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Portrait of a science teacher as a bricoleur: A case study from India

  • Ajay Sharma
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Abstract

This paper presents a case study of science teaching in an eighth grade school classroom in India. It comes out of a larger ethnographic study done in 2005 that looked at how science was taught and learned in a rural government run middle school in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Subscribing to a sociocultural perspective, the paper presents a narrative account of how a science teacher negotiated and made use of the existing discourses that influenced his teaching practice to construct learning experiences for his students. It is a portrait of him as a bricoleur, engaged in making-do with what is of available to conform to prescriptive discursive norms as well as engage in situated, contingent and collaborative pedagogical improvisations with his students. Through a discursive analysis of Mr. Raghuvanshi’s teaching practice, this paper presents his bricolage as a feature of everyday sociocultural practices, and as an instance of glocalization of decontextualized school science discourse. It also offers a case for creation and strengthening of material conditions that support enactment of teacher agency for construction of meaningful and relevant learning experiences for students.

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Keywords

Science teaching Ethnography Bricoleur India 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to several the students and teachers of the school where this study was conducted, to friends in Eklavya Foundation, Bhopal, India for making the study possible, and to Andy Anderson for his precious and vigilant guidance. Irfan Muzaffar, Danielle Ford, Eric Eslinger, Kelly Grindstaff and the editors of this journal also helped a lot in improving this paper by their valuable comments and suggestions.

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Elementary and Social Studies EducationUniversity of GeorgiaAthensUSA

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