Conference Program

Transformative education cannot be reduced to curricular reform or progressive policy articulation; it is realised through the everyday pedagogical judgments, ethical orientations, and relational practices of educators operating within historically structured systems. Grounded in a theory of transformative education that recognises schooling as inherently political (Mayo, 2003), this paper advances the concept of Invisible Pedagogical Mindsets (IPMs) as a framework for understanding how educators enact, mediate, or reconfigure reform aspirations into democratic and transformative classroom practice.

IPMs refer to the historically sedimented interplay of culture, local education ecosystems, and dominant learning theories that tacitly govern pedagogical decision-making. Conceptually, IPMs extend democratic education scholarship by shifting attention from formal policy design and institutional structures to the epistemic and relational substrata through which authority, knowledge, and legitimacy are interpreted in classrooms. In the postcolonial Indian context, successive layers of textbook dependency, marginalisation of indigenous epistemologies, and market-oriented standardisation have crystallised into everyday assumptions teachers hold about teaching, learning and their own professional identity. These mindsets hold a language of critique (Giroux, 1985) where systemic analysis ties educational reform to structurally conditioned forms of oppression, exposing the contradictions concealed beneath dominant, hegemonic discourse. Without attending to these invisible substrates or IPMs, transformative aspirations risk being absorbed into compliance-driven routines rather than enacted as dialogical practice (Thomas, 1991).

Drawing on the Strengthening Pedagogical Approaches for Relevant Knowledge and Skills (SPARKS) project, developed by Brookings Institution, this study examines qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with teachers, teacher educators, and policy actors across four Indian states, namely, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Jharkhand, and Goa. The study interrogates the tension between the transformative vision of India’s National Education Policy 2020 and the lived realities of schooling. While participants describe structural constraints, performative accountability pressures, and limited institutional recognition, they also demonstrate situated agency in reworking dominant pedagogical logics.

The findings show that transformative education is enacted through micro-relational practices that subtly reconfigure power within classrooms. Teachers cultivate psychologically safe spaces, embed dignity and inclusion into everyday instruction, and redefine educational success in ethical and civic terms. These practices resonate with Freire’s (1970) dialogical pedagogy and Giroux’s (1985) language of possibility, illustrating how educators function as democratic actors who negotiate and contest hegemonic reform narratives from within.

By foregrounding IPMs as the analytic hinge between structure and agency, the paper argues that transformative education must be understood as praxis emerging through educators’ situated interpretation of reform, answering Mayo’s (2003) question “with whom does the agency for social transformation lie?” Systemic change, therefore, requires not only policy mandates but the democratisation of pedagogical authority, the legitimisation of relational and care-centred practice, and the creation of collective spaces for reflective inquiry. Transformative education, in this account, is not delivered through reform; it is enacted through educators’ capacity to reinterpret inherited pedagogical mindsets toward more just and dialogical forms of schooling.