NIRANTAR - a centre for gender and education

Writing Textbooks

Textbooks produced after National Curriculum Framework (2000) were critiqued for containing numerous factual errors, distorting facts and for promoting conservative and at times blatantly right-wing Hindu ideology. In September 2004, NCERT constituted expert groups to undertake a process of reviewing and recommending changes in these textbooks. Nirantar was involved in coordinating a team of teachers and educationists who worked together on the Civics textbooks for Classes 6 to 8 published by SCERT. The effort was to write in a language that would be accessible to the learner as opposed to writing for the teacher and to bring in concepts through narratives and experiences of the learner. The books were contextualised in order to make them relevant to a child living in Delhi, possibly a first-generation learner in her family and belonging to a poor or working-class family. This is the group that forms the majority of the learners in government schools in Delhi.

Nirantar has also been part of the textbook-writing committee set up by NCERT on the Social and Political Life, Political Science and Sanskrit textbooks. Nirantar’s inputs have not been limited to gender but have also been in terms of working with the team on the content, framing and pedagogical devices used.

EXAMPLES FROM THE NCERT TEXTBOOKS
In working on the Sanskrit textbook writing committees, Nirantar argued for substantial changes in the layout and content. Debates around gender, caste, labour and religion and their representation in the Sanskrit textbooks were opened up perhaps for the first time in the NCERT. Some of the highly contested insertions

- A piece (Pemla Pemli) by a famous Gujarati educationalist, Gijubhai, that wittily reverses gender roles was included after much discussion about the danger of communicating that boys/men should be sissies/hen-pecked husbands.

- A piece by Savitribai Phule was included to talk about her work on women’s and Dalit education. The committee argued that a Maharastrian (Ramabai) writer was included in last year’s book, and so a writer from another state should be included. Savitribai’s contribution to women’s education was emphasised on, and the piece on her was included.

A chapter on Diversity and Discrimination in the Social and Political Life book attempts to unpack structural inequalities and locate different sites of discrimination – rural/ urban, girls/ boys; disability, caste and so on.

Click on this link to download NCERT textbooks: http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Instructions.htm

EXAMPLES FROM THE SCERT BOOKS

A chapter on the Yamuna is written as a travelogue, through which issues related to geography, environment, livelihoods, history and current efforts to ‘Save the Yamuna’ are explored.

Gender issues are treated as central to the content rather than as a marginal theme:
A chapter on societal institutions presents different types of families, looks at how family as a concept can be examined through critiques made by feminist sociologists, and interrogates the relationships within families. This is a significant departure from the previous books where the family is always presented as being nuclear, harmonious and invariably middle-class.

A chapter on citizenship illustrates how language itself can become a means of exploring our own assumption about who is a citizen, highlighting starkly the issue of women’s exclusion from the idea of citizenship by using the female pronoun.

A life story of a boy living in Delhi, Balvinder, shifts the focus of gender from being ‘only about girls’; Balvinder belongs to a middle-class family. He is in class 12, already under pressure to move into a well established profession and train to become a bread winner.

Nirantar has shared its experiences of textbook writing in several different forums, seminars and meetings. This has taken the form of training teachers, discussing issues of textbook writing and curriculum with researchers, students of education, NCERT and DIET representatives and so on. The presentations have used illustrative examples from the textbooks to demystify the concept of gender and how it can become an integral part of educational material and classroom interactions.

Click here to view a presentation on the Social & Political Life Class 6 book

In order to get feedback from the users of the textbooks – students and teachers – SCERT has undertaken a study with qualitative and quantitative aspects, across 200 government schools. Nirantar was involved in designing and implementing the section of the study on the Civics textbooks. The data from the study will be crucial in pointing out gaps between conceptualisation and their use in the classroom.