How Aaina Education uses visual storytelling to spotlight inequalities in educational spaces

Trigger warning: This article mentions instances of suicide.

The death of 26-year-old PhD scholar Rohith Vemula in 2016 brought to the fore the often untalked epidemic of caste discrimination in India. In his suicide note, Vemula wrote, "My birth is my fatal accident," which rallied many to protest against injustice and indignity.  

However, Rohit is not alone. Students and teachers from marginalised communities often face subtle forms of discrimination in Indian educational spaces. Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan said in the Lok Sabha that between 2014 and 2021, 122 cases of student suicides were recorded in prestigious institutions, including IITs, NITs, and IIMs. 

Then there are other forms of institutionalised discrimination. A 2024 report by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People revealed that only 2% of college students reported that their institutions had reserved parking spots for wheelchairs and customised vehicles.

While such statistics are omnipresent in educational institutions across the country, their relevance often gets lost in the fast-paced news cycle, without any tangible impact on the ground or in the consciousness of educators and other stakeholders. Aaina Education, a social media initiative, aims to change that by engaging Indians with these realities and talking about the lived experiences of marginalised communities in navigating the complexities of educational spaces.

Mirroring realities, reflecting change 

"We felt that among both teachers and students, there was not enough space or opportunity to reflect on (pedagogical) practice," recounts Sayan Chaudhuri, a faculty member at Young India Fellowship, Ashoka University, who co-founded Aaina Education in 2021 along with Vrinda Bhatia, a PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The founders delved into academic research about pedagogical practices and education studies. This included resources about inequalities in student experience and problems in access to higher education. However, they felt that this kind of scholarship wasn't being used in an impactful way.

Aaina Education was founded to "communicate critical perspectives in education in ways that were more experience-based and involved dialogue and conversation." The founders chose social media to drive discourse and reach younger audiences.

On Instagram, Aaina puts forward its message through reels, explainers, and comics. A large number of posts discuss how power dynamics or inequalities in terms of caste, class, gender, and disability play out in classrooms. Others focus on the perils faced by school students and research students or specific departments.

As Chaudhuri explains, "We focus on a particular problem. For example, we had a post on how teachers respond to neurodivergent students. What are the ways in which the problem is looked at normatively, and what is the problem with this perspective? The idea is that we are showing a mirror."

Other times, these reflections take the form of comic strips depicting conversations between students on various issues such as funding in educational institutions as well as the socio-emotional needs of students with disabilities and subtle exclusionary practices. Additionally, focus is also placed on discussing pedagogical practices. "We want to show the issues that are affecting different educational communities," Chaudhuri says. 

The team also comprises Sakshi Sharma, an Analyst, PPID at the Quality Council of India; Nidhi Kinhal, a research assistant at Swataleem Foundation; Sruthi Ranjani, MSc in Learning Sciences from Universite Paris Cite and Viral Jain, an undergraduate student at Azim Premji University.. They conduct research through interviews and secondary material after which they design narrative, visual, or conversational templates for social media posts.

Aaina also has a YouTube podcast called 'Aaina Conversations' on teaching practices and how they are conceptualised by teachers. "We want it to be a space where teachers reflect on their experiences but also explain their thought process about any problem they have experienced." These episodes focus on issues such as inclusion in the classroom as well as democratising teaching particular subjects like law and history. 

With over 12,000 followers on Instagram, Aaina's impact is undeniable. Deeksha, a faculty member at Zakir Hussain College, University of Delhi, says, "I think their work is very accessible, and the way they break down their posts is impressive. I can also share their posts with others, especially with my students. They are also able to relate to the conversation." 

She also appreciates that Aaina tries to come up with structural as well as everyday solutions for issues such as mitigating differences of opinion and staff room politics through teacher reflection sessions as well as collective reading. 

Beyond social media 

Aaina Education also conducts workshops with student bodies and professors from colleges based on their social media posts. It also conducts an exercise where participants work on a particular problem, such as addressing linguistic inequalities institutionally. 

Chaudhuri explains the workshops—funded through honorariums—aim to "enrich the vocabulary of teachers and students. We also want to make students and teachers notice power in the everyday. We want to help students build agency in addressing their problems. We also want to make students and teachers listen to each other because this is missing in the formal classroom space." 

In some of the workshops, students have shared about feeling left out. Other times, teachers shared that even though they do not aim to discriminate, they tend to pay more attention to responsive students. "They present their problem emotionally. Our work is to give words to this problem and see how we can understand it philosophically and sociologically," Chaudhuri says. 

Over the last two years, Aaina has conducted over ten workshops and has impacted more than 500 students. Aaina was the recipient of the LingComm Grant in 2022. In 2023, it was among five working groups chosen by Aapti Group and Mozilla Foundation for a project on ‘Strengthening The Data Ecosystem in Indian Schools’. Aaina has also collaborated with YouthKiAwaaz, Kaksha Crisis, and Revival Disability India on social media. 

The workshops have resulted in real-world changes. Shreyam, ia law student from the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, Hyderabad, was part of a two-day workshop on socio-linguistic dynamics in academic spaces. He recalls, "It was because of this workshop that we initiated a demand with our administration that we want to do away with the system of allocating ranks. This created a sense of hierarchy among students. … We switched to a CGPA-based system." 

However, the journey wasn’t without challenges. Chaudhuri says running an organisation along with full-time commitments is difficult, and so is navigating social media because it is difficult to influence action and gauge impact. Even with workshops, engaging with students in a two- to three-hour window is not as sustained as long-term engagement with an educational community. 

Aaina is nonetheless committed to making an impact. The team is working to grow their community and create more content on different platforms. In the long run, the founders want to create sustained projects such as courses and publications. 

"The idea is to keep alive how education needs to be a space of change and liberation. We also have a political purpose in what we are doing. We want to influence teachers and students to do things that move educational practices towards equality and social justice," he adds.