Critically Compassionate Pedagogy with Youth from Adivasi (Indigenous) and Vimukta (Denotified Tribal) Communities

This article stems from a classroom-based teacher research study that enquires into the challenges and possibilities of critically compassionate praxis. It highlights some curricular and pedagogic aspects of co-building a teaching-learning community with aspirants of Grade XII at an alternative school run by a civil society organisation in Madhya Pradesh. The members of this classroom are working youth belonging to Adivasi (Indigenous) and Vimukta (Denotified Tribal) communities. As a teacher, I draw upon the ideas and pedagogical strategies of authentic care, radical love and critical hope as situated within critical, feminist and Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist pedagogies. The study attempts to bear witness to the hopeful and critical ways in which students assert and reimagine their sense of selves, through some vignettes and reflections on the evolving nature of the teaching-learning community. Over the academic year, the classroom became a space for negotiating safety, agency, collective and reciprocal care, and possibilities for the future. The various voices emerging from the classroom highlight that imagining a compassionate and reflexive learning community and being pedagogically rigorous can be aligned goals and need to be pursued together to achieve educational justice.