Community Participation and Learning Outcomes among School Students: Policy Perspectives on Gender-Just Educational Innovation

Abstract

Community participation has re-emerged as a key strategy for addressing learning deficits and educational inequities, particularly in rural and marginalised contexts. However, policy and research often treat community engagement as a neutral or technical input, with limited attention to its gendered dimensions. This paper examines a community-led educational intervention implemented in rural Tamil Nadu through a qualitative case study informed by feminist policy analysis. Drawing on programme documentation, gender-disaggregated participation records, and case narratives, the study analyses how learning spaces were relocated from schools to homes and community sites, and how women—especially mothers—emerged as central pedagogic actors. The findings show that learning improvements were closely linked to gendered processes of care, proximity, and emotional support, with particularly positive effects for girls facing constraints related to domestic labour, restricted mobility, and digital exclusion. At the same time, the intervention exposes tensions arising from the reliance on women’s unpaid educational labour. The paper argues that community participation can contribute to gender-just learning outcomes only when supported by policy frameworks that recognise, resource, and integrate community pedagogic labour within the public education system, rather than assuming it as voluntary care work.