Present Concerns in Teacher Education:
Teacher education programmes today train teachers to adjust to a system in which education is seen as the transmission of information. Attempts at cur ricular refor m have not been adequately supported by the teacher education. Large-scale recruitment para-teachers has diluted the identity of the teacher as a professional. Major initiatives during the mid 1990s were focused on in-service training of teachers. This has accentuated the divide between pre-service and in-service teacher education. Pre-primary, primary and secondary teachers continue to be isolated from centres of higher learning, and their needs for professional development remain unaddressed. Existing teacher education programmes neither accommodate the emerging ideas in context and pedagogy nor address the issue of linkages between school and society. There is little space for engagement with innovative educational experiments.
Experiences in the practice of teacher education indicate that knowledge is treated as 'given', embedded in the curriculum and accepted without question. Curriculum, syllabi and textbooks are never critically examined by the student-teacher or the regular teacher. Language proficiency of the teacher needs to be enhanced, and the existing teacher education programmes do not recognise the centrality of language in the curriculum. It is assumed that links between instructional models and teaching of specific subjects are automatically formed during the programme. Most teacher education programmes provide little scope for student-teachers to reflect on their experiences and thus fail to empower teachers as agents of change.
