In our societal context, the neoliberal competitive and knowledge-oriented culture still exerts a stranglehold on teachers' sense of professional autonomy giving rise to a deficit image of them as 'excessively entitled'. The purpose of this chapter is to eschew this deficit view of teachers by bringing their agentive side to the fore. First, it…

Religious minority schools are seen to take on the task of transmitting the normative image of a community, its ideology and culture. Through pedagogy and daily routine practices, schools seek to shape students' ideas of a religion and ways in which it is to be performed. This paper, based on ethnography of a Sikh school in Delhi, explores such…

Visual representations (and their censorship) are carriers of messages and are powerful tools to invoke discourses. Visuals are not just supplements to written text; rather, these can be read independently as the primary text and are crucial to scientific communication, particularly in life sciences. This paper aims to investigate various textbook…

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…

Recently in a meeting of the statutory bodies of the University of Delhi (DU), the administration tabled a 'vision' document titled the Strategic Plan (2022-2047), and a draft Institutional Development Plan, that are to serve as roadmaps for the University's future functioning and institutional priorities. It is expected that these would serve as…

This paper analyses the development of UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute on Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), examining its record from global, national and institutional perspectives. The global perspective encompasses challenges to UNESCO's attempts to articulate a distinctive, humanistic vision in competition with other…

In South Asian societies, nationalist projects have often relied on cultural symbols drawn from varied native traditions for their legitimacy claims. In a multi-ethnic society like India, with a multitude of narratives about collective pasts, it becomes difficult for such projects to achieve a multi-symbol congruence that is deemed necessary. The…

Jawaharlal Nehru's contribution in pioneering the concept of scientific temper in India is widely acknowledged, and his legacy has had an influence on Academia, Education policy and popular science movements in the country. But in the last decade, the new age social media revolution has seen a renaissance of right wing nationalism, backed by an…

This article is an attempt by two educators, one Dalit and one Tribal, to make a case for why education in India needs to be informed by a conception of "the Dalit curriculum." We argue that the Dalit curriculum is an educational theory based on the following foundational assumption: The Dalit reality is the denominator of measuring any…

In the immediate aftermath of Indian Independence in 1947, there was a palpable attempt to replace English with Hindi and other Indian languages to unleash the processes of decolonisation. English was castigated as the language of the British Empire and was seen to be the basis of power and privilege for a handful of English-educated elites. A new…

This article provides a critical review of English medium instruction (EMI) policy/practices in the K-12 multilingual schools in South Asia, especially in Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Employing Bourdieu's (1993) lens of 'linguistic capital' and 'linguistic marketplace,' the article takes stock of (a) the development of EMI and its ideological and…

Focusing on low-cost English-medium schools, this article investigates whether the ideology of the transformative potential of English-medium education squares with most people's experiences of this education in urban India. It shows how such schools enable socioeconomic mobility among the middle classes while also creating new forms of…

This article analyzes how the Bharatiya Janata Party crafts a narrative of history in line with its ideology of Hindutva by decontextualizing and omitting information. Using school history textbooks prescribed by its state government in Rajasthan from 2013 to 2018, it uncovers how historical events and personalities are reinterpreted to craft a…

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…

This paper investigates the portrayals of schools in various textbooks used by the focal children at an "anathashram" (orphanage) in suburban New Delhi, India. It draws on data collected in the course of ethnographic inquiry on the language and literacy socialization of focal boys over the past decade. The texts selected for this study…