Learning Curve: Azim Premji University's Magazine on School Education
Learning Curve is an education magazine published by Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, Karnataka, for the people who run and reflect on Indian schooling — teachers, teacher educators, school heads, educational functionaries, parents and non-governmental organisations, and, in its current reimagined form, policymakers. It takes up contextual and thematic issues of enduring relevance to school education, providing a platform for varied opinions, perspectives and stories of innovation, in a balance between an academic and a practitioner-oriented magazine. It is available free, in print and online, with an archive of issues reaching back two decades.
The teacher stands at the centre of its worldview. As one of its issues puts it, the teacher is central to the teaching-learning process whatever a school's policies and whichever board it follows; what creates and sustains a good teacher is therefore a question the magazine returns to again and again.
A Publication of Azim Premji University
Learning Curve is published from Azim Premji University's Bengaluru campus, with the university's publications office handling the magazine and its distribution. The university is the Azim Premji Foundation's institution for education and development studies, and its magazines for school education form part of a deliberate outreach: good-quality learning resources for practising teachers, teacher educators and educational functionaries, promoting dialogue on current discourses and perspectives on education, classroom pedagogy, research and on-the-ground experience.
The magazine carries the ISSN 2582-1644. Its issues have appeared over many years — earlier issues were numbered in a long roman-numeral sequence, with Issue XXII appearing in 2014, before a renumbered series in which Issue 5 appeared in December 2019 and later issues continued into the 2020s, including Issue 18 on understanding the National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage and the Jan–April 2026 issue. Through format changes, the continuity of purpose has remained: writing about Indian schools from inside the system.
Who It Is Written For
The magazine's own description names its audience precisely: teachers, teacher educators, school heads, educational functionaries, parents and NGOs working on contextual and thematic issues of enduring value. That list spans the whole ecology of a school — the classroom teacher, the trainer who trains her, the head who leads the school, the officer who administers the block, the parent whose child attends, and the voluntary organisation supporting them.
In its reimagined form, Learning Curve is explicitly designed also for policymakers, serving as a bridge that translates policy into practice through clear analysis and thoughtful perspectives, with articles rooted in firsthand field experience. The aim is to capture the challenges, potential and possibilities within the system so that education reforms lead to meaningful, lasting change. Few Indian education publications speak to both ends of that chain — the ministry and the classroom — in the same issue.
Themes Across the Issues
Learning Curve organises each issue around a theme, and its back catalogue reads as a history of Indian school education's central concerns. An early issue examined teacher absence in India, one of the system's most insistent problems, alongside documented observations from Chinese mathematics classrooms for their potential lessons for India. Issue 9 explored the importance of community participation in education, featuring a remarkable teacher in Gujarat and a review of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its argument for education as a tool of liberation.
Issue 21 took up the theme of enabling — the empowering activities needed by youngsters facing barriers to academic and life skills — with contributions from practising teachers, educators and students across India, including one from a school at 12,000 feet in distant Leh, covering empowerment through responsible citizenry, community involvement, collaborative learning and attitudinal change through dialogue. Issue 26, published in 2017, focused on the teacher: the policy and practice of teacher development, alternatives to existing approaches, gender sensitisation, and pre-service teacher preparation and the realities of its curriculum, followed by practitioners' accounts from private and public institutions — critiques of the present system measured against theory, and testimony from teachers working with dedication in remote areas without sophisticated teaching aids.
Early Childhood, Anganwadis and Foundational Learning
A substantial strand of the magazine addresses the earliest years. Contributors have written extensively on anganwadis — India's community childcare centres — including a day in the life of an anganwadi teacher, what teachers needed when anganwadis reopened after closures, environment awareness and wellbeing in anganwadis, and the teacher's role in early identification of developmental delays. Play as central to foundational learning received detailed treatment in the issue devoted to understanding the National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage.
This attention follows the evidence the magazine's community works with: a child's opportunities are shaped long before they can make choices, and what happens at two years of age determines much of what is open to them later. Learning Curve treats early childhood educators as professionals whose practice deserves the same serious print attention as any other teacher's.
Classroom Practice and the Life of Schools
Much of the magazine is given to the texture of schooling itself. Articles have examined the challenges of using teaching-learning materials — including the revealing finding that materials often remain locked in cupboards because teachers fear losing or spoiling them, while other teachers improvise with pebbles, mobile phones and seed germination in wet cotton wool to move children from rote learning toward understanding. Stories and storytelling recur as a serious pedagogical theme: how to be a good storyteller, how stories carry language learning and socialisation, and how picture books can open conversations on complex questions such as caste and land.
Wellbeing and the emotional life of schools also feature, with articles on pursuing happiness at school and nurturing wellbeing, written by practitioners and school quality assessors working on systemic reform through mentoring and coaching of teachers. Constitutional values in school have been examined through a dedicated school programme. The common thread is respect for practice: knowledge is drawn from classrooms and then organised so other classrooms can use it.
The 2026 Issue: Costs, Funding and Field Responses
The Jan–April 2026 issue of Learning Curve examines everyday challenges in India's public education system, including rising household costs and the persistent underfunding of teachers that affect access and learning. It highlights practical responses from the field, such as community libraries in Karnataka and a decentralised, demonstration-based approach to teacher professional development. The pairing is characteristic: a structural problem stated plainly, and field-level responses documented with equal care, so that policymakers reading the issue see both the constraint and the working alternative.
Contributors and How to Write for It
Learning Curve's contributors are largely practitioners and field-based educators — resource persons working with government schools, foundation staff based in districts from Raipur to Dhamtari, university faculty, and teachers writing about their own classrooms — alongside academics and education specialists. Author notes in the magazine routinely give the writer's posting and experience, grounding each article in a place and a practice.
The magazine invites articles from people with experience in education policy formulation and implementation in India, asking for insightful pieces of up to about 1,500 words addressed to its editors. Feedback is invited at the same editorial address, and the tone of the invitation — practical, specific, field-first — matches the magazine itself.
Free Subscription and the Archive
Learning Curve is free. Readers can read each issue online or download the whole magazine from Azim Premji University's website, subscribe at no cost to receive it regularly, and browse the full back list of issues in the university's publications archive. Its editorial pages list the university's Bengaluru address and publications contact, and the magazine is produced in Bengaluru with the same print infrastructure as the university's other school-education titles.
Free access is integral to its purpose. A magazine about public education that only fee-paying readers could reach would contradict its own argument; instead, Learning Curve is built to reach the government-school teacher, the district functionary and the small NGO worker as readily as the researcher.
Place Among India's Education Magazines
Within Azim Premji University's family of school-education magazines, Learning Curve is the generalist — where At Right Angles goes deep on mathematics and iWonder... on science, Learning Curve takes school education whole: policy and practice, early childhood and adolescence, classrooms and communities. Published from Bengaluru, written largely by the people who work in Indian schools, and reimagined to bridge policymakers and practitioners, it stands as one of the most thoughtful records of how Indian schooling actually works — and how the people inside it are trying, issue by issue, to make it work better.
