Early childhood education for marginalized children in India : deconstructing quality

Societal hierarchies in the form of caste, gender, religion and class continue to deprive a large percentage of young children in India of learning opportunities, leading to intergenerational poverty. Existing research indicates that this cycle can be broken by providing appropriate early childhood care and education. Early Childhood Education for Marginalized Children in India reviews India’s achievements and challenges, and identifies the complex issues related to providing early childhood education to children from marginalized communities. The book presents evidence-based approaches to developing and scaling up good quality early childhood education programmes. It explores what ‘quality’ means in the Indian context and identifies core elements that must be integral to all initiatives that aim to promote holistic development, while addressing India’s significant scale and sociocultural diversity. The available literature has mostly discussed information from Western nations and the book attempts to address this gap. Cover 1 Contents 12 List of Illustrations 14 List of Abbreviations 16 Foreword 20 Preface 24 Acknowledgements 28 Part I: Early Childhood Education in India: Quest for Quality 30 Chapter 1: Challenges and Possibilities in Early Childhood Education 32 Chapter 2: Deconstructing Quality 66 Chapter 3: Curriculum in Multi-age Classrooms 100 Chapter 4: Early Childhood Education Teachers in India 129 Chapter 5: Scaling Up and Contextualizing Early Childhood Education Quality 164 Part II: Quality Preschool Programmes for Children in the Margins 190 Chapter 6: Place-based Education in Himalayan Villages 192 Chapter 7: Community-managed Balwadi-cum-Creches in Tribal Communities 215 Chapter 8: Relationship-based Programme for Semi-urban Communities 238 Chapter 9: Educating Children from Urban Dalit Communities 260 Chapter 10: Community-based Programme in Urban Slums 282 Chapter 11: Cooperative Preschools in a Cosmopolitan City 303 Chapter 12: Diffusion Model 325 Chapter 13: Public–Private Partnership for Government Preschools in Rural Areas 350 About the Editors andContributors 374 Index 382 This book presents the challenges of providing pre-school education to children from marginalized communities in India and approaches that address these issues.