You are facing a class of thirty children, some of them standing in their seats, some talking, some staring blankly. You try to get their attention by calling their names or clapping your hands. A moment’s respite, then distraction, again. The room is small and warm; you can feel the tension building in your neck and chest. What would you do? This is the daily experience of teachers in affordable private schools. While assisting such teachers in managing their classrooms, sociology is a constant reminder that my context is particular, that only by trying to understand can I be useful. It has helped me ask better questions and be more humane.

I help teachers in Bangalore create more inspiring learning experiences for their students. This work is not specialized, like developing a biology curriculum. Therefore, I was able to begin immediately after my MA in Sociology, not having a background in the education domain. I might work with teachers to plan lessons, imagine more stimulating classroom spaces or create low-cost teaching aids – like making a table lamp out of a straw, a bottle cap, a battery and a cheap LED bulb, to explain electric circuits. These teachers work in school contexts beyond my personal experience. The students are often the first in their family to receive a formal education, are most comfortable in Kannada despite English being the medium of instruction and pay tuition fees around INR 1000 per month. I have lived in privileged circles for my entire life. Therefore, a lot of my work involves observation to understand the school environment before making suggestions. Sitting in these classrooms is an unsettling experience; the behavior of both teachers and students is unfamiliar, at times, even immediately offensive. As anyone that has read ethnography will know, this is common when encountering a culture, in this case, a classroom culture, different from your own.

One aspect of classroom culture on which I work with teachers is the teacher’s response to student misbehavior. A typical response to student misbehavior is to shout or occasionally hit the student. Teachers do not usually appear to derive any satisfaction from shouting or hitting students; these are forms of classroom management, of discipline. This form of punishment is authoritative in that it makes the power of the teacher over the student explicit (Delpit, 1988). By contrast, the techniques of behavior management that I suggest, such as grabbing attention by repeating the phrase, “one, two, eyes on you”, are more “liberal” (Delpit, 1988, p.282) in intention, as they do not make the teacher-student power differential as transparent. That does not mean that they reduce that power differential. Teachers will usually try out my methods as I have been brought into the school by a school leader whose authority is respected, out of a desire to reduce misbehavior and occasionally from an awareness that corporal punishment might be legally punished (Giliyal, 2013). My methods reflect dominant educational norms, nationally and internationally. Sometimes, they will work, often they will fail.

Why do they fail? From the interactions that I’ve observed between students and parents – in which parents shout and hit – I believe that these students have grown up within a different “culture of power” (Delpit, 1988, p.283) than the one that I am recommending teachers inculcate in the classroom. A culture of power, as understood by Lisa Delpit in “The Silenced Dialogue” (1988), is a set of rules of communication and interaction that affects and is informed by power relations. Within the culture of power in which these students appear to have grown up, authority is established by behaving authoritatively – by making a power differential explicit. The methods I am suggesting do not fall within such a culture of power; they rely on the teacher being able to command respect by being in an authoritative role and therefore not having to behave authoritatively. From my personal experience having used these strategies with a ‘friendly’ tone, initially capturing student attention and then losing it to laughter and chaos, the form of interaction I am suggesting can be interpreted as ‘playtime’, separate from the time when formal academic learning takes place. While not condoning corporal punishment, this situation places the teacher in a clear bind, as my recommended strategies are in contradiction with the forms of discipline that a child experiences at home, and hence that the child understands as a discipline.

Therefore, student behavior becomes an issue on which teachers and parents have to collaborate. However, teachers are reluctant to work with parents, seeing them as part of the problem, an additional burden to teachers already stretched professional and domestic lives. Teachers complain that parents are “uneducated”, are not involved in their children’s education and only engage with the school to voice problems. The ‘truth’ of these claims is irrelevant; they reflect the teachers’ perception of the parents. From the parents’ perspective, there appears to be an expectation that the payment of tuition fees places the majority of the responsibility for the formal education of their children upon the school.

Further, parents’ discipline usually falls within the broader cultural norms of their community and therefore educates the child about these norms and how to navigate them. Attempting to change family norms without influencing broader community norms may not be desirable as it could harm the child’s ability to be successful within their community (Delpit, 1988). This impasse between schools and parents is where I believed, before COVID-19, more focus should be placed when working with such affordable private schools. This belief has been supported during the COVID-19 lock down as teacher-parent engagement has been a significant factor affecting the ability to provide learning to students at home during this period.

What does all of this mean for me? My learning has been to continue recommending these strategies – I represent an organization that believes in them and a mixture of strategies is useful – but not push them down teachers’ throats, understanding somewhat the challenge before them. This may sound banal, but when you see a teacher screaming at or slapping a young child, it is difficult to remain unaffected and not to intervene, irrespective of the reaction of the child. I have seen educators intervene directly, out of empathy, and in doing so, lose the trust of a teacher, perhaps harming the possibility of influencing that teacher’s classroom management in the long-term. The ultimate aim of my work is to help students by making teachers more effective, not to minimize my discomfort. Having grown up within dominant cultures, it was not necessary to stop and think about how other cultures might be different. However, if I want to be useful to these teachers and students, stepping back is crucial.