The long history of Montessori education in India dates to 1915, and it was expanded through Maria and Mario Montessori's work in India between 1939 to 1946 and 1947 to 1949. The article characterizes a century of Montessori education in India as a series of adapted, competing, and contested framings with key disputes over Montessori education's intended purpose, audience, and how much it could be adapted. First, from 1915 to 1939, Montessori education was connected to the Indian independence movement as nation-building education, but it was eclipsed by a parallel rise of elite, private Montessori schools, a framing reinforced by Maria Montessori's insistence on fidelity to her method. Starting in the 1950s, other Indian educators adapted Montessori for poor children, an emphasis that continues today with government and foundation-funded schools. Finally, in the last thirty years, India's new middle class has driven demand for early childhood education, leading to branded Montessori franchises, some bearing little resemblance to Montessori's original pedagogy.

The importance of education for Asian Americans looking to fight race-based discrimination, create a sense of community, and reclaim and establish an identity is well documented. In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape, Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, sued the San Francisco Board of Education and the principal of the Spring Valley Primary School—Jennie Hurley--after Hurley denied their daughter, Mamie, admission because she was “Chinese” (though born in the United States). The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tapes, but in 1885, the School Board appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of California where justices upheld the lower court's decision. Though Mamie would not be able to attend Spring Valley after the School Board successfully pushed for state-wide school segregation legislation, many “white-only” institutions began to admit Chinese American children after the Tape case.

This contribution is about a female transnational student from Turkey, Hafize, studying for four years at an Islamic Malaysian university. She was interviewed during the research project “Transnational Student Mobility in Higher Education in Asia”, a multi-sited ethnographic project containing six sub-studies aiming to illuminate student voices and the impact of cultural processes on student-inhabited transnational spaces, identity negotiations, and networks. Through a bottom-up perspective, and with life story as the principal method, the project illustrates processes of social change and relations between the individual and society. Questions are posed about, inter alia, the motivations and reasons that may be identified in the educational stories. Hafize's narrative is discussed as a relational and contextual story, in which family relations and the significance of education, gender, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic and political situations intersect. Education is given different meanings: instrumental and reflexive as well as emotional aspects. Turning points and the concept of capital, especially social and emotional capital, are addressed. Hafize's family of eight siblings is deeply involved in serial reciprocity, a tightly bonded network supporting all the children in their efforts to study. Hafize's story is substantially gendered and ‘ethnified’ – a reflexive emotional identity project, in which education and religion are given high priority. In Turkey secularist legislation was an obstacle. The studies abroad provided possibilities for self-development but tempered with some limitations.