Mapping Educational Studies in the Indian Context

How education is constituted as a knowledge domain and the ext­ent to which it may be identified as a discipline have been matters of scholarly debates from the inception of education studies. Arguably, the lack of consensus and territorial tensions around these questions have shaped education research, policy, and practice and the fissures between them to a much greater degree than agreements on the foundational knowledge. The distinction in the connotations of “education studies” (as a broader category that includes studies of and for education) and “educational stu­dies” (as knowledge generation for imp­roving policy and practice) is situated in the context of these debates and discourses (Whitty 2006).

The predicaments of the domain have been studied in depth, albeit not consistently, in some contexts like the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). In the Indian context, scholarly literature on these concerns is much sparse. How the questions about the nat­ure of knowledge in education bear upon conceptualisation of research, policy, and practice is thus not extensively discussed in the literature in the Indian context. The book, Contextualising Edu­cational Studies in India: Research, Policy and Practices, edited by Pradeep ­Kumar Choudhury and Suresh Babu G S, alludes to a possibility of reflecting on some dimensions of the knowledge dom­ain by engaging with interdisciplinary questions and research approaches while focusing on education policy.