Training to Teach in Global Higher Education: Ideas For A Qualification

The idea came to me from various conversations in China and India: That teacher training in Higher Education is an urgent need and a significant opportunity.

This is counter-intuitive. Most Western institutions of Higher Education, autonomous as they are, train their own teachers. For Continuing Professional Development, the emphasis here is on Research, and an established network of Conferences exist to foster the community. Teacher training is for schools, where the volume and turnover of teachers are high, and it needs constant refreshing.

However, the expansion of Higher Education in the last decade in China, India and elsewhere brings into play a different reality altogether. 

First, the Higher Education institutions created in these countries in the last decade are different from research-led institutions in the West: They are teaching institutions operating at a mass scale. The focus is on teaching at scale, and the appropriate teacher training is therefore of great importance.

Second, these institutions face an acute talent shortage and high turnover. Teaching in Higher Education is not well remunerated, and few opportunities exist for professional development. Faculty members are recruited directly after completion of their education, and often lack perspectives and skills required to be a successful university teacher. A training solution for the new teachers are in demand among institutions that want to retain its faculty and develop their skills.

Third, the quality of Conferences and opportunities to develop Professional networks are often quite limited too. The Conference ecosystem is springing up as a response to the expansion in the number of teachers, but the conferences, modelled after the Western ones, are research-centric and at odds with the requirements of teaching focused institutions. 

Besides these, the teaching in Higher Education is also rapidly changing. Globalisation is a persistent reality, both in terms of access to talent (and lack of it, as trained faculty often migrate abroad) and student preferences (more global institutions are preferred by students). Technological change is also making an impact, and its possibilities are instantly understood in the context of requirements in countries like China and India, though the solutions available are often immature and poorly implemented. Finally, appreciation and understanding of outcomes, always a challenge in Higher Education sector, are critical in resource-poor, outcome-hungry developing countries, and this imposes a new set of demands on teachers.

What ideally is needed is a qualification and community for Higher Education teachers (in the broad sense, and including people teaching in Technical schools) that is geared to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century. The demand for this is understood in countries such as China, where the state actively encourages faculty development and global exposure; it is also obvious in countries like India, though, generally speaking, it suffers from a greater level of 'not-invented-here' syndrome and actively resists change. However, even in countries like India, the allure of a foreign qualification for teachers is irresistible, and there is a strong business case to develop something to offer to Indian teachers as well.

Despite the apparent opportunity, however, most Western Teacher Training institutions and qualification bodies are wholly unprepared to provide a solution. Apart from the fact that teacher training in Western nations is primarily a K12 focused affair, Education as a whole remains a very nationally-oriented area of research and conversation. 'Transnational' in Education often has imperial undertones - this means local practises being spread globally - and supplanting teaching models from a Western nation is hardly the solution the rapidly expanding mass Higher Education sector in China and India needs.

Globalisation of Finance and Business has hardly reached the academia, and while Western Universities attracted millions of students, they attributed this success, perhaps rightly, to maintaining their British, American or Australian roots, rather than on their ability to understand and solve problems in the developing countries. That this creates a curious duality - they claim education is a public good and try hard to protect public funding, while at the same time, encouraging and serving the International students' private needs and aspirations as faithfully as ever - but the Western University sector is completely oblivious to such inconvenient questions.

There is also a deep distrust of technology! Good teaching and deployment of learning technologies are seen as oppositional activities. This is not necessarily so in the Developing World, where teachers bother less about having to write emails after work and more about the struggle to find even the basic research papers or learning materials. Their commute to the classroom are often more troublesome and sweatier than the pleasant drive through Middle England, and they are therefore happier to explore how to teach online. And, besides, for a teacher in Indian Higher Ed, mastering the technology is a desirable advantage, not a self-defeating distraction.

And, finally, the outcome-centricity is seen by most people in Western Higher Education as a sign of creeping managerialism (which it is). Higher Education institutions, with its public roots and ecclesiastical pretencions,  do not want to be accountable for short-term and measurable results. There is inherent contradiction between this and the pursuit of private advantage which Higher Education mostly represents, but this is one thing Western academics feel very strongly about. There is no such luxury in India and China, where hierarchy and accountability are facts of life. Surely, the practises there need a 21st Century update - often the people in Higher Education are being accountable for wrong things - but outcome-centricity would not come as a surprise to someone teaching in Higher and Professional education in developing countries.

In conclusion, I see a clear gap and a significant demand. I am well aware of the challenges of building a never-before solution in Education, particularly Higher Education: In a regulated industry, regulatory compliance replaces excellence, and a service that may make perfect sense under the logic of competitive markets, may find few takers unless it is a regulatory requirement. I have applied my market-based logic to regulated sectors before and am well-aware of the perils of such an approach. In planning Teacher Training, therefore, I am not just planning a programme to be launched under a private label, but rather with the right credentials and hopefully with blessings of regulators in certain target countries. This may indeed be my next big project, and I am all excited about it.

 






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