Teaching expertise, like anything else, takes a lot of hard work and practice to develop. But what teachers are working at and what they are developing is not always commonly understood. Teachers and teacher educators often do what they know and over time hone their abilities, routines, and decision-making to elevate student thinking and learning. Their knowledge and practice-base are likely informed through their own trial and error, interactions with peers, and to a lesser extent through professional learning opportunities; leaving much to chance. Ostensibly, the reliance on one’s own experiences and the experiences of neighbors could be limited, and teacher and teacher-educator practice could benefit from informative academic research.

The research landscape for South Asia has been changing over the last few decades. As efforts to improve students’ learning and the teaching that supports it are better understood and dealt with, the barriers to improvement decrease, in large part because the individualistic manner of knowing what it takes to do the work of teaching has been replaced with stronger common understandings and activities: ones that are based in and for practice. In our reading and preparation for this book though, we struggled to find even a few narratives that grappled with what it takes to pull off the work of teaching and teacher education in the region.

As we set out to build this book, our premise was to raise two questions within our communities: Can we afford to let educational practice be guided by hunches and hopes? And, what might their academic reports look like if the primary focus was on practices and the secondary focus accounted for aims and ambitions, environment and context, policies and programs? In essence, we asked authors to foreground practice and push to the background all the rest. We did this because our contention is that oftentimes aims are so ambiguous and context so dependent that they cloud. Implementation is regularly up to local discretion and available capabilities, and to move away from the problem of vagueness, we felt a radical departure toward practices might help authors and readers alike better understand teaching and subsequently learning in South Asia. We debated whether such a path would help us actually see the strong and salient instruments that are being created and deployed that teacher educators, teachers, and students are actually using to advance learning. We weren’t sure. In short, though, we wanted to make use of and showcase whatever assets we could uncover.

What we found was that even in 2019 many practitioners are still not versed in basic teaching practices or even teaching moves. This seems to be the case, in spite of many having passed out of degree programs, or having attended teacher training programs. Fundamentals such as, ways to give instructions, ways to move in the classroom, ways to write on the board, wait-time, and ways to distribute materials are not part of what teachers know to do. The view that there are implications layered into these choices, or even that there are choices, remains unrecognized. And promising practices such as, leading group discussions, setting up and orchestrating small group work, providing oral and written feedback, reinforcing positive student behavior, diagnosing common patterns of student thinking, and posing questions in order to elicit student thinking, are even farther out on the horizon. As Herbert Simon, Victor A. Thompson, and Donald W. Smithburg (1950) wrote, “If the people do not know what they are supposed to do, they cannot do it” (Simon et al., p. 415).

Government school teaching in South Asia in the early 2000s was found to be lacking (Dyer et al., 2004; Mukunda, 2009; Ramachandran, Pal, Jain, Shekar, & Sharma, 2008) and as the cohort of authors for this volume have corroborated, teaching in South Asia is still dominated by reading directly from the textbook, having students follow along and repeat, and having students copy directly from the textbook into their notebooks. The haggard dusty spaces, the overwhelming numbers, and the teacher’s own experiences as a student continue to delimit their potential to alter and advance opportunities to learn.

The aims of teaching in South Asia, however, are changing. And this is presenting many challenges and opportunities for teachers. They are explicitly being told to engage their students, inspire them, and to teach through “constructivist” means in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India (Ministry of Human Resource and Development Agenda for Teacher Education, 2012; National Curriculum Framework, 2005; National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education, 2010). Teachers are being instructed to account for different learning styles, build confidence in students, and be reflective (i.e., during National Council of Educational Research & Training workshops 2010–2011). All of these duties are being put on to the teacher, in spite of the basics not even being understood in a way which might contribute to the teacher being comfortable with this new nuanced role, and as a result teachers struggle and continue to put children, and the nations they live in, at risk.

In order to help avoid aims and ambitions failure, we centered ourselves on practices and the ideas that inform them. The learning of teaching in and through practices is a way to expose teachers to explicated complex, ambitious teaching—minimize the risk—, and to open those practices up so that teachers are well equipped to selectively draw on them as needed (Britzman, 2012; Cohen, 2011; Lampert, 2001). When people learn practices, they enter a historically defined set of activities, developed over time by others. Dykstra (1991) defines practice as “participation in a cooperatively formed pattern of activity that emerges out of a complex tradition of interactions among many people sustained over a long period of time” (p. 43). Our own initiative, stems from U.S. academicsDeborah Loewenberg Ball and David Cohen, whose 1999 work theorized a practice-based approach to professional development for teachers (Ball & Cohen, 1999).

Teaching teachers about practices, techniques, and moves is consequential so that teachers can move toward larger ideals. Their understanding of fundamental practices needs to be in place, so that they may move on to higher order practices that they can leverage for student learning, growth, and advancement. In short, practice-based teaching and practice-based teacher education consist of the most recent innovations in education that purport to help students become people of quality, creativity, and character.

Recent academic research in industrialized nations has shown widespread attention on practice (Ball and Cohen, 1999; Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010; Zeichner, 2012) and lead to a few fundamental questions for South Asia: Why aren’t some teachers and teacher educators drawn to practice-based teacher education? What is it that the field in South Asia knows about practice-based teaching and teacher education? And, in what ways and to what extent are teachersand teacher educators harnessing the potential that practice-based teaching affords in South Asia? We ask these questions because in spite of the great appeal of practice-based teaching and teacher education in other parts of the world, it seems the ideas haven’t been very well unpacked across the subcontinent. Two main driving questions orient the chapters in this volume: (1) What is the work involved in teaching students in South Asia? and (2) What kinds of opportunities to learn might the teaching of practice present for teacher-learners?

Why Focus on Practice?

As it turns out classroom teaching can be quite a complicated endeavor. Negotiating the interface between students, the teacher, and content is not a simple matter (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003). As researchers have shown, to teach in intellectually “ambitious” ways (Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007; Lampert, Beasley, Ghousseini, Kazemi, & Franke, 2010; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2012) requires proficiency in subject‐matter knowledge (Ball & Wilson, 1996; Schwab, 1964, 1971), pedagogical knowledge (Shulman, 1986) pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987), and adaptive expertise (Bransford, Derry, Berliner, & Hammerness, 2005; Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).

To put these constructs into context, a sketch of the demands on Standard IX Social Studies teachers may help.Footnote 1 In Standard IX Indian classrooms, teachers might need to teach about the spread of Buddhism in the ancient world. To do so, the teachers would need to have some basic subject-matter knowledge. They would need to know functional details—characters involved and places of note. And they would need to know more crucial ideas about interaction and historic modes of communication. They would need to know about the rigidity of ancient forerunners of Buddhism in order to contrast them with contemporary versions. They would need to know the debates between and the threats to the ancient spiritual practices. They would need to know how research has shifted extant perspectives on these topics as well. To be effective, the teachers would benefit from some pedagogical knowledge, too. They would need to know the subtle characteristics of each student, and have a broader sense of the common patterns of thinking of IX standard students, in order to leverage opportunities for them to not only know information, but also read carefully, identify themes, and write and talk persuasively about them. To generate student thinking the teacher would need to have some proficiency in pedagogical content knowledge. They would have to be able to draw from their subject-matter knowledge and their pedagogical knowledge and reformulate the content in terms, modes, and representations that fit well for their Standard IX students; being attentive all the time to their languages and cultures. They would need to be selective and thoughtful about the resources they deployed, in order to challenge assumptions and provide opportunities for students to question historical sources.

Then, they would have to marshal and mobilize all of this acquired knowledge and expertise skilfully as they enact a lesson. This would entail the teachers having practiced and honed routines that could facilitate and ease learning opportunities. They would need to organize time, space, materials, and students strategically and deliberately, and design sequences of lessons that provided opportunities for inquiry and discovery. The teachers would need to foster student engagement, provide opportunities for students to practice core disciplinary skills, such as reading, writing, discussing, interpreting, and evaluating. They would need to have adaptive strategies as well that would allow them to capably respond to what students do or say, ask questions when necessary, and listen when needed. They would have to iteratively assess what students have come to know and are able to do as a result of the instruction before, during, and after the lesson. They would have to lead a whole-class discussion, prompting some to talk and urging others to listen. And they would have to manage small groups, as well as individual work; collective thinking as well as individual.

Then, they would need to be reflective and analytical about their efforts as well as the students’. They would need to find media and mechanisms that would support them in analyzing the complex interactions that just occurred, and doggedly critique their effort looking for ways to improve and enhance the learning opportunities. They may need to find ways to communicate about their teaching with trusted peers, teacher leaders, or outside resource persons. And, they need to do all of this work in relation to external benchmarks and guidelines, and ensure that it meshes with personal goals, but also with larger societal ones.

It may seem that only demigods or magicians might be able to pull this off. But teaching and teacher education, with a focus on practice, can bolster practitioners efforts to enhance student thinking and learning in such ambitious ways. A focus on practice is not an effort to harken back to competency-based teaching and teacher education. Rather, it is an effort to move the field forward (Setty, 2013). A counter view to Competency Based Teacher Education has been posited by contemporary reformers of teacher education in the United States, where “practice” has come to represent a way of thinking about the work of teaching. Researchers have termed such work as “core practices” (Grossman & McDonald, 2008), “generative practices” (Franke & Chan, 2008; Franke & Kazemi, 2001), and “high-leverage practices” (Ball, Sleep, Boerst, & Bass, 2009; Hatch & Grossman, 2009), and in doing so are building on each other’s efforts to determine the focus of teachers’ education. For Tom Hatch and Pam Grossman, high-leverage practices are those instructional approaches that will help teachers face problems that commonly come up while teaching, and also are vehicles for their own learning. For example, orchestrating group discussions will lead to opportunities for students to articulate their thinking, which in turn will offer the teacher opportunities to think about issues that come up in terms of content, pedagogy, and student thinking. Members of the University of Michigan’s School of Education have formulated another definition of “high-leverage practices.” In their work, the community of scholar-practitioners identified 19 practices, such as “Making content explicit through explanation, modeling, representations, and examples” and “Implementing organizational routines, procedures, and strategies to support a learning environment.” These practices constitute the curricular core of teacherpreparation efforts in some related programs.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Francesca Forzani (2009) explain that “High-leverage Practices” include tasks and activities that are essential for beginning teachers to understand, take responsibility for, and be prepared to carry out in order to skillfully enact their core instructional responsibilities” (Ball & Forzani, 504). The definition highlights an important shift in the move away from competencies to practices. “Practices” includes technique and more. As teaching is purposeful, principled, and constituted by relational work, the learner is of central importance in this definition, as are the instructional responsibilities. In this view of instruction, technique sits within broader social, educational, and individual aims (Lampert, 2001). And, it can be used as a resource to study and coordinate the technique with broader intellectual aims and social responsibilities that constitute such practices.

An orientation to practice is not new in education or in philosophy. John Dewey’s thoughts on practice have supported this orientation in teacher education and provide another counterargument against convictions that privilege technique over principled practice. In his seminal essay, Dewey argues that theory and practice in teachers’ education are interrelated (Dewey, 1904). For Dewey, the psychology, the logic, and the ethics of developing children requires grounding in theoretical ideas of teaching and learning. Without this base the teacher runs the risk of under-developing an ability to grow in their professional position over time (Dewey, p. 151). There are “evils” that Dewey points to that will develop out of an emaciated theoretical grounding; e.g., lack of intellectual independence, inability to maintain steady growth, and intellectual subservience—an inability to cultivate independent thinking (Dewey, p. 151). Additionally, Dewey notes that the aim of theory is to support the practical work of learning to teach. “Practice work,” as he calls it, is not merely the site of enacting or witnessing techniques of teaching, however. Rather, the role of practice is to incite intellectual reactions about theory in the professional learner (Dewey, p. 143). Dewey’s concern with the relationship between theory and practice in teachers’ education moved him to articulate the particulars of what practice work could entail if leveraged. In practice environments students of teaching would: (1) observe psychological and theoretical insights; (2) observe an intimate introduction to the lives of students, by being useful in helping the instructor; (3) encounter opportunities to observe the technical points of classroom teaching and management; (4) participate in the actual doing of teaching, with maximum liberty; and (5) learn teaching through an apprenticeship (Dewey, pp. 166–169). These elements were tangible ways that Dewey saw that the relationship between theory and practice could be bridged in a laboratory-type of learning environment.

Practice includes larger educational aims for learners and for society, and they include commitments to subject-matter knowledge and the skills that come along with it (Cohen, 2011). When practice is given a priority in teacher education it centers learning about instruction on what teachers do with students in classrooms, and with content. Attention on practice has implications for the content, method, and structure in teacher education practice.

To orient this discussion on teaching and teacher education practices from the vantage point of modern academic research institutions is an acceptable starting point, but the theory–practice debate has long threads that reach back to ancient South Asia as well. A useful discussion of which can be found when drawing upon Sheldon Pollock’s article, The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History (Pollock, 1985). In his work, Pollock argues that in Sanskritic culture śāstra (“theory”) and prayoga (“practical activity”) were inextricably bound in śāstras (pronounced sha-s-thras), such as the Rig Veda, Manusmriti, and the Kāmaśāstra. The association was not causal in these texts—where knowledge of theory preceded practical endeavors—rather the two mutually affected, constrained, and informed one another.

Pollock argues that the śāstras have a mythical aura about them, which has implications on the prioritization of theory. The very notion of a śāstra implies that it was conceived primordially and composed in ethereal ways as opposed to through the hands of humans. This implies that knowledge is fixed. If knowledge is fixed, then the practices that depend on it are also set. If practices need not evolve, change, or grow, then experimentation, invention, and discovery are unnecessary. Pollock—citing architecture and mathematics—notes that he is not arguing that innovation does not exist in India, or that it has not occurred. Rather, he is pointing out that such innovations are viewed through an inverted ideological lens, which claims that these achievements are results of “renovations and recoveries.” Where Pollock’s argument proves helpful is that while these texts are cosmological and highly theoretical in nature, they are nevertheless blueprints for how the cosmic should proceed; i.e., guides for everyday practice (Pollock, p. 518).

In Sanskritic India, śāstras were programmatic. According to Pollock, communities were brimming with extraordinary taxonomies and nomological handbooks that made homogeneity conducive for over two thousand years. As the oral became textual, such articulations were seen as devices rather than storehouses of knowledge. For example, the 196 yoga śāstras of Patañjali detail the aims, intentions, and consequences of yogic beliefs, while also detailing the āsanas (body positions) that aid in harnessing the physical, mental, and spiritual through concentration. And the Ayurveda, derived from the Rig Veda, merges the codified natural laws with natural medicinal treatments. Furthermore, the Kāmaśāstra —the procedural handbook about human sexual conduct—also provides treatments of theory in procedural terms. As a result, Pollock argues such śāstras need not be interpreted as theoretical treatises, but rather prescriptive systems (Pollock, p. 504).

Even though they had emerged from a primordial status explicating how to achieve “the meaning of life,” the śāstras developed into specialized texts that present the practical means to reach there.Footnote 2 Pollock draws on RāmānujaFootnote 3 to argue for the basis of this view: “Śāstra is so called because it instructs; instruction leads to action, and śāstra has this capacity to lead to action by reason of its producing knowledge” (Rāmānuja in Pollock, p. 509).Footnote 4 Thus, following Pollock, even the most substantial primordial texts in ancient India are manuals. Today, the priority of knowledge from the śāstras frame many decisions in India. Some view them as faultless and well defined. But as the śāstras themselves are of great importance, Pollock’s analysis that theory and practice have been fused for some time warrants recognition for this present volume.

My comments here on Pollock’s treatment of the theory–practice dialectic in ancient India hardly do justice to the complexity of his argument and the issues he raises. What I find compelling is that it echoes modern assumptions that practice can be codified, and to adequately understand such codification it is best not to divorce it from theory. Critics of this work might argue that employing a practice-based theory is a neocolonial endeavor, in which we are importing an American conceptualization that holds no applicability in South Asia. They may claim, also, that an overly systematized way of teaching and teacher education impedes the progress that can be gained from more organic growth, and that teaching and teacher education is best informed through local truths and firsthand experiences. However, if Pollock’s argument is acceptable, then such a view imports provisions for the counterargument that progress in South Asian teaching and teacher education depends on intentional design, codified patterns of performance, and a grammar of practices.

What Is This Book About?

This edited volume is about how Teaching and Teacher Education is currently being understood and practiced among diverse communities of education practitioners and policy enactors in South Asia. It borrows conceptual ideas from industrialized nations, and it brings together an assortment of authors from the fields of education and development, representing a wide range of positions from strong believers in practice-based approaches in research, extension, and development, as well as those who approach practice-based teaching and teacher education with strong skepticism. The most distinguishing feature of this book is its combined focus on what it takes to effectively execute both teaching and teacher education as it endures in South Asia. It is our intention that this volume will help to raise questions about current teacher and teacher education paradigms, but also that it will call out future trends in the professionalization of teaching and teacher education.

This volume is also about deeply exploring specific ways of teaching and teaching teachers how to teach in South Asian educational contexts. In particular, it is about generating a systematic look on using high-leverage practices and using those same sets of practices as a medium to teach teachers. Our intended focus is on how both teaching and teacher education is enacted, what teachers and teacher educators do, and how the learners inform these efforts. With such a focus, this volume does little with social, historical, or cultural background or implications, as one might expect from edited volumes on education in South Asia. We argue that this framework engenders the volume to be more accessible and usable for the communities we intend this book to flourish in. Moreover, we believe that our approach to seeking out authors from the classroom, teacher education institutions, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and academic institutions for this book distinguishes it from its predecessors. As South Asia is rich with nongovernmental and quasi-governmental agencies, we have incorporated chapters cowritten by academics and practitioners to allow for interaction (and participation) between theory and practice.

At the same time this volume has an interdisciplinary feel, positioning not only the work of both teaching and teacher education, but also casting it within different educational genres, such as cognitive and social science, subject-matter disciplines, and qualitative and quantitative research. Moreover, this volume showcases works from large-scale efforts across Pakistan and India, as well as interventions and academic analyses at the local levels in these countries, as well as from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The book also asked these educators to bring to light the practice-based theory and techniques they use while teaching in various settings—classrooms, communities, organizations, online, and others. As editors we asked authors to use their settings to inform the ideas presented here, as they are more than mere bystanders in the ways teaching and teacher education unfold. We keyed in on multiple disciplinary perspectives as well, as we recognized that this volume’s success would rely on a dialogue between both analytic quantitative research articles as well as carefully thought out qualitative ones.

Formula for the Book

Tackling topics in education relevant throughout South Asia, the books in this series demonstrate the linkages between research, policy, and practice. Authors employ varied methodological approaches (qualitative, quantitative, and mixed) to address specific topics in policy and practice, such as teacher education, technology, educational planning, and globalization of education. This book has a regional scope, focusing on interactions and developments across the region as opposed to single-country case studies. The series developed out of the work of the South Asia Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), which brings together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to discuss pertinent issues, and welcomes work from non-SIG members and SIG members alike.

As an editorial team we worked together and with our publisher to create the concept of a book that focuses on practice in South Asia. We honed our thinking and responded to feedback from Palgrave before we sent our call for contributions out. We then made a focused attempt to solicit contributions from practitioners and academics from the region, and also from universities and NGOs from industrialized nations. After several rounds of feedback, revisions, discussions, and debates, we finalized all drafts and went to print. In what follows, we provide a snapshot of our thinking on the bones of the project, and the topics that our authors’ chapters speak to.

How Does the Book Break Down?

In the first part—The Enduring and the New Questions in Teaching and Teacher Education in South Asia—we introduce the broad trends and debates prevalent within teaching and teacher education research and practice. Furthermore, this part introduces the concepts and issues pertaining to practice-based teaching and teacher education in the region.

A functional purpose of this introductory part is to describe to readers the objectives and purposes of the volume and to present the critical approach of this project, which aims to bring together multiple voices and perspectives on teaching and teacher education and its relevance to the education sector in South Asia. This part is comprised of three chapters. First, Samanthi Senaratne and Nuwan Gunarathne work to explicate what teacher educators might learn from professors of accounting and finance in Sri Lanka; specifically that goal-oriented practices are the driving force behind improvements in accounting education at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Second, Jyoti Bawane’s chapter sets the stage by explaining what has been done in India before for teachers’ education. And third, Professor Subitha Menon rekindles the conversation on “policy rhetoric versus policy achievement” and offers suggestions for certain reforms, which if taken up, might derive strength from practice-based teacher education.

Together these chapters orient us to some of the enduring questions of teaching and teacher education as they exist in South Asia; i.e., How is practice being considered today? What is the role of practice? Where is practice-based teaching and teacher education heading?, as well as new questions, such as: What are the ways in which educators can be looking to and learning from other professional education efforts, such as medicine, law, and accounting?

The second and third parts—Empirical Research on Teaching in South Asia and Empirical Research on Teacher Education in South Asia—constitute the bulk of the real estate in the volume and showcase chapters that provide recent research on teaching and teacher education in South Asia. The parts roll together multiple methodological studies, trend-level analyses, and case studies. All of which grapple with the work of doing teaching or teacher education and question its evolution.

Maya Kalyanpur’s research report of six case studies of teachers’ practices in Indian English Medium Low-Fee Private Schools showcases how choral recitation, copying from the board into notes, and the deliberate neglect of struggling students remain as core practices of teaching in the ubiquitous schools that mushroomed as a result of government abdication of education as a public good. The second research report in this section dives into the Pakistan Reading Project and discusses how social and cultural norms and practices in Pakistan predispose boys to engage less in reading. Shaheen Ashraf Shah and Grace Armstrong’s research draws from the USAID’s National Gender Study and expands upon the notion of practices to include not only the pedagogical practices deployed by teachers, but also the learners’ practices and those of the families that support them. Moroever, the research delves into the darkness of how the practice of violence affects students’ learning opportunities and outcomes. Turning back to India, the third chapter in this part by Vincy Davis from the Accountability Initiative maps—through a mixed-methods analysis—how teachers use their time in 39 different Delhi schools, and contrasts administrative/clerical practices with pedagogical practices. Davis’s use of survey and interview data paints a painful picture of degrading morale and self-esteem for teachers as the clerical demands for their time often win out over pedagogical ones. The next chapter for the Empirical Research on Teaching part comes from the Maldives and Professor Rhonda D. Biase. Her work investigates how teachers can enact active learningpedagogy in the Maldivian education system through a design-based research methodology. In her report, she explores the pedagogical practice of concept mapping through photo and graphic elicitation of student thinking techniques as the Maldives transition from teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning.

The final chapter in this part serves as a bridge between the exploratory section on teaching practice and the follow-up section on teacher education. Professors Amy Moyer and Jill Sperandio examine the problem of “transfer of training” to practice within the context of government primary schools in Bangladesh, by considering three qualitative case studies of novice teachers and their practice. Their research report voices how novice teachers implemented methods that they were taught as part of their teacher education program, but that these methods were unambitious and conventional, such as question and answer types of techniques. Thus, the transfer of training for Moyer and Sperandio was successful, but this success wasn’t leading to an emancipated form of teaching or learning.

Refocusing on teacher education, the first chapter of part three is a collaboration from educators at the Piramal School of Leadership in Gujarat, India and academics at NYU. In this piece Mahjabeen Raza, Sharon Kim, Monal Jayaram, Vivek Sharma, Aditya Natraj, and Edward Seidman explore how the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS) developed at NYU unfolds and evolves in Gujarat under the efforts of Gandhi Fellows, District Administrators, School Leaders, and Teachers, and how the linchpins of feedback and video-based analyses feature in these efforts. The final chapter in part three assesses a continuous professional development program implemented at scale in India. In the analyses set forth by Bindu Thirumalai, Anusha Ramanathani, and Amina Charaniai from TISS, and Glenda Stump from MIT, the core construct of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) unfolds during a mass-teacher education activity with over 2000 teachers, and how reflection can be bolstered through the use of ICT tools is explored.

In the final part—Humanizing, Professionalizing, and Intellectualizing the Policy Goals for Teaching and Teacher Education—we focus on ways in which the promoted ideals of policymakers have shaped and are being shaped by teachersand teacher educators. Chapters present analyses of macro-policies and frameworks, cultural myths of teachers and teacher education, and alignment with teaching and teacher education and sociopolitical goals and tactics. More than a restatement of policy frameworks and what they entail, these chapters concern themselves with the localization of policies and reinterpretation of ideas into practices. In particular, chapters explore how teaching and teacher education policies are being reframed and applied, whether it is through local interpretations of national narratives, or deep dives into district or state-wide plans, or even school-level actions.

The first chapter in this part by Professor Suzanna Brinkmann argues that teachers’ beliefs should become an important focus of Indian Teacher Education, and elevates her argument by considering what kinds of teacher education processes are more likely to contribute to changes in teacher beliefs. The chapter also explores a framework for Indian teacher educators seeking to engage with teachers’ beliefs, anchored by two practice-oriented theories: Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1990) and Freirean problem-posing (Freire, 1970). The penultimate chapter for this part by Professor Supriya Baily and Swati Sodhi examines a much-debated policy framework in India in the Right to Education Act. Their research, however, explores the policy affordances and limitations through the lens of extra-curricular activities, and how RTE has exacerbated some of the more dehumanizing and unprofessional aspects of the current state of teaching and learning in India. The final chapter in this part examines the rapid expansion of public–private partnerships and philanthropy in pushing forward a green agenda through teaching and learning across India. In the chapter, Professors Preeti R. Kanaujia and Rajeswari N. Gorana provide an important historical, legislative, and contemporary context for the potential enhancement of Environmental Education and the sustainable development on India’s horizon.

The contributed chapters conclude with an original capstone piece on Pastoral Care from Ashwathi Muraleedharan, a standard V classroom teacher in India, who capably articulates one teacher’s view on her role and what teaching entails. The final chapter by Erik Jon Byker and Matthew A. Witenstein concludes the volume and synthesizes the editorial team’s takeaways.

Our Hope for How to Read the Book and Render It into Practice

This book will be especially useful in wide-ranging situations. We view it as a robust compilation of current research and practices for practitioners, researchers, and academics in the field of education, offering an excellent overview of the theories of practice-based teaching and teacher education, as well as the key issues regarding the deployment of practice-based teaching and teacher education as they unfold in education settings across South Asia. We also have taken care to provide a special emphasis on regional adaptations of industrialized nations’ stances on teaching and teacher education.

As educators across South Asia continue to struggle, the volume offers a provocative introduction to practice-based teaching and teacher education and highlights innovations in the combined practices of practice-based teaching and teacher education. And while readers may find that the majority of the chapters adopt the premise that practice-based teaching and teacher education can provide enhanced opportunities for teaching and learning, not all of them do. In some cases, the critiques may prove to be more helpful than the affirmations.

Our target audiences include students of teaching—both novice and practicing, academics pursuing explorations of teaching and teacher education settings, and policy practitioners seeking insight into how their own efforts are unfolding in real spaces. With respect to students of teaching, particularly those at the graduate level, we see this volume as a reference resource for you. We hope the book will be attractive to students studying the work of curriculum and teaching, the intersections between policy and practice, international development, comparative education, mixed-methods research, and enhanced teaching modalities. We believe it will prove an attractive text for course adoption in Graduate Faculties of Education, Social Work, Development Studies, Rural Development, Development Sociology, and Gender Studies, where courses on such themes as “community based development,” “activity based learning,” and “participatory learning” continue to increase in demand.

If you are a sociologist, anthropologist, or political scientist, the volume will provide an accessible introduction and collection of articles, acting as a key reference text on the use of education policy appropriation and development in South Asia. All volume authors were encouraged to draw on the wider literatures on teaching and teacher education, its evolution and incorporation in global and local policymaking for their chapters. Finally, this volume will act as a reference for domestic and international policy practitioners in education and other social services, whose work increasingly requires them to have a respectable understanding of how teaching and teacher education gets done, unfolds, the activities of those involved, and their impacts on children’s learning processes and outcomes.

As an editorial team we endeavored to support program and policy evaluations, and journalistic accounts, by guiding them toward more critical and analytical stances. We were more successful in some cases than others. Nevertheless, all of the chapters illuminate the on-the-ground practices and pedagogies that are unfolding in South Asian classrooms today and have the ability to serve as linchpins for others to learn from and deploy in their own practice in South Asia and abroad.