same educational level or higher. On the other hand, the mediation of family education between origin and destination suggest that it is also a device for social mobility. In this particular case, the quality of secondary school (strongly affected by parental credentials) is of special importance for later success at the university and the labor market. These findings emphasize the key issue of qualitative inequalities. Providing academic quality at secondary public schools is a way the Colombian educational system could break the existing link between origin and destination. At the HE level, however, while privatization has furthered participation of non-traditional students, it also has reinforced inequalities insofar as quality in private education continues to be a privilege.

Gender Inequalities in Medical Education: Accessibility of Orthopedic Training for Female Interns in Egypt

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Marwa Schumann.

Marwa Schumann works as an instructor at the medical education department, faculty of medicine of the Alexandria University. She is currently researching gender inequalities in medical education.

Feminizations of medicine and gender inequality are paradoxical factors with an increasing influence on the field of surgery in general and orthopedic surgery in particular. The increased number of female medical students and graduates has led to a paradoxical shortage of orthopedic surgery residents; only a very small proportion of female graduates choose to become orthopedic surgeons. Reasons included female disinterest in orthopedics, the long working hours, increased physical demands, male domination and male nature of the field causing biases and stereotypes about and against women. Female exposure to negative attitudes discouraging them from choosing a specific “male-dominated” career show how education can function as means of reinforcing social and gender inequalities rather than correcting them.

Main objectives of the research are to determine the gender influences on access to education and training of interns, to explore the motivations and expectations of a female intern training in the orthopedic surgery department and to explore the challenges facing the first female intern choosing orthopedic surgery training.

This is a qualitative study carried out within the framework of a narrative inquiry methodology where data is generated in the form of stories. It is situated in constructivist epistemology where knowledge is “socially constructed”. Purposeful sampling was carried out to conduct semi- structured interviews with the first female intern training in the orthopedic surgery department to explore her motivation, expectations, preparation and challenges she faced to get the approval for orthopedic training. A focus group discussion is chosen to elicit the attitudes of peers. Interviews and focus group discussions will be audio-recorded, transcribed, translated and analyzed.

Gender issues seem to affect the training and learning experience of house officers in general and those training in the surgery departments in particular. Sexism and negative attitudes towards women working as physicians in general and as surgeons in specific, act as barriers against achieving expected skills and competences. The hidden curriculum plays an important role in gender discrimination. Negative effects of gender discrimination among house officers extend beyond de-motivation of trainees and limiting the career choices to affect the quality and safety of healthcare provided. Equal training opportunities should be provided to medical interns regardless their gender.

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Youth Experiences in Secondary School: Massifaction, Dynamics of Inequality and Figures of Citizenship in Argentinia

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Pedro Núñez.

Pedro Núñez is currently teaching at Universidad de Buenos Aires. His research is related to the analysis of the relationship between schools, youth and political participation.

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(Foto: Pedro Núñez)

In recent years, alongside a greater visibility of youth political participation, youth studies devoted considerable attention to the relationship between the youth and policy, which resulted in a growth of research that addressed different issues and events featuring young. Studies of secondary school are part of this trend. Also, educational research in the country and the region has a long-standing tradition, since the 80s, in the study of the incidence of the educational processes in the production and reproduction of social and educational inequalities. The present project seeks to problematize these issues, by studying the topics of citizenship, the feelings of injustice and the situations of discrimination, and by incorporating to the analysis the voice, perceptions and practices of young people in secondary school.

Starting from these initial ideas it wonders: Which changes and innovations take place in the way of “teaching” and signifying citizenship at school, from the moment on certain social groups have access to the level to which they had historically been excluded? What figures of citizenship emerge under the educational fragmentation process? What demands gain primacy in this context and what are the experiences in relation to the visibility/marginality based on the sexualities/genders, the social class and different forms of discrimination and construction of distinctions? What are the injustices that activate student movements?

This work in progress is part of a line of research that problematizes ways of building citizenship and participation in secondary schools. It presents a brief characterization of the situation of secondary schools in Argentina, especially of the changes in school enrollment, mainly in terms of coverage and the process of educational fragmentation. It is focusing on three urban centers (City of Buenos Aires, Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires and Rosario). The main interest is in the study of the perception that the students have about the rules that regulate school interactions, the situations of discrimination, the injustices and the formal spaces for participation – like coexistence agreements and student centers.

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Working Class Youths and Education in Post-Industrial Mumbai

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Sumeet Mhaskar.

Sumeet Mhaskar is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. He is currently working on a project that examines rural urban linkages in globalising Mumbai city with a particular focus on rural labour migrants’ urban experience.

During the last two decades of the 20th century large scale industrial closures took place in major Indian cities such as Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Kolkata and Mumbai. The industrial closures resulted in the retrenchment of a large amount of workforce as well as a sharp decline in the employment opportunities in the formal manufacturing sector. The implications of industrial closures on the workforce and to a certain extent on their families have received significant scholarly attention. However, there remains a major gap in the literature that investigates the implications of industrial closure on working class youths’ educational and occupational attainment. Whilst studies have hinted at the negative implications of workers’ retrenchment on their children’s education and overall life chances this aspect remains largely understudied. This project aims to fill this gap by examining both working class youths’ educational attainment as well as their occupational choices. In order to explore this phenomenon this project relies on the quantitative survey data of 924 ex-millworkers families that was collected during 2009 and qualitative interviews with ex-millworkers children, workers, trade unionists, school teachers and social and political activists. In addition, personal documents, biographies, relevant reports have been consulted.