The Moral Basis of the Modular B.Ed.

Abstract

10 The recent history of initial teacher education in this country has been one of frequent and substantial change. The length of training has been extended from two to three, and in many cases to four years. Panic expansion in the size and number of colleges has been followed immediately by contraction, closures and amalgamations. Paralleling these structural changes there have been major developments in the knowledge content of the course itself, the introduction of teaching degrees, and internal organisational changes within the colleges to cope with new forms of knowledge, especially in the area of education theory. A feature common to these changes is that they have, to a greater or lesser extent, been directly imposed upon the colleges by outside agencies: the structural parameters are set by the DES, and the new forms of knowledge have been developed almost exclusively in the Institutes of Education and disseminated to the colleges. The last two years however have witnessed one significant change that appears to have been developed within the colleges, and which has, as yet, aroused little comment. It is the development of modular courses of teacher training. Although there were pressures from outside leading almost every college to frame proposals for three and four year B.Ed. degrees to replace the existing Certificate, there was no visible compulsion for these to have been devised as modular structures. Many colleges have, however, moved to this form of course organisation, and it is this development that is the subject of this article. The principal features of modular course designs are as follows: the course, in large measure, is progressively built up from a series of student-selected options; these optional 'units' or 'modules' comprise relatively self-contained blocks of knowledge of standardised size; student performance is assessed on each module upon its completion, and overall final assessment is arrived at by the arithmetic accumulation of grades obtained from each completed module. The distinction between modular and conventional courses is not always clear cut; conventional courses can contain optional elements, and self-styled modular courses can contain large proportions of compulsory units.' The operational definition used here derives simply from the manner in which colleges, through their official prospectuses and entries in the Handbook,2 describe their courses. A college will be said to be operating a modular pattern if that college describes its own course content in 'unit' or 'module' terms, and indicates that to obtain a Certificate or a B.Ed. degree a student must pass a set number of such units. It has to be acknowledged that, in the absence of further data on each college, this is a rough classification. Some colleges are probably operating thorough-going modular schermes, while others, because of the number of compulsory units and/or built in prerequisites, are presenting fairly conventional teacher training courses merely re-written as modular structures. In 1973 no course of initial training was operating on a