International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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Moving towards preparing teachers for more participative, open ended and exploratory classrooms for children has been an endeavour that many of us have engaged with. There are many issues that are significant in analyzing the processes that have to be introduced and the mechanisms needed for this to happen. There have been many efforts at in-service training as a means to preparing teachers for it. We also need to analyze the essential principles in this effort and the kind of experiences that we have had. Major training programmes in the last two decades including those initiated and implemented by the government institutions as well as by non-governmental organisations have in some way recognized some of the principles underlying participative teaching-learning. Some of them have also mentioned concepts like competency, activity, learning by doing, teacher being a facilitator, motivational approach, value based approach, activity-based, discovery oriented, child-centred, and more recently constructivist approaches etc.

   Some of the major efforts at evolving an alternative in-service training include those of the Eklavya group in Hoshanbagad which carried forward the work of Kishore Bharati, Friends Rural Center, Rasulia and University of Delhi based teams that laid down principles of teachers training, the Lok Jumbish programme in collaboration with NGOs, the DPEP effort of creating SRGs and DRGs and later the REP taken up at the behest of MHRD. We would also briefly consider the current trainings under SSA and the major issues concerning them. Apart from this, we would also analyze a few of the smaller and differently organized training efforts and the goals they set for themselves. All this would be in the context of our own experiences of capacity building and preparation of our own team, making possible sharing among institutions and individuals and an effort to make that possible through a programme with the NFE teachers in a mixed mode.

   We need to analyze the major bottlenecks that have arisen in executing our plans, the stances that have been taken, the things that have been considered important in different efforts and we need to look towards the issues that emerge regarding the possibilities of making a movement in this direction. We would examine this in view of the issues with cascading and preparing resource groups for undertaking this work. The focus would be on alternative mechanism of engaging with teachers and the movement towards their preparation and exploring what could be alternative forms that may be useful for this purpose.