HONOURING THE SILENT VOICES OF PRE-SERVICE WARLI TEACHERS IN CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

This paper describes the first in the sequence of 3 phase research project based on the Development and evaluation of an ongoing “Culturally Responsive Early Childhood   Teacher Education(C R E C T E) program for pre-service  Warli teachers in India.  It portrays the silent voices of the pre-service Warli Early Childhood Educators   in a context in which their cultural landscape, issues of identity, pragmatics of employment, family and community and a bureaucratic mechanism intersect to create educational scenarios that are multi-facetted in their complexity. This landscape of professional pathways of pre-service Warli teachers offer data for teacher educators and policy-makers to consider in the drive to 'close the gap' in   the early childhood educational opportunity among Warli community