District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
for written information by the education authority; and so on. These concerns are
often put forward as explanations for why children are not ‘completing the course’.
Those in authority positions tend to see these as teacher excuses used to mask an
unwillingness to work, rather than heed an underlying issue: the resultant constant
pressure of time.
The Indian state requires teachers to carry out a significant element of work that
is related either to social development (e.g. pulse polio drives), or to the
maintenance of the democratic state (e.g. running polling stations). Training for
teachers ignores this contextual reality and focuses only on their formal classroom
role; and the content and competency load of syllabus over the year is organised
on the assumption that teachers spend 100% of their time on classroom activities.
Officially, the number of working days in the year is about 180, but teachers
present overwhelming evidence, particularly in the lower primary stages, of a
much shorter working year, into which the syllabus has to be crammed (see
chapter 8).
A further complication is that since the abolition of examinations at the lower
level, children must be promoted if they attend school for 70% of the school year.
This policy conflicts with the policy of using attainment of competency levels as an
indicator of readiness to proceed:
T11 In the 1st and 2nd Stds. we have to pass on the basis of attendance. So
even if the children don’t know anything but they are regular we have to
pass them. See this girl Chandrika she doesn’t know even k-ko [abc] but
she comes every day so I have to pass her (GUJ/ T 011, February 1999)
This policy conflates attendance with learning. In so doing, it denies a teacher the
opportunity to make professional decisions about a child’s educational progress.
2.3.4 Teacher agency
Teachers’ sense of being in a ‘deficit’ situation was a pervasive component of their
accounts and actions across the study sites. This sense of deficit significantly shapes
classroom processes, powerfully determining teachers’ expectations of children and
of themselves, and impacting substantially on their willingness to engage with
training messages. A striking feature of many discussions with teachers is their
relatively low sense of professional agency, which is linked with their views on the
contextual factors that for many of them seem to determine the possibilities of
success. Teachers often report that they need to be made to work, and that unless
supervisory arrangements are strengthened, they are unlikely to work harder. The
onus for improving the quality of classroom processes is widely perceived to lie with
the authorities, rather than to be dependent on any intrinsic motivation among
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