Navigating school development and children’s rights governance in resource-poor contexts in Karnataka, India

Ipe, Rebecca (2021) Navigating school development and children’s rights governance in resource-poor contexts in Karnataka, India. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

How do participants in school governance govern rights-based policies to education? In north Karnataka, India, School Development and Management Committees (SDMCs) are legal governance bodies where marginalised, resource-poor citizens can govern school affairs and enact school development goals. India’s 2009 Right to Education not only focuses on development goals, but also emphasises a rights-based approach that implicates notions of childhood and discourses of children’s rights. Therefore, school governance is also bound up with governing the rights attached to the right to education. The dual nature of governance-its potential for emphasising structural inequality as well as its capacity for social empowerment- signify a middle ground, where perils coexist with promise. In this dissertation, I investigate the practice of school development and child rights governance in two government schools, one rural, one urban in Kalaburagi, north Karnataka. Taking a theoretical approach that fuses key developments in the studies of governance and childhood, I concentrate on eliciting narratives of the bottom-up practice of governance from resource poor parents, children, teachers, and activists. Designing a qualitative methodology to elicit these narratives, I relied on a variety of research methods: group and individual interviews, observations, fieldnotes, and arts-based interviews during two phases of research in the field spanning three months and two weeks in total. Through thematic analysis of prevalent patterns in participants’ accounts, I found that while governance demanded much effort and commitment from participants, they rationalised their efforts (and governance failures) through a discourse of care. Care for children was instrumental in helping participants navigate the middle ground of governance, preserve their motivation, and orient their practice.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: L Education > LB Theory and practice of education
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Education
• Supervisor's Name: Schweisfurth, Professor Michele and Maitra, Dr. Srabani
• Date of Award: 2021
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2021-82329
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 21 Jul 2021 07:42
• Last Modified: 30 Nov 2022 15:09
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.82329
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/82329