In 1995 there were approximately 46 million primary and secondary school teachers in the world's formal education systems. A little more than 3 million of them were in the United States and Canada. Initial teacher education throughout the world has five main features, all representing decisions regarding key issues. These are: recruitment, curriculum, structure, governance, and accreditation and standards. This article focuses on the first three issues. Among the most important features of teacher education are the criteria and procedures by which candidates are selected or recruited for entry to programs and institutions. Unlike some other professions, teaching often suffers from a shortage of qualified candidates for admission. Therefore, teaching often does not enjoy the privilege of being able to select the best qualified from among a large pool of applicants. The problem for a system is, first, ensuring that there is a large enough pool of qualified graduates to meet the needs of the professions and, second, attracting enough qualified applicants to enter teaching in competition with the other professions. How much schooling should a candidate for admission to teacher education have? How valuable are experiences outside school for prospective teachers? If the demand for fully qualified applicants for admission to teacher education programs is greater than the supply, are there alternative qualifications that might satisfy the demand? These are some of the issues confronted in attempts made to recruit candidates for entry to teaching. Factors influencing recruitment include the status of the teaching profession; the supply of, and demand for, teachers; and the economic resources of the system. An example of the status of the profession affecting recruitment can be seen in Thailand. In 1996 it was reported that the low status of the teaching profession in Thailand was discouraging competent people from entering teaching and that some entrants were not seriously committed to becoming teachers. For Thailand, therefore, the need to improve the status of teaching and to provide other incentives for joining the profession was important. Raymond Bolam pointed out that the career structure of the profession is also influential, contrasting the situation in the United Kingdom, where a head teacher might earn four times as much as a beginning teacher, with the situation in Spain, where head teachers received only a small increase in salary above that of their colleagues. Presumably, in Spain, candidates motivated by prospects of economic advancement are less likely to enter teaching than they are in the United Kingdom, other things being equal. Another important aspect of recruitment concerns the number of years of schooling candidates have completed before entry to training institutions. While in most developed countries completion of a full eleven or twelve years of schooling is a normal requirement, that is an unrealistic expectation in a country that is unable to produce a sufficient number of such graduates to meet its needs for teachers. Toward the end of the twentieth century, in the central and south Asian countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, the mean number of years of schooling required before entry to teacher training was 10.7 years. In the southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, it was 10.5 years, while in the Latin American countries of Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia, it was 9.3 years. In the African countries of Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Kenya, the mean was 9.6 years. This is not to say that the only qualifications accepted for entry to teacher education are the number of years of schooling or level of academic achievement. In some countries, candidates are recruited without completing the full secondary education available because of their valuable experience in other types of activities beyond formal schooling, such as employment and community development work, and their strong motivation to become teachers. In Australia, for example, universities like the University of Sydney offer such candidates programs specially designed to take advantage of their strengths. Most systems provide teacher education in face-to-face situations to students attending institutions of higher education. However, many teachers around the world receive substantial components of their training through distance education. Beginning near the end of the 1950s, this approach involved the use of postal services for the delivery of learning materials to students remote from an institution, and the sending back of completed assignments by the students. The correspondence elements of this model were supplemented with tutorials conducted at centers located within reach of enough students to form a group. On a number of occasions tutors would meet with the groups to render the process in more motivating social contexts and to deal with students at a more personal level. Sometimes students traveled to the campuses for residential schools. Telephone hook-ups were also arranged by land line or even satellite. Two Australian universities, the University of New England and the University of Queensland, pioneered this approach to distance teacher education. As technical electronic advances occurred with the introduction of personal computers and electronic mail the process became much faster and more efficient. Distance education is a relatively inexpensive approach that is especially useful in locations where populations are sparse and distances are great. The duration of teacher education programs varies across systems from a year or less to four or even five years. That range exists in quite a variety of countries and seems not always to depend on the economic development level of the countries concerned. Among the African developing countries of Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Kenya, the range in 1990 was from one to five years. In Australia, recruits who have completed three-or four-year university bachelor's degrees can complete a professional teaching qualification in one year, while most choose to enter teaching immediately after completing secondary schooling and then take up to four years to complete a bachelor of education degree.
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