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…

Language and literacy education has long been a site of contestation. Lisa Delpit, an African-American language and literacy educator, shook this contested site in the 1980s and 1990s through her ground-breaking book "Other People's Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom," by centring the voices, discontentment and hopes of…

Mother-tongue education has increasingly become a keyword in formulations of development goals, especially the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Achievement of these goals acquires a grave sense of urgency in light of the ever-increasing threat to the very fabric of our linguistic diversity. The basic premise of this article is that Gandhian…

All aspects of our lives, including educational access and quality, are affected by our socio-economic position. This reflective note about the author's educational experiences describes the interlinkages of caste and education. It talks about how those experiences played an integral role in shaping the author's beliefs about caste, reservation…

Hem Borker performed field-based research in madrasa "Jamiatul Mominat," a residential girls' madrasa in Delhi, exploring the everyday lives of young girls studying in the madrasa. She interacted with a number of students and teachers in this madrasa. But there were few with whom she developed a bond during her journey from being a…

Jacques Rancière is a contemporary philosopher who theorises about everyday social life. His writings explore an anti-positivist social history, linking it with contemporary political thought. He positions the 'sensible' as a political construct, as a way of both being and transcending the conditions of cultural and social life. Rancière's oeuvre…

Schools are truly 'microcosms of society' since they reflect the larger dynamics of society. Women's position in society also got replicated in their low participation in education among other fields. This article contextualises women's education in the nineteenth-century Punjab. It briefly discusses approaches followed by various stakeholders…

In state and central governments, there is a widespread perception that it is the rural areas that are in the greatest need of government assistance. By the same token, it is assumed that the educational problems are more urgent in rural areas. In this understanding, the taluka town is willy-nilly classified as urban, and little attention is given…

Collective identities of people have remained largely transitional despite largely remaining rooted in certain inherited essentialities. The essential dynamics of identity often get negotiated with various forces and processes like those of the economic transformation, technological reorientation, collective mobilisation, modernisation,…

The article narrates a personal journey of learning and unlearning the images in school textbooks, its uses potentials and challenges as experienced by the author. It reflects upon the experiences of the process of selection of these images within the context of political science as a discipline. These experiences have been formed over a decade…

This article attempts to locate the 'English-Speaking' class in contemporary India. By unpacking different aspects of one such class in Mumbai, it sheds light on the ways in which students, teachers and those who run the class view the 'English-Speaking' course and the ability to speak 'good English'.

The Teach for India (TFI) programme, an important offshoot of the Teach for All/Teach for America global education network, began as a public-private partnership in 2009 in poorly functioning municipal schools in Pune and Mumbai. Like its American counterpart, the programme in India has similar ideas of reform and recruits college graduates and…

Using the experience of teaching film in the International Baccalaureate programme, this article presents the intellectual and emotional learning that film can enable as well as the possibilities of using film as a pedagogic tool for the collaborative construction of knowledge.

The 'liberal' feminist perspective on science problematises the presence of fewer women than men in science and believes that increasing their number would qualify as social change. On the other hand, 'radical' critics of modern science argue that science has been deeply involved in the creation, strengthening and subversion of gender…

Citizenship education being central to the process of nation-building, changing political regimes promote a re-imagination of the 'ideal' citizen. A perusal of the successive national curriculum frameworks introduced by the NCERT (1975-2005) shows how curricula and textbooks have been repeatedly re-designed to suit the requirements of changing…