primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
written about for over 20 years and the predominant training regime has received
widespread attention and criticism.
• In all states, in-service training continues to utilise the ‘cascade model’, despite
attendant transmission loss at each successive level of training;
• Training packages continue to be designed at upper levels of the educational
hierarchy by functionaries with little or no personal experience of teaching at the
elementary level; while DIETs and other in-service training institutions serve
merely as implementing agencies;
• Training programmes are poorly designed, implemented in an ad hoc manner
and bear no relation to teachers’ real needs with respect to content or
instructional strategies;
• No follow-up is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness or relevance of training
content to teachers’ practice; and
• The pedagogical underpinnings of these training programmes tend to be highly
superficial and poorly understood even by the trainers themselves.
(Alexander 2008; Dhankar 2002 ; Dyer 1996; Dyer and Choksi 2004; Sarangapani and
Vasavi 2003)
The implications of the foregoing for the promotion of meaningful learning
experiences for teachers, not to mention children in the classroom, are obvious. To
cite one example:
Clarke (2000) found that although DPEP teachers had learnt the new jargon (‘activity-based’,
‘child-centred’, joyful learning’, etc.) there was no appreciable difference in the understanding or
practice of DPEP and non-DPEP teachers. Both methods were reported to be derived from preexisting
pedagogical practices and had no evidence of special child-centred focus. Several
educationists have pointed to the inadequacy of the notion of ‘quality’ that has informed the DPEP
arguing that it relies too heavily on only a intuitive notion of the understanding of the child as the
starting point, for curriculum reform (Dhankar 2002). (…) Many teachers and observers have
indicated and as we have observed in several schools, ‘joyful learning’ and teaching have become
synonymous with making children sing and dance in class (Sarangapani and Vasavi 2003).
The issue of relevance is an inevitable by-product of how training programmes are
designed in India: by high level functionaries with little knowledge or experience of
teaching conditions in primary schools; based on an idealised vision of what teachers
‘should’ do, but with scant attention to practical details of hurdles in
implementation; with limited input from teachers themselves and no space within
the training for questioning or analysis of content. To take an example from Gujarat:
Teachers felt that their trainers were not sufficiently aware of the realities of small schools with
single rooms and no facilities, and hence did not offer strategies for working in such conditions.
(…) The pedagogical problems of the teachers in Gujarat’s rural schools are not primarily related
to infrastructure, but to the absence of skills to cope with either teaching several classes
simultaneously, or the needs of first generation learners, compounded by heavy and often
irrelevant curriculum. The type of pre-service training they receive does not equip them with
adequate classroom management strategies, or the confidence to adapt the curriculum, and is an
important factor in low teacher motivation (Dyer 1996).
Evaluations and reviews have often recommended that the government should do
things differently—a recent one summarises the suggestions that have been made
from within the system and by donor agencies that are financing the SSA
programme.
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