Contemporary Education Dialogue

This article studies the relationship between the authorities of newly independent India and mission schools using the case of (and the perspective/sources from) the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Chotanagpur (then South Bihar, now Jharkhand). These relationships were marked by much tension in the late 1940s and early 1950s. An abundance of issues—for instance on finances, appointments, recognition, and management—mirror the fight over the control of the mission schools. However, these debates faded in the late 1950s, inter alia because policy-makers became aware of the benefits of mission schools, both in efficiently educating and in collectively suppressing communism.

So far research on school choice sets (decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools) has primarily regarded parents as key actors. Moving beyond, this article emphasises that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets. This article foregrounds how school-going Muslim children’s experiences interact with their families to produce school choices across public and private schools in Bangalore, India, while accounting for their marginalisation at the intersections of religion, class and gender. Data were collected from 4 school sites using 21 focus group discussions with 190 children and in-depth interviews with 56 children, 14 teachers and 3 parents and analysed using an intersectional framework. Our findings suggest that factors like heterogeneities in social class, differential levels of religious discrimination/exclusion in schools and a need to protect their faith through education and the complex overlap between these were crucial in shaping choices.

This article engages with the teacher education (TE) reform approach adopted in India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It locates the policy recommendations in the context and challenges of TE in India and makes sense of the NEP’s vision for the domain. It examines the knowledge traditions and global education policy (GEP) discourses that underlie the proposed reforms, and the translation of the core reform ideas in the national regulatory framework for implementation. The first part of the findings identifies the knowledge traditions and influences of GEP inherent in the policy and argues that NEP’s reform approach is an assemblage of fundamentally inconsistent discourses. The second part examines the regulatory norms and standards of the NEP-recommended TE programme to understand what makes it distinct as compared to similar ongoing programmes. Based on the analysis, the article argues that the proposed new programme is a tweaked version of India’s conventional TE approaches.

It is well known that teachers are central to education reforms and to providing high-quality instruction. The National Curriculum Framework 2005 identifies the need for professionally qualified teachers and the need to enhance the professional identity of schoolteachers. Low-fee private schools are often presented as a solution to the supposedly poor quality of education provided by government schools. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the micro-managed context of teachers’ work in low-fee private schools in semi-urban Delhi. It illustrates ways in which curriculum and pedagogy were used to control teachers’ work and analyses these observations in the light of New Public Management discourses. This article argues that teachers strongly constructed their work as provisional and used silence and exit as a way to cope within the highly regulated work environments of the school.

The canvas of science education needs to be viewed in its totality to prevent the confounding of some basic issues and to enable us to evaluate the fads and fashions in educational practice. Policies and processes in education are tacitly shaped by theories in the humanities and social sciences. Inadequate understanding of these theories, or the lack of attention to uncalled-for implications of their practical import, takes education in undesirable directions. To be a good science teacher has never been easy. The teacher is a master of knowledge in science. But that is not all. She is equally committed to the principles governing the practice and communication of science.