Experiences of (Non-) Participation of Saora Children in Odia-Medium and MLE Plus Schools

Experiences of exclusion or inclusion depending on whether children’s linguistic and cultural resources are included in the classroom processes shape their experiences of belonging to the classroom communities. The classroom practices of two schools, Odia-medium and Multilingual Education (MLE) Plus schools are studied to show how conventional teaching and learning practices of Odia-medium schools reduced learning to memorisation, repetition, and copying. Saora children who entered the classroom as novices could neither learn to competently use their everyday linguistic and cultural resources or the school resources to participate in academic discourses nor could they engage and connect to academic concepts and emotional resources in the classroom. On the contrary, the teaching and learning practices in the MLE Plus classroom founded on children’s everyday linguistic and cultural resources opened spaces for interactional engagement as well as conceptual learning. The sense of belonging to the classroom community and participation in the academic discourses developed a community of learners in the MLE Plus classroom.