Opinion Teaching the teacher
The key link in making a success of the right to education.
The key challenge in school education is improving and sustaining quality. Poor student performance is directly linked to poor quality of teaching. The bulk of elementary schoolteachers in India are under-qualified and untrained. If 80 per cent of new schoolteachers are educated in unregulated private teaching shops,the rest are poorly prepared through inadequate pre-service training in public institutions that have outdated curricula.
Teacher-training capacity in educationally challenged states such as Assam,Bihar,Chhattisgarh,Jharkhand,Orissa,Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal is grossly inadequate. In order to meet the demands that the Right to Education Act places on teachers,pre-service education is made an essential requirement for newly recruited teachers by a gazette notification.
This means that additional resources are required to upgrade the professional capacities of close to one million existing under-qualified and untrained teachers and for the pre-service education of one million additional teachers to be recruited. If not attended to,the current situation will continue to drain public resources by attempting to motivate poorly qualified teachers through piecemeal in-service training without addressing the real needs of the classroom.
Elementary schoolteachers are currently prepared via a two-year diploma (DEd) in District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) or their equivalent,while secondary/ high school teachers are trained in BEd in colleges of teacher education (CTE) and some universities. DIETs have no systemic linkage with institutes of higher education and CTEs operate in an insular manner. Most schoolteachers remain intellectually isolated with no access to new knowledge created in universities and research institutes.
The RTE aims to ensure that elementary education of acceptable quality reaches all children. Yet,it fails to make a commitment and define workable institutional arrangements and regulation for the provision of quality pre-service education and on-site support. The discussions on the Twelfth Plan recognise that most schoolteachers may not be able to meet the aspirations of RTE until the national teacher education system is revitalised.
Pressures to recruit a large teaching workforce to meet RTE obligations have led many states to seek exemption from fulfilling their legally binding teacher qualification norms. This dilution will have serious consequences,as it is likely to weaken the teacher cadre,further ensuring poor learning outcomes. In fact,indiscriminate hiring of para-teachers that began in the mid-1990s to meet the targets of Universalisation of Elementary Education is perhaps the most important reason for abysmal learning outcomes in schools.
The National Curriculum Framework 2005 and the subsequent NCERT textbooks are heralded as path-breaking innovations in Indian school curriculum. The National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE) 2009 has now included the model syllabi to build the linkage between the education of teachers and learners. This is the missing link that the quality debate has failed to connect. Enabling this connection via regulation,reform and upgrade of teacher-training institutions could be the differentiating factor between performing and non-performing states in this decade.
There is a common belief,even among teacher educators,that a primary school maths teacher only needs to know mathematics up to primary grades. This concept may have found acceptability in Victorian England,but is out of place now.
The separation between what is taught and how it is taught has been contested by scholars across the world. Despite this,current models of teacher education focus on the mechanical planning of lessons in standardised formats,rituals of fulfilling the required number of lessons and other routine activities.
Working within deterministic frameworks,student-teachers even in leading BEd institutions rarely have opportunities to examine subject content or pedagogic approaches. This unquestioning practice of structuring teacher preparation around methods of teaching is at odds with the need for an engagement with schooling often beset with the dynamics of caste,gender,identity,linguistic and social exclusion.
Engagement with NCF-led pedagogy requires focus on the learner and her context apart from content and methodology. In this frame,the learner is viewed not as a textbook child but one who is to be understood in varying socio-cultural,economic and political contexts.
The solution does not lie in abandoning pre-service teacher education. Access to schooling,an adequate teaching-learning environment,an appropriate school curriculum and an empowered and inclusive teaching community are four crucial prerequisites of a school system that seeks to enable social transformation. While educational reform since the 1980s has focused on the first two elements,the NCF has brought school curriculum into national focus. The critical link that binds these four elements together is the teacher.
The need is to institutionalise the ideas articulated in the NCFTE in order to revitalise teacher education. This can be best achieved by bringing convergence between schools,the system of teacher education and higher education.
The writer teaches at the Central Institute of Education,University of Delhi
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