Teacher Education for Diversity in India: Socio-Educational Experiences of Travel to a 'Margin'

This paper is a reflective account of a travel that shifted the site of initial elementary teacher education from a metropolitan milieu of New Delhi; to the contrasting locale of a remote mountain region in the central Himalayas. This shift of site aimed to re-locate the concerns of quality schooling, diversity and ecological living to this new context. The possibilities of an emancipatory education for the marginalised children of these remote mountain regions may not emerge from mainstream schooling but are derived from an alternative educational imagination. This alternative educational trajectory is rooted in the children's locale specific bio-physical reality, social ecology and recovery of traditional local knowledge systems. The field experiences at a new site are among the critical dimensions of teacher education for diversity. In comparison to the learning that takes place at an urban location of the initial teacher education programme the insights gained from experiences at this educationally 'non-developed' locale at the margins are central to teacher education for diversity. The visit deepened the understanding that a distinct locale specific alternative vision of educational development is not the same as mainstream notions of school education, economic growth and ecological living.