On teaching the teachers

Refresher courses for university faculty need a total revamp

Teachers tend to fall in love with their own voice and I cannot claim to be an exception. Even so, a few months back I declined an invitation to deliver a lecture in a UGC Refresher Course (RC) for university and college teachers.

In my younger days I eagerly served as RC faculty in many parts of the country; but soon I got disenchanted and came to regard them as having little impact on quality of higher education.

The need for well-designed RCs is however undeniable. Under the present system, fresh MAs in economics are mostly ill-acquainted with the basics and motivation of their discipline. Its consequences could have been minor since most university recruits are M Phils or PhDs.

Unfortunately we have yet to develop decent graduate schools and M Phil courses fail to rectify major deficiencies and prepare students to become good teachers and researchers. Quality of teaching is further eroded by the fact that over the last two decades many top-ranking students have migrated abroad or opted for a management career.

A dedicated teacher can conceivably overcome initial handicaps under most trying circumstances; but reliance on such rare breeds hardly constitutes a serious policy option.

In fact, dedication alone may not be enough for purposes of unlearning and learning, when young teachers have little guidance on how to go about them and lack opportunities for intensive discussion for clarifying doubts. Hardworking teachers then sometimes develop the 'latest-is-best' syndrome.

Others bombard students with faithful reproductions of various models on some theme without providing any clue to their underlying unity, points of departure or economic relevance. As some widely circulated textbooks testify, more damaging is exposition of the relatively ambitious who try to provide a 'synthesis' of alternative approaches without regard to their mutual consistency or differences in motivation.

In recent years teachers' research output has been on the rise, thanks to UGC norms for promotion and data-crunching software facilities. How ever, the papers hardly go beyond their doctoral ancestors, tend to be mechanical and reflect poorly on authors' comprehension of software-derived results. With a little help many of these earnest academics can become highly productive.

Nor are the majority of those lacking motivation beyond redemption: after all, what ultimately counts in teaching is interest, challenge and environment in provision of which RCs can play an important part. But that calls for drastic changes in their planning and organisation.

As of now, RC faculty consists of more than a dozen teachers drawn from diverse sources, each giving a two-hour lecture on a relatively specialised topic and its recent advances. The idea is to whet teachers' interest and induce them to pursue the topics seriously when they go back to their institutions.

This presumes a minimum level of training and competence which most teachers lack. No wonder, RCs have become only a passport to promotion. In order to make them effective it is necessary to distinguish between two objectives.

The first is to disabuse the teachers of widespread misperceptions and make them able and motivated to pursue serious studies on their own; the second, to help broaden their mental horizon, imbibe new ideas and undertake fruitful research. Organisation of RCs for promoting the two objectives needs to be different.

Given the space limitation here, I focus on the first because of its overwhelming importance in raising the average standard of university education.

For their success RCs require meticulous planning, drafting of dedicated faculty and close coordination among them. It is cost-effective to give priority to training younger teachers since they are more receptive and have a longer working life ahead of them.

Course outlines, list of basic references, important reading material not easily available and sample problems should be sent to teachers well in advance so that they have enough time for preparation, assessing their knowledge and identifying their difficulties.

Under the prevailing state of university education, in RCs it is necessary to begin from the beginning before proceeding to specialised courses.

Fortunately learning has now become relatively easy and much less dependent on inspiring faculty. Excellent textbooks at all levels written by top-ranking economists are currently available.

Anybody studying them in proper sequence and working through the problems set at the end of each chapter should be able to master the fundamentals, find the subject highly interesting, and not have much difficulty in going deeply into it. Indeed, it is the absence of such a programme of study in most universities that necessitates remedial measures through RCs.

The emphasis during RCs is to be less on lectures and more on making teachers sort out problems on their own. It is however necessary to give some lectures at the beginning on motivation, rationale behind widely used methods of analysis and the way different branches of the discipline are organically linked.

Lectures designed to provide a perspective and prevent teachers from missing the wood for the trees constitute perhaps the most serious challenge to RC faculty: the material is not available in textbooks on different branches and in elementary ones the treatment is often inadequate. Here arises the need for collaborative effort of the faculty through exchange of ideas "" something which should be of benefit to its members also!

Following the age-old principle of learning by doing, bulk of the course must consist of presentations and workshops. In the former, with a few faculty acting as guides, teachers in turn should speak on core areas, face probing questions and clarify their doubts through intensive discussions.

The idea is to instil the habit of (a) starting from first principles; and (b) not hiding one's ignorance or limitations. While (intellectual) honesty is undoubtedly the best policy (at least for learning), in the absence of (a) economics becomes a black box and its practitioners fail to appreciate its relevance under specific circumstances. Recall Robertson's advice for not memorising Hicks's formula for derived demand unless one was a trained mathematician.

The major part of the course material may be covered through workshops designed to test teachers' command over the core references and sharpen their intellectual edge. Given the time constraint, this would involve checking their solution to problems sent beforehand; discussion of sources of their errors if any; and making them analyse some contemporary phenomena in light of what they have learnt.

Such analyses are bound to be tentative and unsatisfactory; but supplemented by proper guidance, this is a most effective means of learning economics and developing interest in the subject.

The important thing is to sequence the course in proper order such that challenges put to teachers at each stage are neither too easy nor too difficult. Once they come to realise the truth of the adage (concerning calculus) "" "what one fool can do, another can""" the job of RCs is well done.

For implementing the programme suggested above, pooling of resources and relying on only three to four institutes for conducting RCs would be an important step forward. These institutes, chosen for their potential to become first rate graduate schools, should not treat RCs as poor cousins of regular courses.

The present vicious circle of condescending attitude of RC faulty, teachers' lack of motivation and sense of pointlessness of the whole scheme may then hopefully be turned into a virtuous one.

proj_monfin@hotmail.com

(The writer is ex-professor, Presidency College and Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta and currently director, Monetary Research Project at Icra)