Educate, Agitate, Organize: Grassroots Dalit Educators in South India

Blossom Academy

10-month educational residence

A Critical Ethnography

• Setting: Blossom Academy in Kerala, South India
• by Dayamudra Dennehy, SFSU EDDL
• Committee Chair: Dr. Maricel Santos
• Committee Members: Dr. Sheldon Gen and Dr. Mina Kim
• May 11, 2020

"Marginalized learners with limited access to English proficiency become further marginalized.

In this way, access to English mastery
is a global social justice issue.

In response, grassroots educators are innovating
to improve access to English proficiency
in their own communities, solving their community’s own problems.

Blossom Academy

• A full-time educational residence
• 2 two hostels for marginalized 30 Dalit students who have dropped out of high school, 1 for young women and 1 for young men.
• Communicative English, math, computer literacy, personal growth, and the arts, with daily periods of meditation, self-reflection, and physical exercise.

How do the grassroots Dalit educational leaders at Blossom Academy describe their own transformative process
from learners to leaders?

What does Transformational Leadership mean to these educators?

In what ways do leadership theories, which are mostly Western, inform their grassroots leadership practices?

Caste System: Foundation of all
social strata in India

"A System of Graded Inequality"


"All are unequal, but some are more unequal than others."

-Ambedkar, 1891 - 1956

Caste oppression

• Dalits make up 17% of India’s population, historically suffering from exclusion & severe discrimination socially, economically, politically, culturally, based on their caste status (Paik, 2014).
• Dalit scholars regard castelessness as a truly indigenous aspiration, based on social equality, personal responsibility, democratic principles (Aloyisus, 2004).

BOURDIEU
Social & Cultural Capital


GRAMSCI
The Sub Altern

DALIT GRASSROOTS
EDUCATORS

*Community of Care
*Imagined Identity
*Imagined Community

Community of Care:
Respect & Confidence

Imagined Identity:
Caste, English language mastery

Imagined Community:
21st century learners,
Social Endosmosis

Using critical ethnography, data will consist of semi-informal interviews, focus groups, classroom observations, analysis of program documents.

The stories of these young educators continue a tradition of Dalit educational activism, part of an often-ignored Dalit social justice movement with several centuries of history.

CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

An investigation of power and social inequities

How social structures have led to inequities

Understanding the layered experiences
of the participants

Relationships with the community are valued
(Bhattacharya, 2017)

9 Study Participants

• Program Director
• Office Manager
• 3 Teachers
• Supporter/Guest Teacher
• 3 Senior Student Leaders

RESEarch process

• Interviews: 3 Rounds
• Focus Groups: 3 Rounds
• Possible Observations
• Data memos, teacher journals, publicly available program materials
• Email, phone, audio & video recording, possibly in-person meetings
• July - December 2020

semi-structured interviews

• Neither an everyday conversation nor a closed questionnaire
• Dynamic open-ended interviewing provides richest data
• Based on the literature on Imagined Identity, Imagined Community, & Community of Care

GOAL:
Participants engage
in a process
of self-reflection
(Freire, 1970)

Coding Process

• 3 Cycles of Coding
• Narrative coding explores participants’ experiences actions to understand the human condition through story. Saldaña (2016)
• Stories shared will be connected to current leadership theories and turned into codes to better understand their leadership transformation.

Transformative leadership MODELS

• Grounded in democracy
• Addressing individual & public good
• Inclusive & equitable

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

• Sense of efficacy
• Dedication
• Collaborative Skills
• (Alston, 2005)

Radical healing

• Individual Well-Being
• Community Health
• Broader Social Justice
• (Ginwright, 2015)

POTENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE

• Focus attention on the educational inequities facing the overlooked community of Dalits suffering from centuries of brutal caste oppression.
• Showcase the work of Dalit scholars
• Center the voices of grassroots educators within the international community of scholars.

Generalizability

• Critical ethnography is particular to a specific context & site.
• The value in such a study is in its particularity. (Creswell, 2018)
• Educators in other contexts can learn from these transformative intellectuals and gain a new perspective on grassroots leadership.

The voices of
grassroots educators
can inform an understanding of educational inequities
& innovative solutions,
told by the educators themselves.

“My final words of advice to you are to educate, agitate, and organize; have faith in yourself.

The battle to me is a matter of joy.
It is a battle for freedom.
It is a battle for the reclamation of human personality.”
(Ambedkar, 1942)

Questions for the Committee
1. Advice: COVID-19
2. Guidance: Manual Coding
3. Reality Check: 3 Rounds of Interviews & Focus Groups

Thank you!