Situatedness of School Choice among Muslim Students: An Intersectional Approach

Abstract

So far research on school choice sets (decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools) has primarily regarded parents as key actors. Moving beyond, this article emphasises that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets. This article foregrounds how school-going Muslim children’s experiences interact with their families to produce school choices across public and private schools in Bangalore, India, while accounting for their marginalisation at the intersections of religion, class and gender. Data were collected from 4 school sites using 21 focus group discussions with 190 children and in-depth interviews with 56 children, 14 teachers and 3 parents and analysed using an intersectional framework. Our findings suggest that factors like heterogeneities in social class, differential levels of religious discrimination/exclusion in schools and a need to protect their faith through education and the complex overlap between these were crucial in shaping choices.