Exploring student participation in primary school mathematics textbooks and classrooms in Delhi, India

Meghna Nag Chowdhuri
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

For more than a decade globally, and more recently in India, education policy has focused on how children participate in classrooms. This (re)imagination falls within a larger shift towards a more constructivist perspective, where “learning takes place through interactions” (NCERT, 2006, p. 17). Based on this, reformed textbooks have been developed, incorporating text that encourages student participation. However, what is often missing from the discourse is teacher’s voice (Batra, 2005). Thus, despite the reformed textbooks, it is not understood whether such a change is realised in classrooms or (and) accepted by teachers. This paper focuses on the reformed primary-level mathematics textbooks to explore this link — nature of ‘student participation’ in the mathematics textbooks, compared to teachers views and practices. Mathematics is one of the most crucial subjects of primary schooling, and a key indicator of basic skills across the Southern context (ASER, 2016). Yet it continues to play the role of a gatekeeper in education, especially for those from under-privileged communities (Khan, 2015).

The data discussed, is part of a three-year-long project exploring the teacher-textbook relationship in primary government school classrooms in Delhi. The study was conducted in four schools, with a focus on 10 teachers. The data includes reform-based textbooks, 44 classroom observations, and 16 semi-structured interviews.

The textbook anticipates students’ engagement in classrooms in primarily three ways: explanation tasks (oral and written), generation tasks (creating their own tasks), and construction tasks (creating physical materials). The paper argues that although a few of the teachers are starting to approach these ways of student engagement, especially those involving explanation;the construction and generation tasks are not as frequently seen. Further, teachers’ understanding of how these tasks can be used meaningfully for mathematics learning is vague. These results have implications for teacher-training policies, textbook development and mathematics education research.