Sarbani Chakraborty

Sarbani Chakraborty is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She grew up and studied till the Masters level in India and worked in Singapore as a school social worker for two years. She joined the School of Social Work but later switched to the School of Education to pursue her doctoral studies focusing on the schooling system in India–a system that is somewhat familiar and yet unknown to her in various ways. Sarbani borrows Bourdieu’s idea in summing up her interest in India’s school system. Her goal is to make the familiar strange and the strange, familiar. For her pre-dissertation study, made possible by the SKJ Fellowship, Sarbani plans to interview teachers in government schools and researchers in urban Delhi to learn what government teachers (often criticized as ineffective/non-performing) do/don’t do in the classrooms and why and how they are perceived as a group.

Read on about Sarbani’s fellowship experience here.