Education, Teaching and Learning: Discourses, Cultures and Conversations

Contents: Preface and Acknowledgements. 1. The Discipline of Education in India and its Histories: An Introduction/Padma M. Sarangapani, Manish Jain and Azra Razzack. Section I: Educational Histories and Discourses. 2. Nationalist Imaginations in the Colonial World: Civics and Citizen in India, c. 1920–1940/Manish Jain. 3. Discovering Germany: Indian Students in Berlin between 1914–1945/Joachim Oesterheld. 4. India’s Child-Centred Education/Padma M. Sarangapani. 5. Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme: Some Undocumented Stories/Sadhna Saxena. 6. The Talented Student: Evolution of the Category in Post-Independence Education Policy/Rachel Philip. 7. Decoding a Pedagogy of Assimilation: India’s Adivasi Education Policy and Practice/Malvika Gupta. 8. Whither Teachers?: Educational Reforms in the Era of Globalisation/Manisha Priyam. Section II: Cultures of Teaching and Learning. 9. Modes of Learning: Some Thoughts on the Other- and Self-directed Educational Practices/Mohammad Talib. 10. Constructions of Sikh Masculinity and Popular Culture: A Study of Sikh Adolescent Boys/Prabhjyot Kaur. 11. Education for Non-violence/Nidhi Gaur. 12. Redefining the Role of the Teacher/Shirley Joseph. 13. Transformative Mentoring: Teacher, Coach, Role Model/Bharati Holtzman. 14. ‘Schooling’ Cultures of Fear/Poonam Batra. 15. Reflections of a School Functionary/Azra Razzack. Section III: Conversations. 16. Examining Education as a Field of Inquiry and a Normative Experience: A Conversation with Krishna Kumar/Disha Nawani. Index.

The discipline of education in India has developed over 150 years, beginning in the colonial period, when the British government established the first schools in the Presidencies that responded to the growth of the discipline in the West. Following Independence, the discipline’s growth has been shaped in response to education policies of successive governments, which has changed the direction of the discipline of education as a field of scholarship and practice.

Education, Teaching, and Learning brings together leading teachers, researchers, and practitioners in the field of education, whose work represent instances of significant departures in the discipline of Education in India over the last thirty years. The chapters focus on two core practices that define the discipline of education in the university: the practice of preparing teachers, and educational research as social inquiry.

The book examines how educational policy and discourse have

defined talent, pedagogy, curricular reforms, and the construction of gender in education; the need to recover and reinstate child-centred education in India and the importance of innovative methods of teaching; also studies the role of the teacher and teacher agency; and challenges the notion of school as a space which has the good of the child at heart.