ABSTRACT
All modern social institutions in the Global South are, in a way, products of colonial legacy. Christian missionary education has long been conflated with colonial education in the critical literature. However, some historians argue that missionary education in South Asia was not always coterminous with the colonial agenda. This chapter is based on an ethnographic case study of an old Catholic missionary school’s inclusive pedagogic work in India. The school is considered an elite academic institution with a long history of over 150 years. It has been through waves of inclusion to decolonize pedagogy for transformative social action and inclusive education. The chapter provides a Tagorean analysis of the school’s inclusive pedagogic work. Tagore is probably the most famous school drop-out from South Asia; he was the first non-European Nobel Laureate in literature and built his own school. The chapter will first engage with Tagore’s learner-centric and community-oriented theoretical ideas and then provide a Tagorean analysis of the case study school’s decolonizing pedagogic work for inclusive education.
