Dakshayini Suresh

Dakshayini is a feminist educator. Her instructional experience spans age-groups and learning needs, and ranges across the areas of libraries, language, gender and social science. At IIHS, she is an External Consultant with the Practice team, where she works on building narrative outputs for education-related projects. Before IIHS, Dakshayini’s work has largely focused on language and text-based pedagogies. At Azim Premji University, Bangalore, she was faculty at The Language Centre—a unit that aims to ease the transition of second-language speakers of English into the requirements of an urban liberal arts undergraduate programme, with a focus on language acquisition. As a tutor and instructor, she worked to impart communication skills and buttress their sense of self during the cultural transition – using a pedagogy centred on dialogue, autobiographical exploration, close reading, and critical thinking. More recently, she worked as a library facilitator at Centre for Learning in Bangalore, using children’s literature and dialogue to open up conversations about difficult issues such as gender roles, gendered violence, conflict, caste, and sexual identity. Her own explorations take off from these experiences and weave them into questions of affect, habit, power, and institutionally situated learning. In April 2024, she presented a paper entitled “Is it uncomfortable enough in here: A search for the critical in the critical reading and writing classroom” at Ashoka University’s Critical Writing Pedagogies Symposium. She is interested in the development of compassionate text-based pedagogies for social justice, which can challenge the relationships of power that pattern learning in everyday life.

Dakshayini enjoys writing on literary and cultural themes, and exploring the relationship between systems of cultural production and their tangible manifestations in the form of popular literature. Her writing on books has appeared in Frontline magazine and The Hindu Business Line. She has a Master’s in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi and a Bachelor’s degree in English from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University.