The dominant models of pedagogy involve a unidirectional process where children are mere passive receptacles. Mismatch between a child’s home and school languages further thwarts any possibility of bi-directionality. This paper is based on a study conducted in primary schools in the tribal blocks of Gajapati district, India, to explore the experiences of teachers while using children’s home language in classrooms and to examine if this results in a change in a collaborative model of pedagogy. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with teachers in Guma block that had 100% monolingual tribal students. Content analysis of the data revealed that only a few teachers were able to use the children’s home language to create a learning space that was reciprocal, recursive, and collaborative. The theoretical framework was drawn from the social learning theory of Vygotsky, and works on intersubjectivity and collaborative learning by Matusov and Rogoff.