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Unit 30: NCF for Teacher Education (2009)

30.6.2 Perspectives for Equitable and Sustainable Development Notes
In order to develop future citizens who promote equitable and sustainable development for all
sections of society and respect for all, it is necessary that they be educated through perspectives
of gender equity, the perspectives that develop values for peace, respect the rights of all, and
respect and value work. In the present ecological crisis, promoted by extremely commercialised
and competitive lifestyles, teachers and children need to be educated to change their consumption
patterns and the way they look at natural resources.
There is also an increasing violence and polarisation, both within children and between them,
being caused primarily by increasing stress in society. Education has a crucial role to play in
promoting values of peace based on equal respect of self and others. The NCF and subsequent
development of syllabi and materials provide a direction in this regard. For this, teachers need to
be equipped to understand these issues and incorporate them in their teaching. The new teacher
education curriculum framework will need to integrate these perspectives in its formulation.
30.6.3 Role of Community Knowledge in Education
It is important for the development of concepts in children as well as the application of school
knowledge in real life that formal school knowledge is linked with community knowledge. This
increases the relevance of education as well as the quality of learning. In addition, the perspective
that informs the NCF promotes the inclusion of locally relevant content in the curriculum as well
as pedagogy. This puts an added responsibility on the teacher for which s/he needs to be equipped
to select and organise subjectcontent and learning experiences from the community for the
classroom.
We need to develop the capacity of teachers in identifying entry points in the curriculum and
textual materials which call for contextualization and development of appropriate teaching-
learning sequences and episodes based on the identified local specifics. These specifics may
include community knowledge about technology, local occupations both farm and non-farm,
local folk culture including songs, festivals, fairs and games. As teachers develop curriculum
materials and learning experiences, informed by the perspectives enunciated above (gender,
peace, sustainable development), they will also learn, through actual participation, the skills to
identify and process the specifics for the purposes of meaningful curriculum transaction.
30.6.4 ICT in Schools and e-learning
With the onset and proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), there is
a growing demand that it be included in school education. It has become more of a fashion
statement to have computers or multimedia in schools, the result being that in spite of its
potential to make learning liberating, its implementation is often not more than cosmetic. It is
also often touted as a panacea for shortage of teachers. These are detrimental to the learning of
the child. Teacher education needs to orient and sensitize the teacher to distinguish between
critically useful, developmentally appropriate and the detrimental use of ICT. In a way, ICT can
be imaginatively drawn upon for professional development and academic support of the pre-
service and in-service teachers.

30.7 Professionalization of Teacher Education
Teaching is a profession and teacher education is a process of professional preparation of teachers.
Preparing one for a profession is an arduous task and it involves action from multiple fronts and
perspectives. A profession is characterized by a sufficiently long period of academic training, an
organized body of knowledge on which the undertaking is based, an appropriate duration of
formal and rigorous professional training in tandem with practical experience in the field and a
code of professional ethics that binds its members into a fraternity.
These dimensions acquire critical importance in view of several factors. There is, first of all, the
traditional idealism, the esteem and importance attached to the role of the school teachers and
very high societal expectations from them. Teachers are concerned, in an important way, with the

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