A Glimpse into Tamil Nadu Teacher Training Classrooms

• In Event: Professionalization and accreditation for quality education: issues in South Asia

Proposal

As the United Nations rallies governments and development players to collaboratively work towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, we must pause to recognize successes and failures. This paper critiques the failure of the Indian state to adequately invest in effectively preparing and professionalizing primary school teachers. It fills a void in India’s teacher education literature (Batra, 2011) by documenting and analyzing pedagogy and relationships in Tamil Nadu teacher-training classrooms. Such studies in India are indeed rare. Meanwhile, as Ramachandran et. al. (2016) point out in their report published by India’s National University of Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA), primary teacher education quality lingers unaddressed, despite significant shifts in India’s educational policy discourse.
Between 2011 and 2012, as part of my doctoral dissertation research, I conducted seven months of ethnographic research at two Teacher Training Institutes (TTIs) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. I found that bureaucratic control among Indian educational administrators restricted teacher agency and reproduced teacher subjectivities in ways that privileged knowledge as information acquisition. The current paper stems from this wider work, providing glimpses into teaching and learning in two Tamil Nadu teacher training classrooms.
Following Aiwa Ong’s (1987) analysis of the way family structures are imposed onto factory worker relationships between managers and workers in Malaysia, I show how teacher educators in Tamil Nadu treated student teachers like children – asserting control over their dress, moralizing them and demanding respect. Descriptive accounts of teacher training classrooms demonstrate how teacher educators relied on traditional teaching practices and at times assumed parental roles when teaching and interacting with student teachers.
The isolation of elementary teacher education outside the realm of higher education in India has been repeatedly critiqued by both state and non-state advocates of educational reform (Batra, 2011; GoI, 2012; NCFTE, 2009). The two-year non-degree Diploma in Teacher Education (D.T.Ed.), offered through colleges and TTIs, has been historically unaffiliated to university degree programs. At present, only secondary-level teacher preparation requires university degrees, whereas primary teachers must obtain the D.T.Ed. after completion of plus two (Grades 11 and 12).
This dissociation of the diploma course from institutions of research and inquiry has contributed to the association of pre-service primary teacher education with a culture of administration and teacher “training” rather than professional development (Batra, 2011). Batra (2011) has argued that TTIs “operate in closed spaces, intellectually impoverished environments that actively discourage engagement with new ideas and perspectives” (p. 6). This description characterized the general atmosphere of the two Chennai-based institutes in this study. At both TTIs, the principals were hands-off when it came to the teacher educators’ teaching of course material. They seemed mostly concerned with ensuring that the government-prescribed course books and assignments were “completed” in a timely manner.
During classroom observations of student teachers during their field internships, copying and memorizing were the most frequent forms of “learning” I recorded. At the end of each lesson, primary students typically copied questions and answers from the board into their notebooks. In one class, students first wrote down the answers in the textbook then copied the same answers into their notebook. When I asked the class teacher why she required students to do this, she explained that the notebook could get rained on or lost. And what would she do when the inspector came to sign the students’ notebooks if they were not kept there at school?
Similar observations provided throughout the paper suggest that the Indian Government is failing to provide adequate support structures for teacher educators and student teachers. There is an urgent need to invest in educational leadership in order to create dynamic, learning-oriented institutions. Child-centered education and programs such as ‘Activity Based Learning’ have penetrated the educational discourse in India at multiple levels, from policies to schools and even learner expectations. However, in a country as vast as India, understandings, practices, interpretations, and responses to these concepts have not been uniform. The competing and often ad hoc demands arising from new program and policy priorities at national and state education centers have resulted, at times, in confusing implementation procedures in schools. Even though primary education reform efforts have centered on making teachers and classrooms more child-friendly, the focus has been mostly on treatment of children, not necessarily on learning.
There are virtually no links between progressive academic discourses outlined in recent curriculum framework documents (NCERT, 2005; NCFTE, 2009), and the sustained technical-rational approach to teacher “training” in teacher education institutions. This gap may be traced to social, economic, and political processes that tend to reproduce rather than challenge historical forms of inequality. On the one hand, the persistence of post-colonial bureaucratic legacies in education has constructed the teacher as a “meek dictator” (Kumar, 1991). On the other hand, the institutional culture of supervision and control in which British colonizers established a meritocratic education system to serve the needs of their empire was inherited by a state bureaucracy which sought to modernize and develop society while holding on to idealized notions of “ancient Tamilness” (Geetha & Selvam, 2009). Thus, student teachers in this study were simultaneously conditioned to perceive their role as one of following orders while also receiving strong messages about upholding and propagating Tamil values and morals to shape future generations of Tamil citizens (Ramachandran et al., 2008).

Author

• Meera Pathmarajah, Visions Global Empowerment