Pre-service teacher education classrooms are critical spaces for intervention aimed towards building a future generation of competent teachers, who will be responsible for nurturing young children’s minds. 

Teacher educators, therefore, have an obligation to the young children of school classrooms through their work of preparing teachers. How prospective teachers are prepared will ultimately contribute to the qualitative changes in teaching-learning practices in the schools.

Teacher educators’ work is complex because the responsibilities relate to both school and higher education. What truly renders the practice of teacher education problematic is the task for the teacher educator to represent teaching as it occurs in the school classroom to their student teachers and concomitantly build a pedagogical relationship with these adult learners.

Pedagogy in teacher education is not mere ​‘instruction’. It is characterised by the relational values, socio-political and policy contexts, the professional knowledge bases, planning content in response to a diverse classroom, identifying learning material and texts that suits the cognitive levels of student teachers, engaging the class in meaningful ways with an intention that student teacher will learn and finally, assessing prospective teachers. 

Thus, development of pedagogy of teacher education cannot be formulaic or prescriptive but must evolve in the crucible of the classroom practices, allowing for the co-evolvement of the pedagogy of the teacher educators, on the one side, and the prospective teachers’ pedagogical reasoning, practice and development, on the other.

The NCFTE (NCTE, 2009) has given considerable emphasis on the need for a process-based teacher education and envisions a teacher as a thinking, reflective individual, whose primary task is to facilitate children to construct meaning from their experiences. 

Drawing upon the National Educational Policy (2020) that has reiterated the need for a quality teacher education system, the more recent National Curricular Framework (NCF) for Foundational stage (2022) has called for the inclusion of the vision of the four stages to be emphasised in the Integrated Teacher Education Programmes (ITEP).

While policy frameworks repeatedly have called to prepare competent, well-qualified, professional and humane teachers and have provided adequate curricular directions, the actual practice of teacher education in the country remains inadequate. Teacher education classrooms continue to use transmissive pedagogies and hold assumptions about student teachers as passive recipients of knowledge. 

There is a dire need for a pedagogical re-imagination of teacher education classrooms. Focusing on developing teacher education pedagogy through professional development of teacher educators provides possible pathways for moving in the desired direction and may encourage a critical and investigative stance towards teaching and learning.

In light of the growing need for a discourse on pedagogy in teacher education, the proposed Summer Course aims to engage with this theme through an exploration of both theory and practice. 

Through discussion and deliberations, it is hoped that shared constructive views on teaching about teaching will emerge that may serve as a framework for the practice of better teaching-learning processes in teacher education programmes.

The Summer Course will be in the nature of seminar-workshops. 

The morning sessions of the Summer Course will include talks and discussions on themes such as:

• NCF 2022 and its implications for initial teacher preparation
• Constructivism in teacher education, pedagogy in NCFTE 2009 
• Faculty-student relationship
• Technological tools in teacher education 
• Preparing student teachers for inclusive classrooms
• Aesthetics and art in teacher education pedagogy,
• Research on pedagogy 

The afternoon sessions will consist of presentations by participating teacher educators based on pre-summer coursework that teacher educators will be expected to carry out.

• Interested participants must be currently serving in a teacher education programme at a recognised higher education institution.
• Participating institutions are requested to register with a statement of purpose (SOP) of about 500 words stating your interests and the relevance of topics to be explored in the Summer Course for your current work.
• The selection will be based on the SOPs submitted. 
• Only one member will be allowed to participate from an institution. 

The selected participants will be provided travel reimbursement to the extent of 3‑tier AC train fare from their nearest railway station (excluding local conveyance), boarding and lodging facility near Azim Premji University, and commute to and from the University to the place of lodging for the duration of the summer course.