AfroPhysics/Project Planning/Leg

Statements about teacher education

• All quotations from:
• Open and Distance Learning in the Developing World
• -- 2nd edition
• by Hilary Perraton
• (Routledge 2007)

Work in progress

Conventional teacher education:

• (1) “… teacher education is criticised as being costly.

Costs per student are often much higher than those of secondary education, even when the content is similar. … This problem is probably most severe in Africa … As the teaching service is often the largest national profession, presenting the largest single wage bill to governments, so the cost of training the service are significant for educational budgets.” (p. 60)

• (4) “… distance education … It has been used across much of the south, to upgrade unqualified and under qualified teachers for primary and secondary schools, to raise the quality of teaching and support curriculum change, and to meet the needs of specialist groups including head teachers.” (p. 60)

Examples of teacher education at a distance:

• (5) “Much of the African experience, including that in Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, has been about training for unqualified teachers, who have themselves completed only primary or secondary education. It can be seen as catching up, or an emergency response, relevant only while the education service is unable to provide enough potential teachers with a fuller conventional education behind them. Teacher-training programmes of that kind, using distance education, continue.” (p.65)

• (6) “Large number of Asian teachers have also got qualifications through distance education.” (p. 67)

• (7) “… China Television Teachers College started work in 1986 to offer in-service courses to both qualified and unqualified teachers. In doing so it makes extensive use of television, the main teaching medium; … . Some printed material is made available to students and there are opportunities for face-to-face sessions at study centres; plans are reported for the development of ict-based distance education.” (p. 67)

• (9) Pakistan: “ … Allama Iqbal Open University offered a way of providing inservice education on a new curriculum to its primary school teachers. … in 1976 to train 150 000 teachers as quickly as possible in a new curriculum. … 17 per cent were untrained … . As in Indonesia, the course concentrated on subject knowledge rather than teaching method and did not include any teaching practice. The courses were written in Urdu - a second language for most students but a third for others - and used print backed by between eighteen and twenty-four 15-minute radio programmes…. The course was relaunched with increased student-tutor contact and more supervision. … with a high pass rate and completion rate another 33 000 qualified over seven years. (p. 68-69)