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Modern schooling is often expressed as one of the key social dynamics of development and modernisation in Nepal. Ideally, school policies and pedagogies are said to embrace inclusion, socialisation and democratisation of young children irrespective of their class, caste, gender and ethnicity. The state’s signatory promises in national/international conventions and platforms often mention social inclusion as the most important expected goal of formal schooling. However, such an understanding is often undermined by persistent educational inequalities and differences which, in turn, underline emergent social, cultural and economic forces that exacerbate social exclusion of many schoolchildren. English Language Teaching (ELT), one of the modern education specificities in the national educultural space, is intricately connected to such inequalities, and is the de facto cause of the enforcing social exclusion of socially, culturally and economically marginalised Dalit children, despite the fact that they attend schools and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms as the “principled inclusion” advocates. Amid this paradox, the main purpose of this paper is to examine exclusionary-inclusion in relation to modern schooling and English learning in rural settings. Employing critical ethnography, this paper examines how modern schooling, particularly in relation to English teaching/learning including English-as-a-medium-of-instruction (EMI), perpetuates social exclusion of the Dalit schoolchildren. The analysis of the data derived from qualitative interviewing, participant observation and learner diaries, suggests to us that policy-practice ambiguities and complicated intersection of existing caste-class-gender disparities with English Learning Opportunities (ELOs) are the principal domains areas that enforce “exclusionary-inclusion” among the marginalised Dalit children in community, school and EFL classroom spaces in rural Nepal., Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication, Vol 6 (2018): Special Issue: Stability, Democracy and Rights in Post-Conflict Areas

This commentary paper examines our local expert engagement methodology that we developed to understand water supply issues as well as to inform the direction of our action research conducted in Dhulikhel, a small town in Nepal. Through three years of field-based research at Dhulikhel, our inquiry uncovered a range of data ‘gaps’ and emergent as well as long-term conflicts around increasingly scarce water resources. To respond to this gap and contribute to inclusive water management, we developed and used a local expert engagement method, through which we were able to pool and mobilise a rich repertoire of hybrid knowledge from a range of local experts in Dhulikhel and others from nearby towns. The method of expert engagement was simultaneously linked to deliberations among local water stakeholders concerned with water supply management. Based on the lessons from this work, we argue that rich local expertise exists in water management and policy in Nepal, one that transcends the dichotomy between indigenous and scientific knowledge. We also show that as formal scientific knowledge becomes hybridised in different ways, this creates an important and actionable opportunity for advancing local science-policy processes to support water security agendas across the country.