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The challenges for the modern-day teacher

At the recently conducted G-8 UNESCO World Forum on “Education, Research and Innovation: New partnership for sustainable development” (at ICTP, Trieste, May 10-12, 2007), the main message was that the three critical factors — Education, Research and Innovation — need to be operated as inter-dependant. The fundamental requirement for global standards of education is emergence of trained graduates by professionally competent teachers. As it looks toda y, in the Indian context, where there is an explosion of education enterprise, there is a great demand for good committed teachers.

Teaching is now a profession rather than a passion and thus there is a paradigm shift in the perception of teachers. The crux of the issue is: to meet the demand with necessary quality and commitment towards the profession.

The recent times, to keep the balance between the demand and supply, have seen a spurt of growth in the educational institutes; mainly catering to the professional courses (The cry is louder now for the basic sciences which could not attract students). Education as a responsibility of the State has become an enterprise. The private partnership has increased enormously. Still, there seems to be a need for more institutes. This growth has given an urgency to the educational reforms which are being addressed at the Ministerial level by excellent and eminent academicians.

Whatever be the advancement in technology, till now, the teacher is not replaceable. The teacher used to exercise (till mid-1970s) full authority and autonomy on teaching methods. However, there is considerable change in the recent times. There is erosion in the values, responsibilities, commitments of the teaching profession. This erosion is a result of complex structure of the society, socio-economic growth, the enterprising nature of education (we can buy seats now) and the pressure of work (in the institutes of higher learning, the teacher is to show his visible research outputs) and the quantification of deliverables by the teacher and many more factors.

Today’s teacher is as busy and as pressured as a software professional. The expanding education enterprise, the global bench marks, the transformation of higher secondary education have brought in considerable changes and challenges in the college education, but still more is to be done. Some of the present challenges are: Teacher-student ratio, coping with expanding opportunities in specific need-based sectors like IT, nano and biotechnology, advanced materials, technology for home land security, dearth or development of proper/more efficient educational tools, basic infrastructure in terms of laboratories, libraries, etc.

The salaries and emoluments of teachers, though given a priority in the Government thinking, lack the societal demands, thus the profession does not seem to attract the right talent. Further, the selection mechanism of teachers (for higher positions) seem to depend, in higher educational institutions, mainly on the research credentials rather than on the teaching skills. The teacher-student ratio becoming high (approximately stands at 1:9 and is anticipated to reach 1:14 in higher educational institutes), there is a need to re-think the teaching methodology (adopting modern tools) and evaluation mechanism.

The selection methods in almost all universities and some institutes of higher learning need to be redesigned to discover the teaching skills and the commitment along with research capabilities. Also, the society should recognise that teaching is a serious profession and it demands considerable time and effort. The teaching talent is to be identified as early as possible and is to be fostered. A special recognition needs to be given to teachers for which evaluation yardsticks have to be evolved. It is to be realised that anybody and everybody cannot be a teacher. Also, it is to be noted that there are no set procedures and benchmarks to evaluate the teaching methods.

One possible solution is to redefine the responsibilities of the teacher. For example, in the earlier times (may be a decade ago), the teacher is responsible for collating information and imparting knowledge; he/she also is responsible for evoking interest of the pupil in the subject.

One possible solution to meet the demand of imparting knowledge is to employ modern technology: web-based education like National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning; but the solution may not be complete. The other possible attempt is to identify the teaching talent quite early and nurture it. Probably, the Educational Technology is the area where we should pioneer to lead all developing nations in the endeavour of the programme ‘Sustainable Development’ as launched by the United Nations.

The author is Professor, Department of Physics,

IIT-Madras.

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