Career path for teachers: A new venture to address an old need, VMIE hopes to refine teaching

The institute will offer training to aspiring teachers as well as professional development courses.

KARACHI:

With over 700 teacher-training institutions already operational across the country, Dr Bernadette L Dean vows to set a benchmark with a new venture, aiming to offer a holistic education with a focus on liberal arts.

The Valy Mohammad Institute for Education (VMIE), where the former principal of St Joseph’s College for Women in Karachi and Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore has assumed the responsibility of the top job, had its groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday. The site for the institute’s main campus, located at KDA Scheme 33, near Safoora roundabout, is expected to flaunt a state-of-the-art building in the next two years.

This venture by the Rangoonwala Foundation, which is likely to receive degree-awarding status in September this year, intends to introduce the four-year Bachelor’s degree in education, alongside other certificate and diploma courses. The institute will also offer development services to schools through continuing professional development of teachers.

“The institution will set a new model in Pakistan through the integration of theory and practice with emphasis on the five Cs - critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication and contextual relevance,” said Dr Dean. “Ten years down the road, we hope to have transformed the educational environment in the country.”

Explaining the need for such an institution, Dr Dean said that the deplorable state of education in the country called for a rigorous plan to produce good teachers.

An estimated seven million children are out of school while learning outcomes for the school-going children are extremely poor in the country. Pakistan does not only have a constitutional provision for ‘Right to Education’ but is also a signatory to the ‘Education for All’, a global movement led by the UNESCO, aiming to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015, she said.

For her, the VMIE has come at a very opportune time when the need to focus on improving the status of education is greater than ever. “Besides preparing pre-service teachers to get into the field, we need to train teachers who are already in service since they are not delivering,” she said.

What appears wrong to Dr Dean is the prevailing perception that anybody can teach. “We want to advocate getting better people into this profession while creating a real career path for teachers so that it becomes a profession like any other.”

Asif Rangoonwala, distinguished business entrepreneur and chairperson of the Rangoonwala Foundation, explained that the foundation began with vocational training in 1970s. “If you look at a great number of vocational training courses that take place outside the Zuleikhabai Valy Mohammad Gany (ZVMG) Rangoonwala Community Centre, most teachers serving in those courses have learnt their basic skills at the community centre.”

With that legacy in mind, the Rangoonwala family felt the need to move up from vocational training to formal education. “When you have a shortage of 175,000 teachers in a country of 20 million people, I think we, as a non-governmental organisation, should start putting emphasis on education,” he said. “Today, you are witnessing the beginning of the first state-of-the-art VMIE facility here. We hope to have at least 10 similar institutions in the next 10 years.”

He said that Pakistan at present only produces six to seven thousand teachers, of which around 50 to 60 per cent would fail their appraisals even though they have recieved their degrees. “Each institution will produce a minimum of 800 teachers annually and the foundation envisions producing at least 10,000 teachers within a decade.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2014.