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Teacher Education

Notes managerialism, competition and market arrangements. Globalisation widens the availability of
clients and resources to be used in such regards.
Regarding teachers, this approach has induced some to view teachers as essentially economic
actors, drawn to and retained by the profession in terms of economic costs and benefits. This is
something which in many ways is already enacted, as a World Bank document that examines
teacher policy, reveals.
Policies are being enacted that attempt to improve students' achievement by providing teachers
with the right incentive packages. These policies emphasize linkages among pay, control and
achievement. In this regard, school effectiveness literature has constructed a particular paradigm
of teacher identity, based on the expectation that teachers produce student achievement.
It is very likely that within this approach which seeks to marketise 'education', teacher education
will be subject to the laws of supply and demand, and its aim will be to make teachers and
educators 'marketable'. It will take into consideration the demands consumers in the educational
market are making, and seek to cater to this with an adequate supply of teachers having the
required characteristics.
This approach may seem appealing because it seems to be responsive to people's choices, needs
and desires rather than imposing homogenous models. Hence, it may avert the criticism generally
made, that global models are imposed by some set of people on others.

In the era of Neo-Liberalism where emphasis is on output, teachers' remuneration and
security of employment is increasingly directly linked to student learning.

17.3.2 Limitations to the supply and demand approach
Still, a number of shortcomings are evident, particularly regarding the role teachers are expected
to play. This approach urges teachers to cater to students' demands. Yet, given that the demand
may change and that this may happen quite rapidly, teachers would have to be subject to constant
retraining so as to be able to cater to changing requests. A major problem in such regard is that
the rate of change in tastes and choices may be too fast to be catered to adequately and so allow
for thorough retraining.
Moreover, teachers are made responsible to implement the necessary innovations to cope with
social and economic changes. They must show capacity to interpret future requirements of work
and life and constantly update their knowledge and teaching skills to keep up with rapidly
changing global requirements, involving shifts in technology and widening social relations.
They are called upon to model the skills-oriented subject without raising questions about what it
means to live in a democratic society; questions about the relationship between democracy and
capitalism. A pedagogic ambiguity is created because no concrete definitions of content, teaching
methods and evaluation methods are considered to be the ideal ones. This creates risk-awareness,
uncertainty and dislocation among teachers and they end up being blamed for lack of educational
quality, resistance to change and innovation in teaching methods.
17.3.3 Economic efficiency in teacher education
The second approach which attempts to adapt education to this global economic/political/social
situation aims at making the learner as economically competitive as possible. Economic-efficacy
is understood in this approach to be education's major aim. Yet, rather than leaving education at
the mercy of the laws of supply and demand understood in the manner delineated in the first
attitude, here it is the needs of the economy at large which determine the content and pedagogy
of the educational set-up. Hence, if the world economy requires people with more sophisticated
technical skills, the wider teaching of skills like media and computer literacy is promoted and
students are taught how to use these new technologies of information and entertainment, so as to

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