“Quality education” is one of the most overused yet least defined phrases in Nagaland’s public discourse, said Dr Theyiesinuo Keditsu, speaking at the inaugural edition of the FAC Annual Lecture organized by the IQAC, Fazl Ali College (FAC), on Monday at the college’s Conference Hall. Dr Keditsu is a Poet, academic, educator and an advocate for the conservation of indigenous culture.
Opening her lecture with a critical reflection on the term, Dr Keditsu situated “quality education” within what she called a lexicon of vague but powerful words – ”women empowerment,” “development,” “Nagaland for Christ,” and ”political solution.” These, she observed, “circulate widely yet remain poorly enacted.”
She posed searching questions to the audience: ”What is quality education? Can our institutions become homes, or will we remain trespassers within them?” Despite “failing infrastructures, bureaucratic inertia, and under-resourced systems,” she said, government educational institutions in Nagaland continue to pulse with “life and possibility,” serving as spaces “where the idea of the nation is rebuilt daily.”
Calling “quality education” both aspiration and mirage, Dr. Keditsu argued that under the new Four-Year Undergraduate Programme, teachers are expected to model innovation amid administrative decay. “Quality,” she said, “depends on who speaks and from where — especially in Nagaland, a region thrice colonised by the British, the Church, and the Indian state, and now absorbed into a fourth colonisation of neoliberal markets and digital algorithms.”
“Quality by whose standards?” she asked, urging a decolonial rethinking of education through three interlinked lenses – ontology (being), epistemology (knowing), and methodology (doing).
She called for:
Decolonising Ontology: transforming institutions from spaces of uprooting to “spaces of re-rooting” where belonging and relationships define learning.
Decolonising Epistemology: reclaiming oral traditions and lived experience as theory, promoting “epistemic disobedience” and empowering indigenous teachers and students to take charge of their own knowledge systems.
Decolonising Methodology: moving “from extraction to reciprocity,” embracing Shawn Wilson’s concept of “research as ceremony,” and legitimising community-based methods.
Turning to NEP 2020, she acknowledged its promise of rootedness and interdisciplinarity but warned of its paradoxes. “A centralised state cannot easily decentralise epistemic power,” she noted, questioning whether Indian Knowledge Systems risk rebranding upper-caste epistemes as national heritage.
She also highlighted the difficulty of implementing mother-tongue instruction in multilingual classrooms and urged teachers to “read policy against the grain — to inhabit and reinterpret it creatively.”
Drawing a striking analogy, Dr Keditsu remarked, ”With Nagaland’s oppositionless democracy, perhaps educational institutions remain one of the last spaces where dissent and dialogue survive – if we can get students to think, question, and converse freely.”
From this reflection, she proposed an Indigenous Research Ethos grounded in three commitments:
Contextual Curricula: Education must emerge from communal collaboration and respond to local needs and aspirations.
Decolonial Teacher Training: Teachers, she said, “are often the most colonised agents within the system” and must engage in self-reflection on privilege and positionality.
Community Partnership and Local-Language Scholarship: Knowledge, she insisted, “should circulate horizontally — through translations, exhibitions, performances, and community discussions — not vertically through gated journals.”
She also called for what she termed a “Pedagogy of Return”, describing teaching as “a practice of freedom,” quoting Paulo Freire. “Quality,” she said, “must emerge from indigenous ground, where knowledge is relational, research reciprocal, and nation-building plural.”
Commenting on her topic, “Quality education for indigenous research and nation-building,” she suggested it should have been, “Indigenous education for quality research and nation-building”.