Indian summers: Irish teacher-training on the subcontinent

Teaching children is one thing; teaching teachers is quite another. Without well-trained teachers, children lose out on the quality education they deserve.

That was the reasoning of Dublin teachers Dr Garret Campbell and Gwen Brennan when they first went to India on the invitation of Salesian Missions to discuss teacher training.

In 2006, the married couple arrived in Assam on what they describe as a busman’s holiday. They spent almost seven weeks travelling around and meeting Indian teachers to figure out what their needs were.

“The school principals probably would have preferred if we’d given them a bag of tricks and said, ‘Do this and you’ll be grand’, but we weren’t really interested in that,” Campbell says. “We felt we really needed to listen to the teachers and get some sense of their issues and problems.”

Their problems weren’t too far removed from those facing Irish teachers, he said. “They weren’t being paid enough; they were working too hard; the principal didn’t understand them; there were discipline problems in the classroom.”

“But the interesting thing that came out in the conversation with those teachers is that they never had the opportunity of formal teacher training. A lot of them were promising high-school students who went on to work in the schools as teachers. At 16 or 17, they left school, became a teacher, stayed in school teaching for 10 or 15 or 25 years,” Campbell describes. “Also, they never had any formal recognition they were a teacher: they had no diploma or certificate to say it.”

The couple came home and founded Global Schoolroom, in which volunteer Irish teachers travel to India and formally train Indian teachers. By 2008 Global Schoolroom had become a level-seven diploma, awarded through UCD.

Global’s diploma

To earn the diploma, Indian teachers put in 1,200 hours part time over three years, completing assignments and supervised teaching practice. The course runs in three-year cycles; by autumn 2016 it will have trained nearly 800 teachers.

“The northeast of India is a tribal area, so it doesn’t have the same Hindu and Muslim divides as the rest of India,” Campbell says. “ I think there’s a sense that with so many different tribes, with their own interests and concerns, you can let them fight it out among themselves and it’ll all work out in the end.”

Indian parents were rarely involved in school life, he says. Global Schoolroom modelled parent-teacher meetings, resulting in more school community involvement.

For example, locals now build benches so children don’t have to do their homework on the ground, and buy lamps so they can continue homework after dark.

“Because the teachers weren’t trained, they didn’t really know how best to prepare kids for exams,” Campbell says. “We have seen dramatic increases in the number of children in the schools passing the equivalent of their Leaving Cert, going on to get scholarships to college.

Irish volunteers also reap the benefits of the programme.

Stephanie Egan, a geography and CSPE teacher at Coláiste Craobh Abhann in Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, has tutored in India for three summers. She says the work has had a huge impact on her own teaching.

“It has improved my teaching unbelievably,” Egan says. “It’s the best professional development I’ve ever done. I’m working with very experienced Irish teachers and I’m learning so much from them, and learning so much from the Indian teachers because they’re so eager and so enthusiastic and they really want to improve their teaching and improve things for their students.”

Chalk and talk

Teaching in India wasn’t the experience Egan was expecting, but she says it’s comparable to Irish teaching years ago.

“It’s very chalk and talk. We’re trying to bring in a bit of active learning and new methodologies or strategies we’ve found helpful in our own classrooms. It’s extremely difficult because they’re working in very difficult conditions. The school infrastructure isn’t fantastic and you’re in very remote schools, some of them made from bamboo, some with 60 or 70 kids. There’s none of the ICT we have here.”

Research at the University of Limerick on the impact of Global Schoolroom and the professional development of Irish teachers in India found they went to India with little understanding of development, and gained no more knowledge of it.

What teachers did learn about, says Campbell, was teaching. “The Irish teachers learned about themselves and their teaching and methodologies from working with their Indian colleagues. They didn’t learn about India, or global development or any of those things; what they learned about was teaching.”

The model of teacher education is a good one, he says. “It works, and we feel that at this stage, having developed it, we’re in a position to work with other education partners to tweak it to fit into a bigger global plan, where there are teacher training needs internationally.”

He says the programme can have a wider impact than simply assisting education in small pockets of the world – if it is rolled out in more areas.

“What’s driving this is a clear belief that unless we get teacher-training right, we’re never going to get education sorted. And unless we get education sorted, we’re wasting our time talking about international global development.

“Education has to be at the heart of the development agenda,” he says. “And unless everyone believes that, we’re going to get nowhere.”

GLOBAL SCHOOLROOM: HOW IT WORKS

Global Schoolroom recruits Irish teachers on a voluntary basis from September until mid-November. Those applying commit to training one weekend a month from January until July, when they fly to India for a month. They must raise a minimum of €3,000 to cover their own costs.

Applications are shortlisted and some are selected for interview. A total of 24 teachers will travel to India for a month, teaching in teams of three.

“You’re looking for teachers who are very passionate about what they do and who bring a complementary skill set, from different types of experience,” says founder Gwen Brennan.

Those chosen are trained in tutoring, with 25 hours on course content and five on health and safety in India.

“They aren’t just recruited and sent to India,” says Garret Campbell. “We have a very rigorous training programme. Just because you’re a great teacher, you can’t assume you’re a great teacher educator.”

• Applications to volunteer with Global Schoolroom close on November 20th. See globalschoolroom.net