Tribal or Adivasi communities represent the "weakest among the weak" sectors of society in India (Sivanand, 2001), marked by economic and socio-political vulnerability (Mishra & Joshi, 2015). The Government has responded through the provision of free formal schooling for tribal children. However, under a neoliberal framework of development (Misra & Mishra, 2018), formal education has become a tool of acculturation and mainstreaming, and the identity, culture, and languages of first-generation school-going tribal children are disregarded and left out from curriculum, materials, and classrooms. In this presentation, I report on a collaboration between tribal communities in central India, an Indian NGO with deep ties with these communities, and myself, a female Indian researcher with previous prolonged engagement in central India's tribal schools now doing a Ph.D. in the USA. The goal was to support mother-tongue multilingual education via the creation of a repository of multilingual books in Tribal languages and Hindi for use in schools. The NGO worked with tribal community members, tribal school teachers, and Tribal-Hindi language experts and created multilingual books in two endangered oral Tribal languages: Sehariya and Kol. Upon the NGO's invitation, I became a supporting researcher on the project. The data comprise my participant observations, audio and video recordings of work sessions, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and researcher fieldnotes, all collected during one summer of fieldwork. I document how different key actors in the project contributed our different onto-epistemologies, privileges, vulnerabilities, and expertise. I map how the NGO yielded control and supported extensive and strategic involvement of the tribal communities. This alternative collaborative methodology enabled Tribal agency and Tribal voices, thus leading to efficacious redistribution of power. The study has important implications for researchers interested in developing successful community-led research collaborations that foster appropriate representation and co-creation of knowledge in high-vulnerability contexts.
Bibliography
Mishra, R. C., & Joshi, S. (2015, January). Acculturation and Children's Education in a Rural Adivasi Community. Indian Educational Review, 53(1), 7-24.
Misra, G., & Mishra, R. K. (2018). Ethnopsychological Perspectives on Education for Adivasi Children in India. Indian Educational Review, 53-71.
Sivanand, M. (2001). The good doctors of Sittilingi. Reader's Digest, 159, 110-17.
