Policy and Regulatory Reforms in Teacher Education in India

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Teacher education regulation in India is generally perceived as an apolitical technical domain that operates on a set of given norms. In principle the regulatory instruments are believed to be pursuing the goals of professionalizing and enhancing quality in teacher education, which have been longstanding issues in the country. Given this perception, teacher education regulations (and policy) remain much understudied by educationists and social scientists. However, an analysis of the developments and debates in the regulatory policy points otherwise. A critical analysis of the successive national regulatory frameworks and norms which consists of tracking changes and reforming ideas highlights that policy and regulatory decision making in teacher education is highly contested, with different coalitions of scholars and practitioners claiming stakes in the domain. These contestations are inherently connected with the tensions that underlie or constitute the “discipline” of education. These contestations and dynamics allude to various issues of which at least three need much greater attention. The first among these concerns is the centralization of regulatory powers and standardized regulatory norms for different kinds of institutions in teacher education, which makes it difficult to allow for diversity in the domain. The second issue concerns limited autonomy of university departments of education and of location of teacher education in the university space that has its own regulatory frameworks. The third issue is the lack of dialogue between research, policy, and practice in teacher education that makes it more challenging to arrive at “generally-agreed-upon” rational bases for regulating or policy thinking for quality in teacher education. These issues have been persistent in the grammar of the regulatory instruments and illustrate the peculiar challenges of imagining and implementing “reform” in a praxis-based nationally regulated domain.