New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Teacher education: a case study
already phasing out at the end of the 1980/8 1 academic year. The reasons for phasing out this
course are that: (i) the rate at which teachers are being produced each year (about 1000) is
greater than the rate at which Junior Secondary Schools are opened; (ii) since the government is
not under pressure to open more Junior Secondary Schools the present number of teachers is
thought to be adequate; (iii) the standard of the teachers produced by this programme is said to
be much lower than expected; (iv) lack of equipment, materials and qualified staff coupled with
the difficulty of recruiting the right number of qualified candidates for admission into the
colleges; and (v) the products from the three-year Post-Secondary Colleges consider themselves
as specialists, demand preferential treatment and wil not consider postings to the elementary
schools.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE THREE-YEAR POST-SECONDARY SCIENCE COURSE
As mentioned above, a feature of this new course which distinguishes it from the former twoyear
course is that a degree of specialization in subject areas is combined with initial training.
Specialist subjects are divided into three groups: Group 1 - Science, Mathematics and Agricultural
Science; Group 2 - Social Studies, French, Physical Education; Group 3 - Home Science,
Commercial Studies, Music and Art. Colleges have to choose which groups of courses they
wish to run. My own College, Bagabaga Training College, runs Group 1 and 3 courses. The Group
1 course has the following structure:
Specialist subject
This aims to provide the student teacher with a basic knowledge of science, mathematics and
agricultural science up to the GCE ‘A’ level standard. It was the intention to give the same
weight to all the subjects - and to offer a fully integrated science component. However, it has
been found very difficult to teach integrated science to ‘0’ level and beyond. And the situation
is made especially difficult since the three subjects are taught in three departments, each exercising
jealous control over its own syllabus with hardly any co-ordination among them.
The NTTC questionnaire to all Principals of colleges involved in this course in 1976 and the
subsequent analysis of its findings, revealed that, among other things, subject combinations were
thought to be unrealistic for teacher training. Principals recommended that specialization should
be deferred to post-initial training. The result of this was that the number of subjects was reduced
from three to two.
Project Work
Every student is required to undertake a project and work at it throughout the three years. The
topics chosen should be based on an activity in the community and should be of scientific
interest. Topics such as soap making, vegetable oil extraction, metal work, brewing and herbal
medicine making have been chosen in the past. The processes and concepts embedded in the
activities are observed in the local situation and then tried in the laboratory.
Problems connected with project work are: (i) determining how far the student should go;
(ii) inadequacy of such resources as library facilities; (iii) the provision of effective guidance to
the students. Because the aims, objectives and methods of working on their projects have not
been made clear, students find the project work very confusing and often regard it as a waste of
time. Not only do they have to be told to look for problems, but they need to be guided on how
to locate such problems and how to collect and interpret data.
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