Making connections: Exploring student agency in a science classroom in India

India has been a free country for more than half a century now. In this time, the state has succeeded to a large extent in providing universal access to at least elementary education to all the citizens. However, the quality of education provided in state-run schools remains far removed from the ideals endorsed in policy documents. The vast majority of Indian poor, especially in rural areas, depend upon state-run schools for access to education. However, the low quality of education provided in these schools militates against their hopes and efforts for securing a better future through education.;Undergirded by concerns over the raw deal students of government run schools get in rural India, this study is an ethnographic exploration of science learning in a rural middle school classroom in India. The study was conducted in the government middle school at the village Rajkheda, in the Hoshangabad district of the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. The study focused on the nature and scope of student participation in a middle school science classroom of rural school in India. Taking a socio-cultural perspective, it explored student participation in science classroom as engagement in a socioculturally mediated dialogue with the natural and the social world. Thus, two parallel yet intersecting themes run through the narrative this study presents. On one hand, it focuses on students' efforts to both learn and survive science as taught in that school. While on the other, it details the nature of their engagement with and knowledge of their immediate material world.;The study shows that through active engagement with their local material and social world, students of the 8th grade had acquired an extensive, useful and situated funds of experiential knowledge that enabled them to enact their agency in the material world around them. This knowledge revealed itself differently in different contexts. Their knowledge representations about school science and the material world were situated improvised responses to ongoing dialogues that enabled them to survive, negotiate and maneuver their way through their immediate social world. Inside the science classroom, students negotiated their roles as students in a varied, improvised, and contingent manner. Further, whenever the constraints and affordances of the local situation and the resources at their disposal made it feasible, students exercised their social agency to selectively appropriate school science discourse for their own out-of-school purposes. The science teacher did much to encourage this contingent and situated emergence of students' social agency. However, the extant teacher professional and school science discourses allowed him to achieve only limited success in making science more meaningful and relevant to the students.;The study reveals that though much has been accomplished to provide universal access to elementary education in India, the science instruction still persists along traditional lines. Thus, the state is still far from providing access to the type of science education it advocates in its national policy documents. The study urges the state to fulfill its constitutional obligations by providing a science education that enables students to not only build a better future for themselves, but also work for peaceful and progressive social change. The study recommends informed bricolage as a goal for teacher education and professional development.