Teacher Education in India’s National Education Policy 2020: Knowledge Traditions,Global Discourses and National Regulations

Introduction

In terms of policy discourses, teacher education (TE) is at a crossroads in India. Debates about policy, legal and regulatory developments have intensified over the past decade. This unprecedented interest in the area has emerged from an overarching policy focus on addressing the ‘learning crisis’, which is often defined in terms of low-learning achievements at schools. This crisis is seen as an outcome of ‘poor teaching’ that in-turn is connected with the lack of satisfactory quality of teacher preparation. Several long-standing structural issues in TE in India impinge upon both conceptualisation and enactment of policy reforms, arguably pushing the sector to a moribund state. The main issue is the entrenchment of commercial interests in the domain, which is reflected in the concentration of TE institutions in the self-financed private sector (about 92%) (Menon & Mathew, 2016, p. 150). These institutions in most cases are ‘standalone institutions’ that have little or no connection with other areas of study or the larger university system. Literature indicates that this has contributed to overall abysmal quality of teacher preparation (Ministry of Human Resource Development [MHRD], 2012; Sharma, 2021; Srinivasan, 2015). To address some of the quality concerns, there is a centralised national regulatory control in TE that applies not only to the self-financed institutions but also to the public and not-for-profit actors as well. TE in India is regulated by the National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE) which gained statutory status in 1993. Its main objective is to achieve planned and coordinated development of TE and control commercialisation in the sector by developing and implementing regulatory norms and standards for TE institutions for starting TE programmes (TEPs). These regulations prescribe centralised norms (for instance, related to infrastructure, curriculum and numbers and qualifications of teacher educators) that often make innovation in TE non-viable and unsustainable (Sharma, 2019, 2021). There are also issues of lack of transparency and coordination within the TE regulatory system (MHRD, 2012).

The concern for TE quality coexists with a shortage of 1 million qualified teachers in schools in keeping with the norms of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) (2009) (TISS & UNESCO, 2021). Section 23(2) of the RTE Act, 2009, mandates the provision of qualified teachers at the elementary school stage within five years from the Act’s implementation—that is, by 2015. Paradoxically, the status of TE and the mounting shortage of trained teachers led to the amendment of Section 23 in 2017, extending the time for fulfilling this requirement (Batra, 2017). The shortage of qualified teachers continues to create much pressure on educational practice in India. These issues have been acknowledged in policy documents. National Curriculum Framework for TE (NCFTE), 2009 (NCTE, 2009), and Justice Verma Commission (JVC) Report 2012 (MHRD, 2012) are two policy-level documents that emerged from deliberations within this sector. The Supreme Court of India set up the JVC in view of a case regarding granting of recognition to a large number of private TE colleges in the state of Maharashtra. The report drew its main reform principles from the NCFTE: (a) a holistic approach to curriculum; (b) an emphasis on engagement with theory and foundational perspectives on education; (c) preparation for future teachers to be reflective, humane and professional practitioners; (d) longer and intense internship/school experience; (e) preparing would-be teachers to organise teaching–learning in a child-centred manner; and (f) stage specificity in training for various school stages. To address pre-service quality issues especially at the elementary level, the JVC Report and NCFTE recommended that TEPs should be upgraded to four-year or longer degree programmes as against primarily being offered through diplomas or one-year postgraduate offering. Both documents suggested upgrading TEPs to the university level. There have been multiple kinds of TEPs that have coexisted in India (UNESCO, 2021), including, one-year postgraduate Bachelor of Education (BEd), two-year post-school Diploma in Elementary Education, four-year Bachelor of Elementary Education (BElEd), and four-year Bachelor of Arts/Science integrated with Bachelor of Education (BA/BScBEd).

The one-year BEd programme was India’s dominant model of TE until 2014. Deliberating on quality concerns of this TEP, the JVC Report mandated doubling its duration (NCTE, 2014a). Among the various TEPs, BElEd was upheld in the JVC Report and NCFTE as the reform model. The programme features that were highlighted were a multidisciplinary curriculum, seamless integration of liberal and professional education and location in university colleges. The JVC Report argued that since a substantial number of current TE institutions are not connected with universities, they remain isolated from a multidisciplinary education, essential for a holistic TE that can be provided in a university. In this context, the report recommended the upgradation of TE to the university level. However, the status and impact of the implementation of this recommendation is only sporadically recorded in the literature (Ramchand, 2021; Sharma, 2019; Srinivasan, 2015).

While this is a broad picture of the TE policy context in India, developments in the domain are also shaped by global education policy (GEP) discourses on learning, teaching and teachers. Since the 1990s, like other developing countries, India has increasingly experienced the influence of GEP frameworks, beginning with the implementation of structural adjustment programmes through externally funded educational projects (Alexander, 2001; Mundy & Verger, 2015). These included projects funded by the World Bank and other multilateral funding agencies following the Jomtien Declaration (UNESCO, 1990) and the Dakar Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2000). Over these years, the influence of global actors, including donor agencies and international non-government organisations (iNGO) has become ubiquitous in the policy landscape of India (Nambissan & Ball, 2010). Ideas of reform advocated by these actors have been characterised by ‘learnification’ of educational policy-practice discourses and simplification of teachers’ identity as facilitators of learning (Biesta, 2013, p. 5). Simultaneously, these actors have advocated for the governance of teachers and TE in the New Public Management (NPM) framework (Raina, 2020a). These GEP influences have been widely seen as part of the neoliberal imaginary that has reconfigured the purposes and governance of education exclusively in human capital terms at the cost of other broader aims such as that of social justice (Rizvi, 2017).

Thus, policy thinking around TE in India has come to involve a complex consideration of the national contexts, problems and aspirations, and the pressures of GEP (Sayed & Sarangapani, 2021). It has also increasingly become a crowded and competitive space with the emergence of multiple global, national and local actors and their coalitions, jostling for greater control in TE. In this complex policy context, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 (MoE, 2020) was released by the Government of India (GoI) in July 2020. NEP 2020 came after a long gap since the last NEP (1986), during which the discourse and concerns around teachers and TE had already shifted. These shifts include (a) a multi-fold increase in the teacher requirement with the expansion of the school system to achieve universal elementary education—and the corresponding rise in private TE institutions, (b) focus on teacher quality in an NPM perspective to enhance learning outcomes and (c) development of discourse around child-centred and democratic pedagogies. Balancing the demands of quantitative expansion with the need to maintain quality and equity in school education has become the main challenge for TE today (Sharma, 2019). In this regard, NEP 2020 was expected to represent a policy response to the systemic concerns in TE.

With this background, this article engages with the current policy discourses on TE in India, specifically focussing on the recommendation of the NEP 2020. It attempts to makes sense of NEP 2020 recommendations to track questions, such as How does NEP 2020 visualise reforming TE in India? What approaches of TE underlie these ideas of reform? What are the distinctive characteristics of the main recommendations? Following these questions, the next section of the article reviews the relevant literature. This is followed by a description of the method. The findings are organised in two parts. The first part examines the policy vision for TE and the knowledge traditions and global discourses that underlie the proposed policy reforms. The second part examines the translation of the core policy recommendation of initiating a new TEP in the national regulatory framework for implementation by drawing comparisons with the regulatory norms and standards of other similar programmes. This is followed by discussion and conclusion of the main arguments.

Perspectives and Literature: Knowledge Traditions and GEP Discourses in TE

The article draws from perspectives and literature organised into three main categories. The first category consists of literature that engages with the identity of education as a discipline and the epistemic tensions and traditions that shape education as a knowledge domain. These epistemic tensions and traditions have an inherent link with how policies in the domain are articulated and how the concepts and processes that guide them are selected or assumed. Drawing from Furlong and Whitty (2017, p. 15), this study is based on the conceptual premise that ‘Education, as a field, is made up of a collection of different traditions, each of which has its conception of educational knowledge which may vary from country to country’. Based on the study of the primary ‘social sites’ of these knowledge traditions (the academic institutions, national regulatory frameworks and professional networks) in different countries, Furlong and Whitty (2017) identify three kinds of knowledge traditions for education, each comprising varied sub-traditions: (a) academic knowledge traditions that embrace sub-disciplines or foundations of education often reflecting a multidisciplinary set of discourses, as well as ‘applied’ and ‘new science’ approaches that focus respectively on specialised areas within education (like early childhood education, curriculum, and learning) and research aiming to improve outcomes typically using randomised controlled trials (RCTs); (b) practical knowledge traditions that are primarily based on the knowledge that circulates in the world of practice. Of interest here is the ‘education as generics’ sub-tradition led by agents whose interest is not in disciplinary knowledge but in maximisation of productivity, for instance, by promulgating a standards-based framework currently underpinning TE globally; and (c) integrated knowledge traditions that bring together the academic and practical traditions, for instance in practitioner research that focuses on developing reflective professionals.

While this categorisation enables the identification of the dominant traditions in particular contexts, it is quite plausible to find these different epistemic approaches coexisting or competing within the same context. This may be seen as an outcome of the lack of epistemological coherence within education compared to the more established disciplines (McCulloch, 2002). This lack of coherence ‘is simultaneous with the domain of education institutionally functioning and having an identity “more or less” as a discipline in a wide variety of contexts’ (Furlong & Whitty, 2017, p. 5). Sarangapani (2011) argues that different positions about the domain have not only coexisted in India but have shaped the epistemic identity of education and TE. A subset of related literature also indicates that these different positions underlie the sharp intellectual fault lines between educational practitioners and scholars and have influenced the policy politics of regulatory frameworks of TE in India (Dhankar, 2014; Sharma, 2019). In sum, the literature broadly points to the lack of and difficulty in building a knowledge consensus or generally agreed-upon principles in the domain.

The second trajectory in the literature, that could be seen as a reflection of ‘education as generics’ sub-tradition, discusses GEP’s influence on teacher governance, including TE. GEP could be understood as global education goals or norm setting (e.g., education for all goals and sustainable development goals) by international organisations (IOs) and other non-state actors (like, international development agencies, private sector organisations and iNGOs) (Tromp & Datzberger, 2019). It reflects processes, agents and events of globalisation in education policy across contexts—through mechanisms such as international aid, development assistance, technical support and monitoring. Sometimes referred to as ‘travelling reform’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2006, p. 665), GEP is critiqued for proliferating a neoliberal social imaginary in national policies through policy diffusion, transfer, adoption, isomorphism or convergence (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Verger et al., 2012). These influences can be identified by tracing policy networks and lexicon of standards, learning outcomes, performance, accountability and efficiency—reflecting a narrow connotation of education as a mere instrument for the global market (Nambissan & Ball, 2010). In the last decade, teacher policies have become central in GEP reforms. Cochran-Smith (2013, p. 3) has argued that increasing attention on teacher recruitment, preparation and retention in the policy space is directly linked to the assumption that improving teacher quality is the single-shot strategy for enhancing a nation’s ability to compete in the global economy. The focus of these discourses is primarily on enhancing narrowly defined learning outcomes by deploying the NPM approach for teacher governance (Raina, 2020a). It is argued that the human capital theory that underlies this approach is increasingly becoming a singular frame of reference for policy-practice in TE (Hordern & Tatto, 2018). The GEP reforms emphasise a technical conception of teaching at the cost of other more nuanced conceptions especially those that are orientated towards an academic tradition. Robertson’s (2012) analysis of global teacher governance frameworks (such as SABER-Teachers by the World Bank) demonstrates that the ‘utility’ of TE and professional development is constantly under question in these reforms. This trend converges into an overall shift in the teacher governance perspective from norm-setting to competitive comparison between individuals. These views question the role of universities in TE, thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of disciplined knowledge in education. While a segment of literature also points to a global trend of the movement of TE in universities after a long-drawn struggle in various contexts, this shift is described as a ‘pyrrhic victory’ for TE (Furlong, 2013, p. 41). As TE has found a space in the university system proper, the autonomy of universities has been challenged by the neo-liberal turn in higher education that has fundamentally altered its systems, giving impetus to ‘enterprise-like’ universities. Education departments have been affected substantially by these developments, given the nature of their contested location in the universities, high regulation by governments and interference by external actors. It is argued that this has resulted in devaluing and de-professionalising of those involved in TE and impacted educational research, making it increasingly market driven.

The third trajectory in the literature comprises works that engage with the need for alternative conceptions of TE, especially in the context of intensification of GEP influences. Within this vast body of critical work, literature that analyses the enactment of global teaching–learning reforms from a cultural perspective is particularly well developed (Gupta, 2020; Kumar & Sarangapani, 2004; Sriprakash, 2012). This literature examines the externally funded learning reform programmes as these are enacted in the classrooms of the Global South since the 1990s following the Education for All goals (UNESCO, 1990). It problematises the Eurocentric theories of teaching–learning that underlie these global development reforms aimed at improving literacy and numeracy achievement by addressing the ‘learning crises at the primary school level. Other studies have critically analysed how global policy action has impinged upon not only the pedagogic contexts but also on the professional status of teachers and legitimacy of a prolonged and intense TE (Kumar et al., 2001; Sayed & Sarangapani, 2020; Sayed et al., 2020). These studies support the view that global TE reforms are based on decontextualised models and do not posit critical agency in teachers and visualise them as mere instructors, often aiming to teacher-proof the curriculum (Gutierrez & McLaren, 2016; Hordern & Tatto, 2018). However, the question of how global policies shape the conceptualisation of TEPs is only sporadically pursued in this literature despite a broader recognition of the need. Similarly, theoretical and empirical research on alternate ways of conceptualising TE in the context of these developments is in its early stages in India and globally (Cochran-Smith, 2013; Gupta, 2020; Viruru & Perskey, 2019).

Critical Policy Analysis Lens and Method

This article constitutes a segment of broader research that focusses on TE policy-practice and regulatory regimes and understanding the location of TE in universities. This research agenda uses the critical policy analysis (CPA) lens to identify the latent assumptions about TE in India’s national policy-level documents. There are multiple ways to understand CPA. For instance, Ball’s (1993) analytical approach enables understanding policy as text, as discourse, and effects. Rizvi (2006) conceptualises CPA as an examination of how power relations are (re)produced and (re)configured in policies based on the assumption that policy is not neutral and descriptive but is essentially politically constituted. Gorur (2011) develops the understanding of policy as assemblage to make sense of the new orthodoxy of Evidence-Based Policy in education, especially when national and transnational policy interactions are to be explored. The assemblage metaphor as a way to explain policymaking is used in multiple ways, such as (a) to explain policy as a chaotic hodgepodge while questioning the certainties that characterise policy rationality, (b) to explore the ‘processes by which entities become relationally entangled in emergent phenomena’ and (c) to destabilise given notions, agency and action to perform an ontological politics (Gorur, 2011, p. 619). Drawing from these multiple approaches, this article focuses on exploring and identifying the knowledge traditions, GEP discourse influences and assemblages concerning TE embedded in selected policy documents while aiming to assess how the concerns of India’s TE are represented therein.

Deploying CPA lens, qualitative document analysis (QDA) has been used in this article to examine policy and regulatory documents. QDA is a ‘systematic procedure for reviewing or evaluating documents—both printed and electronic material’ (Bowen, 2009, p. 27). The method involves an immersive reading of selected documents to conduct a qualitative analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). It is critical to strike a balance between evidence and analysis. The research process includes: identifying and collecting relevant policy documents from official websites and repeatedly reading the documents. For the purpose of the present article, two data sources were used:

National Education Policy 2020 (MoE, 2020).

Data analysis began with the coding of themes across the selected documents, specifically mapping references to TE, teacher preparation and development, and teaching. From multiple readings of NEP 2020 as a whole, two kinds of references to TE were identified: (a) the recommendations in the dedicated section on TE in the NEP 2020 (p. 42–43), and (b) the references made to TE in other sections of the policy. This laid the foundation for the second stage of analysis, which is of coding, which targeted drawing explanatory patterns among the themes. To arrive at inferences, drawing upon the different knowledge traditions in education discussed in the article, the analysis focussed on the issues identified in and reform recommendations for TE in NEP 2020. The overt and implicit references to GEP discourse in the specific context of TE were also coded and analysed. To support this analysis, we compared the regulations of the three selected programmes for initial TE using CPA, focussing on the distinctive features, especially the concept, location, and approach to integration.

The two aspects of analysis were linked based on the understanding of regulatory frameworks as one of the sites of policy enactment because these hold the statutory power to formulate and institutionalise particular conceptions of TE across the country. The two main themes of analysis and findings help to understand the TE recommendations of NEP 2020 in two ways: (a) by identifying the TE traditions and discourses underlying the policy text, and (b) by examining the flagship policy recommendation of instituting a new mainstream four-year ITEP as it unfolds into a regulation and comparing it with other existing four-year TEPs to understand what constitutes its ‘newness’. The following section of the article analyses the findings which have been arrived at.

Parallel Reform Approaches

The analysis indicates coexistence of multiple reform ideas drawing upon distinct and contradictory knowledge traditions and discourses on teachers and TE in NEP 2020. This section engages with three distinct approaches to TE placed in NEP 2020 shaped by (a) the academic tradition, (b) GEP influences and (c) cultural-nationalist orientation.

Between New and Old: Comparing TE Regulatory Frameworks

This part of the article pursues the question of what makes ITEP new compared to the existing four-year TEPs. This question arises as two models of undergraduate TEPs of four-years each, BA/BScBEd and BElEd, have existed in India from the 1960s (see Table 1). BA/BScBEd, offered in the five Regional Colleges of Education of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, started in 1964. It aims at preparing teachers for upper-primary and secondary school stages of education. BElEd started in 1994 with a focus on elementary TE. It emerged from the understanding that universities must play a role in enhancing elementary education (Chanana, 2004). As an outcome of long-drawn thinking and practice-based experiences, BElEd was launched in eight colleges of the University of Delhi (Raina, 2021).

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Table 1.

Comparison of Three Four-year TEPs.

Aspects of Comparison	BA/BSc/BEd	BElEd	ITEP (BA/BSc/BCom/BEd)
Year	1964	1994	2023
Active NCTE regulation	NCTE (2014b)	NCTE (2014c)	NCTE (2021)
Location	Composite institutions	Constituent or affiliated colleges of a multidisciplinary university or a university offering multiple TEPs or a university with multidisciplinary faculty	Multidisciplinary higher education institutions
Duration	Four years	Four years	Four years (with exit system)
School stage	Upper primary and secondary	Elementary	New curricular model5 + 3 + 3 + 4 proposed by NEP 2020
Concept of integration	‘content courses on par with those of undergraduate liberal programmes … and supportive courses, pedagogic courses, and practicum’. (NCTE, 2014b, p. 165)	‘interweaves subject content with pedagogy and integrates practicum with theory’ (NCTE, 2014c, p. 110)	‘dual-major holistic Bachelor’s degree … includes different courses and activities essential for both the degrees’ (NCTE, 2021, p. 11)
Curriculum	Broad structure given in NCTE (2014b)	Broad structure given in NCTE (2014c)	Model curriculum prescribed by NCTE with 30% flexibility allowed to the institutions

One of the core differences in the three programmes is the conceptualisation of the school stages. BElEd focuses on preparing teachers for up to class eight, seeing the first eight years of schooling on a continuum. BA/BScBEd focuses on preparing teachers for upper primary and secondary stages based on the given school structures in most states in India. ITEP aims to prepare teachers for the new curricular model of ‘5 + 3 + 3 + 4’ proposed by the NEP 2020, consisting of the foundational stage (three years of preschool with two years of primary grades), preparatory stage (grades three to five), middle stage (grades six to eight), and secondary stage (grades nine to twelve) (MoE, 2020, p. 11). However, the differences between BA/BScBEd and ITEP begin to fade beyond this, and the gap between these programmes and BElEd widens as their regulations are compared.

Conclusion

The article argues that there are inconsistent and divergent traditions of TE reform in NEP 2020. One of these aligns with the academic knowledge tradition that has been generally agreed-upon in the past two decades in the Indian context as the reform pathway in TE. The other reform approach could be seen as shaped by the GEP borrowings packaged as outcomes-oriented performance-based standards for TE. The analysis also indicates that rather than being a new solution to the challenges of TE in the country, NEP 2020’s primary reform recommendation—ITEP—is a ‘tweaked’ form of the already existing BA/BScBEd programme. The main changes introduced are in the organisation and coverage of school stages. At the same time, ITEP carries forward some of the critical problems of BA/BScBEd, such as a limited concept of integration. It may also potentially create additional regulatory issues, particularly concerning the curricular autonomy of universities and determination of ‘equivalence’ between different TE qualifications. This leads to two critical questions: Rather than introducing modifications in the existing BA/BScBEd, why was a new ITEP introduced? As the new Regulation (NCTE, 2021) for the ITEP was developed, why were the issues of the existing TE models not addressed? These questions point to the missing linkages between policy and practice in TE.

These findings also point to the challenges of TE reforms in India. TE policy and regulation in India is generally perceived as a techno-legal domain that operates on a set of given norms guided exclusively by quality concerns. In principle, the policy and regulatory instruments are believed to be pursuing the professionalisation of TE. Given this perception, TE policy and regulations remain understudied (Sharma, 2021). However, literature and analysis highlights that the policy-regulatory context of TE is highly complex, with competing coalitions of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, private institutions’ lobby, regulatory bodies and global actors, staking claim in the domain. The negotiations in such crowded space and on contested terrains are often reflected in the policy instruments as assemblages of conflicting ideas. These assemblages are inherently connected with the epistemic tensions that constitute the ‘discipline’ of education.

These dynamics allude to various issues, of which at least four need attention. The first among these concerns is the centralisation of TE reform and regulation in a diverse institutional landscape of TE and higher education. Such centralisation makes it challenging to sustain diversity and innovation in the domain. The second issue is the limited autonomy of university departments of education imagined in the policy-regulatory discourses and the ramifications of locating stringently regulated TE in the university space governed by its own internal and external regulatory frameworks and politics. The third issue is the lack of dialogue between research, policy, and practice in TE, making it more challenging to arrive at broadly-agreed-upon bases for policy-thinking (Sharma, 2021). The fourth significant issue is the limited imagination of TE as only an instrument for improving school education, lacking a focus on the marginalisation of the teacher in TE. These issues have been persistent in the grammar of India’s policy and regulatory instruments and illustrate the peculiar challenges of imagining and implementing reform in and professionalising a praxis-based centrally regulated domain. In this context, NEP 2020 recommendations do not come across as systematically recognising and addressing these core issues and thus may further add to the chaos already existing in this domain.