District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
Two of the external interventions that have provided a learning context for this
project and which have now been subsumed into the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan are the
District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and the Lok Jumbish project (see
Boxes 0.1 and 0.2). The DPEP has for example encouraged decentralised, Districtbased
planning; enhanced community participation in schooling; provided new and
improved learning environments through extensive civil works programmes;
improved the preparation, motivation and deployment of teachers through teacher
training and teacher recruitment and deployment; strengthened management; and,
through its textbook renewal programme, improved the quality of textbooks and
teaching and learning materials. Lok Jumbish has also furnished many insights into
the challenges of developing meaningful community participation; and both of these
programmes also underline a continuing need to strive towards gender equality.
Challenges for the future under SSA are to draw the whole system into building
on and consolidating from project gains – for example to improve planning so that
is more holistic and locally consultative; to help teachers become better able to
respond to multi-ethnic, multi-caste, multi-grade and multi-ability contexts; to
improve the capacity of institutions that provide on-going technical and
professional support to teachers – such as SCERTs, DIETs and Cluster Resource
Centres – and to continue to improve management capacity.
DIETs are written large into the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan framework, and many of
its aspects require their involvement (DEEL 2002). This is an opportune moment
to reflect on the performance of DIETs so far, and to identify ways in which they
may be further strengthened and supported in pursuit of the many roles and
responsibilities intended for them in future.
0.3 Project intentions and methodology
Earlier research (Dyer 1994, 1996, 2000) had identified several gaps between the
expectations of teachers articulated in policy discourses, and the situations
observed on the ground in schools. That teacher education is implicated in
sustaining rather than closing such gaps is made clear in official commentaries, but
there is little ethnographic description of processes of teacher education to draw
on to explain from the (all too often neglected) practitioners’ points of view why
this might be.
The main concerns of this research have been to inform and guide policy making
and practitioner development by:
• providing otherwise absent ethnographic detail about educational processes in
DIETs and related schools
2 DFID