Teaching as social practice: Negotiating social divide in an urban middle school for the poor in India

Abstract This paper interrogates the social divide between teachers and their students from poor and socially marginalised groups in a government‐aided urban middle school. This divide stems from intersecting caste and class differences, influencing teacher beliefs about educability of marginalised students contributing to adverse schooling experiences and poor outcomes. Inequities in education provisioning in the contemporary urban and policy contexts provide the backdrop for the study to examine micro processes in a school where a shift has occurred in teachers' social positioning relative to their students. Using an interactionist approach, the paper interrogates how middle‐class teachers negotiate their relationships with students from the margins of the transforming urban landscape. Contrasting experiences of teachers with former students belonging to social groups similar to their own and current ones from marginalised groups yield important insights concerning their notions on moral discipline, educability and worth. Prevailing assumptions that education serves as the pathway for social mobility are challenged by emerging questions about the consequence of schooling, unsettling settled notions about the ‘civilising’ processes of schooling, curriculum and pedagogies. Dominant conceptions that position teachers solely as mediators of social reproduction prove inadequate in explaining their experiences in this school context. The paper proposes examination of teachers' roles as forms of social practice to better understand complexities and contradictions in teachers' narratives and roles and their evolving responses to their students ‘at risk’ of exiting school.