There is increasing interest in the possibility that private institutions may be able to meet the growing need of preservice teacher education in the Global South, yet there is little or no data on impact on quality and equity. In India, at 90 % provisioning, the private sector dominates preservice teacher education (PSTE). Although theorising and empirical data on markets in higher education suggest that privately provided programmes in non elite institutions is likely to be of low quality, in the case of PSTE, policy takes an undifferentiated view, that the whole sector is of low quality and there is regulatory failure to check for quality or malpractice. In this paper, using data from the 'teacher eligibility test' from one Southern Indian state, comparisons are made between the public funded and private teacher education institutions. Candidates' performance on the test is used as a proxy for quality of the preservice teacher education they received. Public funded institutions are found to perform far better than private ones on a number of metrics including proportion of candidates who qualify in the TET, differences in mean scores between candidates(statistically significant), and across all social categories and by gender. By proportion of candidates from a given institution qualifying in the TET, public funded institutions are found to be more efficient than private ones. A very large proportion of private institutions offering primary teacher education are found to be underperforming. The paper draws from available literature to reflect on reasons for differential performance and policy implications are provided.

Continuous teacher professional development is recognised as the most effective strategy for improving school quality and students’ learning outcomes. An action research study managed and examined online teacher communities of practice for professional learning in rural India through a reform initiative. Over 400 secondary mathematics teachers participated in our 2-year study. The results reveal that the community of practice connected universities and schools and provided teachers with pedagogical and technical support. It encouraged pedagogical content knowledge discussion and diffusion of reform initiative ideas into districts. Well-managed communities of practice assist teacher educators in scaling professional development.

India's long tradition of storytelling is well integrated into the social and cultural lives of people. It is a recognized resource for religious and secular moral education. While the desirability and usefulness of storytelling as a general pedagogical tool finds mention in national school and teacher education policy, there is limited research on teachers' beliefs and actual practices. Writing tends to be directive, based on deficit assumptions regarding practice. This paper presents perspectives and beliefs of secondary school government teachers from one State in India. It is based on an exploratory study involving observations of two schools and interviews with seven teachers. Observation and interview data were thematically analysed. Five thematic areas are presented: teachers' personal experiences and related beliefs; their beliefs about usefulness; their views regarding suitability in their school; their own preparedness as storytellers; and their current practices. In conclusion we note that all teachers recalled having positive personal experiences of listening to stories as children, yet they were sceptical about usefulness for "serious subjects", practicality in large classroom settings and risks of failing as performers in front of the class. A few exceptional teachers were able to foster interaction in large classroom using stories.

A mobile-based messaging app (MMA) was implemented as a teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context through a large-scale educational initiative. The development process adopted a Design-based Research approach to test underlying theories in real-world settings. The researchers theorised the pedagogical affordances of the MMA Telegram using Davis and Chouinard's theoretical framework of affordances, defined as a relational process among users, designers, the environment, and the artefact. This paper discusses the iterative design process in detail. The findings showed that the MMA encourages accessibility and for teachers to showcase their practice in the online community of practice and refuses (does not allow) the development of the online community of practice as an epistemic community.

Schools-their curriculum and pedagogy-assume the middle-class child as the norm, effectively rendering other childhoods and life-worlds as being deficient. Shifting away from this assumption, and acknowledging diversity, is usually understood as requiring an 'attitudinal' shift on the part of teachers. Teachers are usually held 'guilty' of having negative attitudes towards children of the poor. Explanations for the pedagogy generally then refer to these attitudes, and 'corrective action' then attends to an attitudinal change. The idea of 'multiple childhoods' is gaining influence in the teacher education curricula as providing an alternative normative framework that can enable teachers to work with, and retain, diversity. Some recent research into the manifestation of 'difference' in the primary school classroom indicates that differences are experienced by teachers as learning difficulty issues that need a curricular and pedagogic response. The child's home culture, home support for schooling and home socialization seem to enter into the pedagogy in more ways than can be addressed by changing the 'teachers' attitudes'. 'Educability' is a central (folk) concept for teachers who engage with and try to address the learning requirements of children, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds (and particularly social classes lower than themselves). Four studies on teachers' experiences of 'difference' are drawn upon to engage with and to evolve an understanding of the specific implications of for pedagogy and educational aims.

This chapter introduces the Handbook on Education Systems in South Asia, a Major Reference Work in the Springer series on Global Education Systems. The chapter begins with a review of discussions about the South Asian region and provides a rationale for including, in the Handbook, ten countries as part of South Asia. The chapter proceeds to highlight the socio-cultural characteristics as well as the demographic and development features of these ten South Asian countries through internal comparisons and also through the identification of common development challenges that South Asia on the whole faces. The second section presents an overview of education in South Asia and locates the significance of the Handbook in the need for contextualized comparative understanding of educational systems in the region. Thereafter, the chapter introduces the eight sections of the Handbook spanning indigenous education traditions, history of education, school and higher education, political economy of education, knowledge and curriculum, teachers and teacher education, as well as learner diversities and educational marginality in South Asia. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the challenges involved in efforts that seek to comprehensively map education systems in South Asia and suggests possibilities for shaping future research in this direction.

This chapter introduces the Handbook on Education Systems in South Asia, a Major Reference Work in the Springer series on Global Education Systems. The chapter begins with a review of discussions about the South Asian region and provides a rationale for including, in the Handbook, ten countries as part of South Asia. The chapter proceeds to highlight the socio-cultural characteristics as well as the demographic and development features of these ten South Asian countries through internal comparisons and also through the identification of common development challenges that South Asia on the whole faces. The second section presents an overview of education in South Asia and locates the significance of the Handbook in the need for contextualized comparative understanding of educational systems in the region. Thereafter, the chapter introduces the eight parts of the Handbook spanning indigenous education traditions, history of education, school and higher education, political economy of education, knowledge and curriculum, teachers and teacher education, as well as learner diversities and educational marginality in South Asia. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the challenges involved in efforts that seek to comprehensively map education systems in South Asia and suggests possibilities for shaping future research in this direction.

This chapter reviews key themes regarding the work of teachers in South Asia to contextualize the section of the handbook with its focus on the state of teachers, teaching and teacher education in the region. In the first theme we discuss the challenges and complexities confronted by teachers in the region, the conditions under which they work, and the preparation and support received for teaching. The second theme is concerned with the precolonial and colonial legacy of teachers and the discursive construction of teachers and their work, drawing on Foucault’s idea of discursive knowledge-power formations that are embedded in practice. Particular attention is paid to how the colonial and post-/neo-colonial discourses frame the work of teacher in the region givens its diverse precolonial histories. Attention is paid to how such discourses reshape teacher professionalism, teacher identity, and teacher accountability. The third theme examines the discourses of professional development including initial and continuing professional development, situating these in a historical and contemporary context. The chapter concludes by outlining prospective research and policy agenda for teachers and teaching in the South Asia region contoured to the ideals of critical humanism and social justice.

Research and theories pertaining to pedagogy in the South Asian region have taken a cultural turn, leading to investigation and explanation of pedagogy that goes beyond visible behaviors and conceptions of teacher skills and competencies. This enables research to engage with the region’s cultural and political history and contemporary political economy of teaching and reform. It also enables researchers to be reflexive, given the normative nature of education theory and practice.This chapter is based on a review of literature from and concerning teachers and teaching in South Asia. The research has been themed into six areas significant to understanding and characterizing pedagogy: (i) textbook cultures; (ii) indigenous ideas of pedagogy; (iii) educability; (iv)pedagogic cultures of public and private schools; (v) teacher voices on good teaching and professional identity; and (vi) pedagogic reform. The chapter concludes by reviewing research on professional development and reflecting on responses to culture in professional development and reform.

'Notes on Quality in Education' develops a framework to guide the normative judgement of quality of an institution, a programme or a system of education. Various approaches to quality in education are examined, and quality is constructed as a multidimensional 'master concept', involving aims of education, provisioning of infrastructure and teachers, curriculum and pedagogy, standards adopted, learning outcomes and accountability. Empirical studies of quality are reviewed, and it is suggested that for comparisons of or judgements on quality in education, all of these dimensions need to be examined. This raises a wider set of questions and the possibility of comparison with regard to stratification and diversity within the Indian schooling system, between management types and across economic classes than is popularly examined in the research literature. This framework is used in the two empirical studies reported in Chapters 7 and 8.

This chapter presents the beliefs and practices of five government teachers who challenge the stereotypical image of being dysfunctional, lacking in motivation and not being accountable. The framework of folk pedagogy is used to analyse and present their interpretations of the context, children, educational aims and their own professional identity and role vis-à-vis children's contexts of disadvantage. The teacher–student relationship is synthesised and conceptualised in metaphors including friend, mother and guru.

The chapter presents empirical data from a survey of 84 schools in one education mandal of the city of Hyderabad. The school management, organisation and clientele are studied and the quality framework (from Chapter 6) is used to examine quality of education across a range of institutions – government, aided, private unaided and unrecognised schools. Schools are found to cater to stratified and homogenous clientele groups, with charities catering to the poorest of the poor. A typology of provider types and clientele socioeconomic groups is proposed and is used to explain the diversity of quality observed. Pedagogic forms varying from 'domesticating' to 'textbook cultures' and 'child-centred' education are found to be largely determined by the institutional ethos, economic niche and clientele rather than by individual teachers.

This chapter contrasts two different approaches – 'managerial' and 'teaching-as-a-profession' – to explain how the ideas around the work of teachers and teaching in general, and more specifically with reference to government school teachers, are being conceptualised in contemporary policy debates. It provides two distinct formulations around issues of accountability, efficiency, motivation, qualifications and capacities, pedagogy, knowledge and beliefs, professionalism and agency of the teachers. The chapter advocates for giving centrality to pedagogic efforts and teacher beliefs in conceptualisation of teaching against the technical approach to teaching emanating from 'New Public Management' discourse.

Le parti du peuple indien (Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) a remporte les elections nationales de 2015 a une majorite ecrasante, conduisant au pouvoir Narendra Modi et balayant toute opposition. Il n’existe actuellement pas de chef de file reconnu de l’opposition a la Chambre du peuple. On s’attendait a ce que le nouveau gouvernement, de droite, annonce des changements et des initiatives en matiere d’education, conformement a son ideologie et a sa source d’inspiration ideologique – le Rashtriya ...

The research and discussion on quality in Indian education has been disproportionately shaped by the government schools vs private school war and focused on primary schools for the 'poor'. We have little or no formal knowledge of the vast and growing private sector of schools. Surveys and studies tend to take a segmented view – either focusing on the middle-class segment akin to market surveys or exclusively focusing on the schools catering to the lower socio-economic segment, where learning outcome and parental choice have dominated understanding issues. These studies tend to 'plug into' and add grist to the government vs private schools war with assumptions on how quality is produced by the state (bureaucracy) vs the market, highlighting features such as teachers' accountability and cost efficiency/value for money or what is to be valued as an education outcome. This chapter is based on a survey of all 85 schools in one education block of the city of Hyderabad. It addresses questions such as: what types of institutions exist, how diverse are they, and what part of this diversity is of educational consequence in terms of meriting attention and providing explanations or having explanatory potential. What are their education qualities, what is the diversity in these qualities and why? The chapter takes an 'ecosystem' approach to understanding the diversification, in relation to the changing role of the state as a provider of schools, the role of charities, trusts, and societies, and more recently the market catering to socio-economic class. It also provides a new approach to understanding pedagogic forms. A typology of school management is developed which is found to be useful in understanding how they develop and adapt aims of education and translate them into institutional forms within an education market. Schools are found to be highly segmented, with homogeneity in clientele reflecting either socio-economic class or religion or disability. Charitable institutions are found to be key in the education of the poorest of the poor.