District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
It has also provided for the establishment and staffing of District Institutes of
Education and Training; in a drive to ensure quality, ‘sub-standard’ teacher
education institutions were to be phased out and DIETs introduced in each
District, either by upgrading an existing institute, or establishing a new one if this
was not possible.
1.3.4 District Institutes of Education and Training
The rationale for the introduction of DIETs was that the elementary and adult
systems were ‘already too vast to be adequately supported by national and State
level institutions alone’ (MHRD 1989: 3) for the further expansion and qualitative
improvement advocated by the policy directive. The DIETs were thus conceived as
‘addition of a third – district level – tier to the support system’ which would be
‘closer to the field, and therefore more alive to its problems and needs’ (ibid). They
were added as a component of an existing top-down, centralised approach to
teacher education, adopting similar structures to those already in existence at the
State and national levels. It was stressed that the DIETs
are part of a larger strategy to achieve national goals in the areas of Elementary
and Adult Education. […] DIETs cannot…afford to view themselves in
isolation, and must faithfully discharge their role of supplementing and
complementing other parallel initiatives (MHRD 1989: 4).
The official DIET guidelines (MHRD 1989) expected them to pursue three key
functions:
1 Training and orientation of the following target groups (elementary school
teachers; Head Masters, officers of Education Department up to Block level;
NFE and adult education instructors and supervisors; members of District
Boards of Education and Village Education Committees, other community
volunteers; resource persons who will conduct suitable programmes … at
the centres other than the DIET).
2 Academic and resource support to the elementary and adult education
systems in the district in other ways.
3 Action research and experimentation to deal with specific problems of the
district in achieving the objectives in the areas of elementary and adult
education (MHRD 1989: 8).
It suggested that the DIET should comprise seven branches (Table 1.1), but States
could change this structure if they felt an alternative would better suit their
purposes. So for example, while Gujarat and Rajasthan retained the suggested
structure, Madhya Pradesh opted for 11 branches.
DFID 13