Reinventing teachers for a better tomorrow
Once Dr D.S. Kothari underlined that ‘the destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms’. In this process teachers are at the core and they have to become the socio-cultural transformative agent to re-shape the individual, nation and humanity. They should be compassionate and ignite the young minds to learn in the real sense. Such exhortations are indeed an expression of the role played by the teachers as transmitters, inspirers and promoters of human’s eternal quest for knowledge (NCFTE-2009). Recently, we received a long awaited commitment for nation building from the Government in the form of NEP-2020. This policy explored the context, concerns and vision for teachers and a symbiotic relationship with indigenous and modern ways of knowing and knowledge. NEP places different demands and expectations from the teachers which need to be addressed both by initial and continuing teacher education.
In this reference, NEP intends to make learning system relevant and self-reliant. It provides action frame for multidisciplinary holistic reflective education coupled with restructuring of academic and research programmes; learning outcome based curriculum; academic bank of credits; conceptual and innovative experiential learning; and robust evaluation for assessing scholastic and co-scholastic attributes. Undoubtedly, research is vital force for humane excel. National Research Foundation for streamlining and creating ecosystem for problem-solving research is also envisaged. Policy has a provision for functional regulatory regime under a comprehensive and inclusive unit with a light but tight frame. NEP is intended to train the youth and empower them with the global competencies and skills to enable them to become socially and economically releto vant and add to the intellectual pool of informed global citizenry. This implies that the current approaches to teachinglearning must accommodate the inclusive needs of today’s learners and address twentyfirst century multidisciplinary themes and skill-sets of learning.
The moot question however is whether the teachers are skilled to impart new age education! And how should they innovate and implement a holistic and multi/trans-disciplinary learning landscape. This may be achievable through National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPSTS) for curriculum development, pedagogical and evaluation framework.
The sad part is that the curriculum design and development in India lacked dynamism and has not evolved with expectations of the learners and society in terms of global competencies resulting into skill-gap and un-employability. 21st Century teachers must come out of their comfort zones and whole heartedly embrace all professional standards to create pragmatic learning system. They should proactively engage in nurturing an ecosystem for cutting-age research, innovation and entrepreneurship capable of creating wealth and solving local, national and global problems.
This is possible if teachers resort to multidisciplinary, holistic and learning outcome based curricular framework having core components of eenabled experiential learning, skill-development, ideation, incubation, entrepreneurship, learning based research and research based learning, and finally make our learning system industry, technology and innovation driven. In changed scenario, we need innovative academic programmes blended with practice based curriculum, visualised through learning exposures like tutorials, practicals, dissertation/project/internship, case study, field-visit/study tour/study camp, mock trial/ debate/ discussion/ disputation, role-play, stage performance/ film shows, and open ended enquiries to inculcate scientific temperament.
Teachers should be able to convert static learning spaces into active learning sites resorting to personalised/flip/adventure/ cooperative/peer/service/ situated/free-choice, contextual, integrative, reflective and action oriented teaching. We need to ensure that the learners have captured the concept and are able to retain it for lifelong learning. The focus of training should be on ‘how to learn’ rather than on ‘what to learn’, and pedagogy should be learner friendly instead of teacher friendly to make learning an enjoyable enterprise. Additionally, teachers should endeavour become agent of change for the free exchange and creation of positive and unbiased ideas to enable students to tackle complex real-life challenges. All these should start from the early literacy to formal education stage.
In essence, the teachers must ensure that the twenty-first century learning system is founded on sound holistic, multidisciplinary and integrated content knowledge, rather than sets of compartmentalized and de-contextualized learning trajectory. Teachers need to upgrade their domain knowledge alongside major reforms happening in the learning system, and also with the learning needs of Gennext. Productive interaction and feedback from the learners, industry, NGOS, research organizations and funding agencies will help understand such learning needs. Learn, unlearn and relearn; Reform, perform and transform; and skilling, upskilling and reskilling are the buzz words for the teachers. This way, teachers can become their new edition with higher version and can always remain current and relevant to the learning system, society and the nation. Owing to resource crunch, the task becomes difficult, but not impossible. It may be mitigated by adopting self-reliant frame.
Furthermore, teachers have to reimagine their roles and re-invent themselves and emulate the Ancient Gurus. It’s the high time to evaluate entire education system and to strengthen teachers’ agency not only in pre-textual heritage and textual underpinning but also by re-examining the contextualized teaching-learning needs. Educational leadership and academic bureaucracy should facilitate teaching community to re-invent and re-orient themselves. Finally, it is time to prove and regain our classical status as the Vishwaguru, which can only be achieved by conferring the honours on teachers.