"Reimagining the teacher and the work of teaching."

by Shreya Khemani

Who is a teacher in our imagination?

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I’ve often wondered what a Draw-a-Teacher exercise would throw up in a country like ours, where the imagination and reality of ‘a teacher’ is informed as much by a historical domination of teaching by specific caste groups as it is by a contemporary reality in which the majority of school-teachers are women (UDISE+ 2019-20). From the Brahmin Guruji, the nation-building Master Sa’abs and mother-like Madams, to university-educated urban youth deployed in schools through fellowship programs — such an exercise would likely paint an explosive kaleidoscope of visuals.

Martyr, mother, preacher, saint, youth volunteer. The mosaic is likely to have it all — mirroring complex histories of both schooling and society. A familiar refrain in Chhattisgarhi about teachers in our area is “vo toh padhayel bas jathe” — she only goes to teach. With the unspoken undertones being: “she doesn’t actually work” and “anyone can teach.” Behind the seemingly effortless, ‘unskilled’ work of teaching is hidden a whole world of tasks structured by social and economic forces. In 2022, four of us practising teachers conducted a research study into the labouring lives of teachers in low-cost private schools in Birgaon, Raipur. We began with a simple discomfort: why is teaching so routinely romanticised and at the same time so devalued? (Khemani et al., 2023).

Our study revealed that teachers in low-cost private schools in our area were paid anywhere between ₹1500 and ₹6000 a month — several times below the stipulated minimum wage for unskilled labour in the region. Workdays were long and tightly monitored; many reported skipping lunch, moving from one 40-minute period to the next without pause, while also performing extensive unpaid labour — administrative paperwork, exam preparation, mentoring new recruits, and emotional care for children. The ecosystem depended on high teacher turnover to keep wages low and workers replaceable. Who managed to “stick” on often had less to do with expertise or professional recognition than with how closely one conformed to caste-patriarchal norms of the “ideal” teacher — shaped by Brahminical ideas of womanhood, sacrifice, and the persistent framing of teaching as seva.

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For those of us committed to “quality education,” this presents an uncomfortable question: How can we speak of quality without speaking of teachers’ working conditions? The school is a teacher’s workplace. When that workplace is built on degraded, precarious labour governed by caste-patriarchal norms, what does that mean for the education children receive?  When influential strands of research suggest that government teachers are “overpaid” (Kingdon, 2020), and others emphasise the need for “cost-effective” private solutions to schooling for the poor (Tooley & Dixon, 2005), such claims serve to legitimise privatisation of education as a rational corrective. In this climate, where multiple forces invisibly and insidiously normalise the devaluing of teachers’ labour, it becomes urgent for those of us who believe in education for social transformation to rethink how we understand, measure, and value teachers’ work.

An analysis of policy documents and legal proceedings reveals that the degradation of teachers' work is not accidental or particular to local geographies. In the 1988 case, A. Sundarambal v. Government of Goa, the Supreme Court dismissed the plea of a government school-teacher fighting against her arbitrary retrenchment. The Court argued that teachers are “not workmen” because teaching is “neither skilled or unskilled” but a “noble vocation.” This landmark judgment marked a turning point in policy and practice: by denying contract teachers labour protections, courts effectively normalised their hiring — a turn private schools were quick to exploit. Over decades, policy shifts — from para-teacher schemes to contractualisation and decentralised hiring — have institutionalised lower pay scales and insecure employment in the name of universalising education. Education reforms framed teaching as semi-voluntary and valorised it as seva (Davies, 2018; Gauri & Robinson, 2010; Govinda & Josephine, 2005; Ramachandran, 2020). Terms like “shiksha karmi” carry this legacy. The NEP 2020 too, encourages ‘trained volunteers’ from the local community to participate in the mission to tackle the “learning crisis” (MHRD, 2020). Bahujan working-class teachers, then, are valued and devalued for the same reason — being from THE ‘community.’ 

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But the impact of such precarity in teaching work extends far beyond wages or job security. It shapes how experience is erased and expertise denied. In private schools, there is an extremely high teacher turnover and even internally, teachers are constantly shuffled across grades and subjects. Contract teachers in government schools have been bravely fighting for wage and job security across the country for decades (Beteille and Ramachandran, 2016). But even permanent teachers face transfers and “promotions” that routinely render experienced teachers novices by shifting them across stages of schooling. This structural resettling prevents teaching from being recognised - or rewarded - as specialised, intellectual and skilled work, and ensures that the teacher herself never becomes the expert.

When such devaluation is codified into law and policy, then ideologies that govern status and value in a society characterised by graded inequality (Ambedkar, 2014) come to shape who can lay claim to expertise - and who becomes the ‘neither skilled or unskilled’ teacher in need of guidance from the expert. This creates a stratification in the entire education workforce — from the education researcher and policy-maker to the contract teacher and Anganwadi worker. Ultimately, this reiterates the fact that teacher status is inextricably linked to who the teacher in question is, rather than to the actual expertise the work requires.

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The discomforting part is that this hierarchy runs through the education ecosystem many of us inhabit. Education nonprofits — even as we seek reform — are embedded within, and at times sustained by, this stratification. Our roles as founders, researchers, consultants, and trainers gain legitimacy from the assumption that expertise must be brought from outside the classroom alone. The prestige, funding, and mobility attached to our work are possible in a system where teachers’ labour remains undervalued and open to intervention.

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This is not an accusation so much as an invitation to reflect and reimagine collectively. When we design programmes that prioritise training over wages, innovation over stability, or scale over security, we may unintentionally reproduce the very hierarchies we critique. If we are serious about transformation, we must also examine how our own institutional locations are entangled with — and sometimes dependent upon — the diminished status of teachers and a very narrow view of teaching. To acknowledge this is not to negate the work many of us are trying to do differently. It is to ask whether transformation is possible without confronting how deeply our own institutional locations are embedded in, and occasionally reliant upon, the inequalities that shape the education workforce. Such acknowledgement could perhaps enable us to work together to restructure the education workforce as a part of our purpose to transform education.  

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Alongside the larger struggle to dismantle stratification within institutions that produce and employ the education workforce, there are also smaller, structural shifts within existing institutions that we could collectively think through and rally for. One such is the urgent need to reimagine the growth path for school teachers. 

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The current structure of the school system defines growth as ‘vertical’ mobility — moving to higher grades or away from teaching into administration, management, research, or policy. In doing so, it positions the classroom as a starting point rather than a site of deepening expertise. If education is to be reimagined as a public good, then the teacher’s growth must be anchored in strengthening — not abandoning — the work of teaching. Contrary to traditions that think of teaching as divinely ordained duty and sacred authority, one is not born a teacher - we become teachers. Over years, under rigorously mentored and reflective practice.

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The question is not whether we value teachers. It is whether our policies, budgets, institutional cultures, and everyday practices reflect that value. Growth must not mean exit from teaching. It must mean deeper investment in it.  A meaningful progression towards expertise for school teachers would recognise and reward accumulated classroom experience, build practice-based systems of teacher education and structured mentorship, create pathways for pedagogical specialisation, ensure wage progression, protect stability and dignity of work and value teacher-led research and knowledge production as central to educational transformation. 

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The reason why the question of expertise and skill is so fraught in the vocation of teaching demands deeper inquiry. Teaching must be recognised as a site of deepening intellectual and emancipatory practice rather than a ladder one must climb to escape the classroom. Because in fact, the classroom, as bell hooks reminds us, is the most radical space for possibility (hooks, 1994). 

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To reinvent education is to radically reimagine the teacher and the work of teaching. If Indian culture and tradition is what policy now urges us to draw on, then we have much to learn from in this direction given our country’s educational history. Anti-caste thinkers such as Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar tied teaching to social emancipation rather than ritual authority. The teacher then is not a guru, temporary volunteer or self-sacrificing maternal figure, but someone who encourages the challenging of authority, inequality and tradition. A rational, critical, dialogic worker engaged in the making of democratic and fraternal subjects.

Perhaps that is the invitation before us: to value the work of teaching without valourising it, to dignify care without exploiting it, and to reimagine teaching as caring intellectual work in the unfinished project of social justice.

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A poem that invites us teachers to reimagine teaching. This poem is by Samma Parveen, a student at New Learning Centre. 

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​References:​

• Ambedkar, B. R. (2014). Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto. In Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol. 5. Dr. Ambedkar Foundation. https://www.mea.gov.in/Images/attach/amb/Volume_05.pdf (Original work published 1989)

• Beteille, T., & Ramachandran, V. (2016). Contract teachers in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(25), 40–47.

• Davies, E. (2018). From universalization to privatization: Drift in Indian education policy. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, United States.

• Govinda, R., & Josephine, Y. (2005). Para-teachers in India: A review. Contemporary Education Dialogue, 2(2), 193–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/097318490500200204

• hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

• Khemani, S., Sahu, J., Yadav, M., & Sahu, T. (2023). Interrogating what reproduces a teacher: A study of the working lives of teachers in Birgaon, Raipur. TESF India, Indian Institute for Human Settlements. https://tesfindia.iihs.co.in/12_interrogating-what-reproduces/

• Kingdon, G. G. (2020). The private schooling phenomenon in India: A review. The Journal of Development Studies, 56(10), 1795–1817. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2020.1715943

• Ministry of Human Resource Development. (2020). National education policy 2020. Government of India. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf

• Ramachandran, V. (2020). Contract teachers in India: Recent trends and current status [Preprint]. Azim Premji University. https://www.academia.edu/44404483/CONTRACT_TEACHERS_IN_INDIA_Recent_Trends_and_Current_Status_12_7

• Supreme Court of India. (1988). Miss A. Sundarambal v. Government of Goa, Daman and Diu & Ors. AIR 1988 SC 1700.

• Tooley, J., & Dixon, P. (2005). Private education is good for the poor: A study of private schools servicing the poor in low-income countries. Cato Institute.