NAVIGATING THE CROSSROADS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY ON INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES, CHALLENGES, AND STUDENT EXPERIENCES IN MULTI-GRADE CLASSROOMS

EDUCATION

Multi-grade classrooms remain a persistent and largely unexplored feature of many education systems in the context of global education reform and rural schooling disadvantage. This qualitative study examines the multitude of teaching practices, pedagogical tensions, and the lived experiences of students learning in multi-grade classrooms, to understand how teachers and learners navigate the constraints of educational structures and curricular expectations. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice and post-colonial arguments on stratification, I posed questions about how (and if) factors such as power, habitus, and symbolic capital influence agency and interaction in multi-grade classrooms. The findings illustrate that multi-grade classrooms were not merely pedagogical peculiarities, but rather sites of authority, improvisation, and resilience. In an interpretivist framework, this study employed interviews, observations, and critical discourse analysis across three rural schools in the Global South. Findings indicated a contradictory space of pedagogical agency coupled with marginalization, where teachers acted as agents of state curricular control and as innovative adaptive leaders within the community. Students engaged with, constructed, and negotiated multimodal learning identities that were often perceived as having been shaped by invisible hierarchies and differentiated attention, which reflected socio-political exclusions beyond the school context. In summary, this study critically engages with global educational discourse to conceptualize multi-grade classrooms as possibilities, not deficits, or temporary ventures, but as stable ideological terrains that challenge homogenized policy representations. Theoretically, it engages and extends a more critical re-thinking of classroom agency within an increasingly authoritarian and decentralizing education system; practically, it calls on educational policymakers to expand notions of equity beyond equity metrics by recognizing the moral labor and structural ingenuity of multi-grade classrooms as potent liminal educational spaces..

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