District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
Chapter 2 Teachers and Teaching
2.1 Introduction
The focus of all teacher development efforts, and the reason for setting up District
Institutes of Education and Training, is to improve the quality of children’s
learning. We present here two case studies of classroom processes, as textured and
detailed illustrations of learning and teaching in two government schools 4 . These
accounts are not intended to be ‘typical’; rather, they provide illustrative examples
of contexts, and demonstrate from within classrooms some of the key issues in
teacher development which confront DIETs 5 . They also provide a sense of how the
professional support structures introduced in the last chapter interact with these
schools. The themes the case studies raise are explored in greater detail in the
second part of the chapter, which draws on data generated through interviews,
observations and questionnaire responses with teachers across the three States.
Box 2.1: Curriculum innovation: the competency-based approach of
Minimum Levels of Learning
The competencies all Indian children are expected to attain during elementary
schooling have been defined as ‘Minimum Levels of Learning’ (MLLs). MLLs
were intended to ‘ensure access to the education of comparable standard to all
learners irrespective of caste, creed, location or sex’ (NCERT 2000: 37) and are
‘expected to be achieved by one and all’ (NCERT 2000: 38) and to function as
a measure of accountability (ibid). The classroom environment should be
joyful, activity-based, and child-centred.
MLLs have been controversial, and adopted to a different degree across the
country. In Gujarat all elementary schools officially adopted MLLs when they were
first intiated; new competency-based textbooks have been introduced up to Std. 4.
In Rajasthan MLLs were initially introduced by Lok Jumbish in the blocks they
adopted but not elsewhere in government schools until textbooks were re-drafted
in 2000-2001. In Madhya Pradesh MLLs were introduced across the State as a part
of the process of textbook reform under the Shikhna Shikhana Package.
The competency-based approach calls for a fundamentally different relationship
between teacher and child from that which had gone before: no longer is the
teacher to be the purveyor of a body of knowledge contained in the textbook –
rather, she is now cast as the facilitator of a child’s learning. Providing teachers
with the new knowledge, skills and attitudes that are required for them to make
this switch lies at the core of current teacher education initiatives.
4 Very little ethnographic material of school processes is available. Official studies using qualitative methods such as
Nagaraju, 2000 have been extremely rare; DPEP has supported some qualitative studies, but there remains a need to ensure
that such work really is in the public domain by improving its availability. See however Clarke, 2001 and 2003;
Sarangapani, 2003 for ethnographic accounts of classrooms.
5 Nine such detailed studies were developed over the project term, but space permits the inclusion here of only two.
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