Every weekday, as the sun rises and schools open their gates, swarms of backpacks fill the city streets. Each with a different colour, size, and shape, carrying books, bottles, and big dreams. But some children will carry heavier bags with invisible weights – packed with hunger, identity-based discrimination, exhaustion from having returned from livelihood activities, low motivation to learn in an unfamiliar language, and countless others.
Unpacking ‘Invisible Backpacks’: Empowering teachers to see what children carry
Shaiza Suhail
Language and Learning Foundation
Every weekday, as the sun rises and schools open their gates, swarms of backpacks fill the city streets. Each with a different colour, size, and shape, carrying books, bottles, and big dreams. But some children will carry heavier bags with invisible weights – packed with hunger, identity-based discrimination, exhaustion from having returned from livelihood activities, low motivation to learn in an unfamiliar language, and countless others. For most of these children, even though they have come to the school, sitting in class would not be enough to feel seen, engaged, or heard. India has successfully done the first step and achieved near-universal enrolment in early grades. Ensuring teachers can actually see these ‘invisible backpacks’ and feel equipped to ‘lighten their load’ is the next, much harder part.
While we strive to address these inequities, statistics alone cannot always capture what these ‘invisible weights’ are. Children’s lived experiences and socio-economic conditions define how well they can pay attention in the classroom, participate, or even believe that they belong in the school at all! Moreover, none of these factors exists in isolation, but rather they intersect, overlap and compound, making it even harder to target. Often, by the time a teacher is able to take note, a struggling child would have already been labelled – ‘withdrawn’, ‘uninterested’, ‘slow’, ‘irregular’. These labels hide the structural disadvantages that shape learning experiences.
Studies in India’s public school classrooms reveal troubling yet familiar patterns: A teacher’s attention, encouragement, and expectations all differ based on students’ performance, which itself is deeply influenced by their socio-economic status. They are called on less often, receive shorter wait times when they struggle to respond, and become quiet, passive learners in the class. These patterns rarely stem from conscious bias. Rather, they are a predictable outcome of an overstretched system where teachers work in overwhelming conditions without being trained to recognise their own biases or understand their students’ contexts. Most teachers enter the profession with the hope of making a difference, but without the tools to ‘see’ the invisible contexts that define their classrooms, even the most dedicated efforts can fall short, as they are often ill-equipped with the right attitudinal and pedagogical skills that work to support learning equity in the classroom.
In countless conversations with teachers in the government system, this common struggle emerges: children at vastly different levels, nearly half of the class are irregular, time is short, and often, not being able to identify the right strategies that can engage all of their children. Despite best efforts, teachers reflect that they are not able to engage all learners, even when they try. Yet, many continue to operate under a concerning assumption: Children arrive at the school as blank slates, ready to absorb whatever is being taught. This belief overlooks and excludes real-life experiences, languages, and cultural knowledge children bring to the classroom. It turns systemic hurdles into mere individual or community ‘deficits’, instead of being perceived as a consequence of systemic exclusions.
India is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees not just access to education but education that respects the child’s identity, culture, and language. The Right to Education Act promises free and compulsory education for all. But these promises remain incomplete if marginalised children sit in classrooms where their identities are erased, their cultures dismissed, and their contexts ignored. Rights aren’t just about physical access they’re about dignity, recognition, and genuine inclusion. Perhaps the most honest question we can ask is: Have we kept our promise? Or have we simply moved children from outside the school gates to inside the classroom walls, declaring success while they remain just as excluded?
Unpacking their ‘invisible’ barriers requires intentional ‘sight’, with the ability to see beyond silence, hesitation and irregular attendance. No stakeholder is better positioned to address this than the teacher, because they can truly bridge the gap between enrollment and learning. When teachers are empowered to understand and respond with empathy and skill to the experiences of their students, everything shifts. This means moving beyond expecting teachers to simply “do more,” and instead equipping them with the tools, understanding, and reflective practices they need to do their jobs well.
Despite their significant and central role, most teacher training programs in India, particularly in-service training at scale, focus heavily on technical subject knowledge. They hardly provide any opportunity to experience or discuss contextual issues, and are implemented in a didactic, cascade model. There is negligible demonstration, practice opportunities, reflection and attitudinal awareness of one’s own biases. Inclusive teaching practices such as bilingual instruction and multigrade-multilevel teaching, and using classroom assessment data for differentiating instruction and conducting remediation, remain underemphasised.
In our experience with training teachers at scale, we have identified several approaches that make classrooms more engaging, inclusive and effective:
- Use of familiar language as a bridge: Introducing new vocabulary or concepts through children’s home language helps them grasp new ideas faster, participate actively and build confidence. Even teachers who are not local can create connections through simple conversational words and engage children to participate in the class discussion.
- Connect new information to real-life experiences: Linking lessons to children’s real-life experiences builds curiosity, critical thinking and deeper understanding. Use of real-life examples also improves application skills in learners.
- Actively building rapport and classroom culture: Simple classroom routines that enable student participation in decision making and co-created agreements help children feel valued, and develop agency, independence and a willingness to engage.
- Incorporating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles: Designing lessons that offer multiple ways to engage with, process, and express information ensures all children feel supported and able to participate.
- Using formative assessments to differentiate instruction: Regular assessments, even on a weekly basis, can give teachers insight into who has met learning expectations and who needs additional support. This can be used to do in-class differentiation and also conduct regular remedial classes.
Teacher professional development is a lever to truly equip teachers with the right strategies that can transform their classrooms into environments of recognition, safety, high engagement, and meaningful learning. One-time training is not enough, and comprehensive continuous professional development, including supportive supervision, reflective monthly meetings, and peer learning through professional communities, is a sustainable and actionable way to empower teachers to address learning in an equitable manner.
