Teachers first

A teacher with a poster demanding higher wages pinned on her back, in Gurgaon in February. - PTI

The state is not serious about the need for a robust programme of elementary teacher education to realise the right to education.

IN India today it is difficult to decide how the agenda for teacher education and its reform can be taken forward. The Right to Education will succeed only if teachers are able to work to ensure that all children do become educated by attending school; effectively, this means that the state has placed the onerous responsibility of ensuring the realisation of the right on teachers. Given the diversity and complexity of the situations of children who are now entering the portals of our schools, teachers need to have at their disposal a deep fund of empathy, commitment, conviction and ability and motivation to persevere; of knowledge and resources to respond and create meaningful educational experiences for all children.

Existing pre-service teacher education programmes for elementary schoolteachers, the two-year, post-secondary school Diplomas in Education, are ill-equipped to achieve this, even in places where they are conducted sincerely. Dominant D.Ed syllabi tend to follow Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) formats they are oriented to teaching textbooks', they lack grounding in contemporary understanding of childhood, child development and learning theory, and they assume middle-class norms, leaving student-teachers with only deficit' theories to use when thinking about families and children of the poor or marginalised groups.

That a reformed and robust programme of elementary teacher education has a bearing on realising the right to education is obvious, yet there is immense reluctance on the part of the state to respond to this requirement with the seriousness it deserves. The Eleventh Plan for teacher education has still not been okayed by the Finance Department. Important ideas in it to strengthen the involvement of universities in elementary education and to create block-level institutes for teacher education in backward districts remain unattended, even as the Twelfth Plan is just around the corner in 2012.

The National Council for Teacher Education again lost its head just as it began to take up and respond resolutely and sensibly to important agendas such as preparing a new teacher education curriculum framework, setting down teacher qualifications to be notified under the RTE, and formulating the teacher eligibility test. Some States which had just begun to initiate a review of the State D.Ed curricula have now put the processes on hold in response to these confusing signals from the Centre. We are seeing a struggle regarding the place and form of teacher education reform on the national agenda. There seem to be two reasons for this. The first is a more obvious financial one, and the second is more subtle.

Teachers are the most expensive' part of the education system, and any effort to cut costs of education strikes at teachers' salaries. This is seen widely in the private sector, where teachers are paid a pittance and there is enormous variability in pay. Beginning with Shiksha Karmi, the Indian state has legitimised the creation of para- teachers' in primary education. By definition, these teachers are not expected to have pre-service teacher education qualifications. Some researchers claim that these teachers produce equal if not better results in terms of children's learning. Some researchers even claim that the small unregulated private schools, which keep costs very low by employing unqualified teachers and paying them very little, achieve better results' than government schools with qualified and well-paid teachers. The claim is that they provide better value for money' and that investment in pre-service teacher education is unnecessary.

Structured curricula, close monitoring and the incentivised practice of payment by results' would, it is claimed, be the best way to take quality education to all children. These arguments are founded on partial information regarding children's learning and overall experience of school. They also draw upon the narrow sampling of what will count as children's learning, and very often the comparisons do not control for parental backgrounds and other such effects. As long as teacher education curricula themselves remain moribund, the arguments that pre-service teacher education is not really necessary in order to teach appeal to the common sense, and along with this the appeal of the idea that under-qualified and hence low-paid, well-managed teachers can produce results'.

The second reason comes from the subtle and complex character of what constitutes the knowledge' of good teaching and how someone can acquire it through a period of education. There have been widely differing and competing paradigms on how to conceptualise this. Traditionally, teacher education was carried out in normal' schools through apprenticeship. Mostly, only subject matter knowledge was asked for. The Radhakrishnan Committee, which looked at university education, was of the view that teachers required only good subject knowledge and education mindedness'. Many people even today believe that what primary teachers basically need is love for children' and commitment'.

Some theorists have conceptualised the work of teachers in terms of a range of competencies' and try to train teachers on each sub skill' through practice and reinforcement. The idea that teachers need to be considered as intellectuals' involved in thinking and solving problems in the classroom, adapting to new situations and interpreting and reflecting in order to work began taking shape only in the last three decades. This notion of the teacher as an autonomous and thinking practitioner has always existed it is the basis of the ideal of guru' or Socrates' as a model teacher.

What is new is that this notion of a teacher' is now democratised'. Instead of being only in elite and exclusive institutions, such teachers are expected to work in the mass education system' to realise the educational aims for all children, and teacher education is central to the development of such teachers. This certainly requires more investment of time and intellectual inputs. However, even educated people are unable to imagine the humble primary schoolteacher and her work as being intellectual and rigorous. The Bachelor of Elementary Education (B.El Ed) programme of the University of Delhi is one such programme that has succeeded in demonstrating that it is possible to prepare thinking, reflecting and highly motivated teachers who are willing and able to work even in government schools and with very underprivileged children.

It is imperative to renew the curricula of pre-service teacher education. The five key aspects that must be attended to are:

1. Enabling students to become knowledgeable in content and learning pedagogy in relation to content. We must acknowledge that dominant school experiences of rote learning do not lead to adequate understanding of content that is required. Pedagogy cannot be learnt or practised without the content.

2. Radically restructuring the experience of learning so that student-teachers begin to think of the aims of education differently and are able to question conventional notions of deficit' and educability of the poor. Approaches to literacy and early reading are among key areas that elementary schoolteachers need grounding in, in contemporary thinking.

3. Growth of the person of the student-teacher in self confidence, communication and self-reflection, particularly so that she can review and interrogate her own socialisation.

4. Engagement with the idea of education in relation to society to understand the phenomenon of social diversity and student diversity, to appreciate different forms of childhood and family contexts.

5. Support in becoming agents of change for which the understanding of the profession and the formation of a community of professionals is essential.

Today, in some States, the Central government is considering large-scale expansion of open and distance learning methods of educating and certifying the large numbers of teachers who have no qualification. This is on account of the compulsions of the RTE, which requires achieving this target within five years, of which more than one year is already over. There is a real danger that in an effort to meet the target, the content of teacher education will be completely compromised and turned into a sham. This has already happened in the case of most of the in-service training programmes where targets of training days are achieved with nothing of any worth being transacted in the training centres, with only teachers' cynicism being strengthened.

In the name of pressuring the state to take quality of education seriously, this clause of the RTE Act may have in fact precipitated complete deregulation by providing new fields in which it can be proved' that qualified' teachers produce no impact on the quality of education. The spread of quality in teacher education then is a slow process, but there is no ground to believe that it does not produce effects.

In a recent interview with the Minister for Education of Finland, which has scored well in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), he identified the investment in teacher preparation as being the single contributing factor to this achievement.

In 1986, soon after preparing the National Policy of Education, the state had begun an indigenous process of investing in pre-service teacher education through the creation of District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) throughout the country. Regretfully, the externally funded District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) distracted central attention from this institution-building effort towards in-service training of teachers, claiming that this would produce the desired effects of raising quality.

Investment in reviewing and reforming pre-service teacher education may have more effectively achieved the goals of both forming and securing professional identity and preparedness for the diversity in the classroom as a result of inclusion through the RTE. The Central government needs to be persuaded to approach the implementation of reform of teacher education with the systematic investment and attention it requires and safeguard it from being hijacked by short-sighted, cost-saving alternatives.

Padma Sarangapani is a Professor in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.