‘We will call you madamii’: a researcher’s journey from being viewed as a madame to a madamii by children in a rural village in India

ABSTRACT Researchers who wish to become insiders to children’s cultural worlds need to genuinely engage with the difference in social power between them and their participants. Most published accounts of adult positionality have been provided by those who have explored children’s school practices. The ethnography discussed in this paper focused on the home and school literacy practices of children in a rural village in India. Cognisant of the unequal teacher-student relationships in this part of the world, I positioned myself as a least-teacher which, I argue, presents a cultural approximant for the least-adult role extensively discussed in literature. The role enabled the children to view me differently from their teachers – as a madamii. In this paper, I discuss its various facets with the twin focus of examining the efficacy of the role for future research and its affordances for the vision of a teacher provided by Indian policy documents.