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Sustainable development in education

improvement
Last Updated 15 April 2015, 16:19 IST
Sustainable development is a continuous process that has to meet the present requirements without compromising the ability of the future generation to meet their needs. In the realm of higher education, sustainable development depends upon quality education and quality in turn depends on innovation and ultimately, innovation upon teaching-learning synergy, research (intellectual capital) and extension (outreach) programmes.

In sustainable development, teaching and learning synergy plays a pivotal role, in that, a teacher should be creative. A creative teacher is one who has the capacity to coordinate synthetic ability, evaluation ability and practical ability and an effective teacher is responsible for creating a warm classroom climate, to promote enthusiasm, motivation, discipline and interactive teacher-student relationship.

S/he needs the capacity to be persistent, flexible and innovative with new teaching approaches and practices. Besides a creative teacher, a student with critical thinking and responsive and reactive talent is needed. It’s not only a creative teacher and a student with critical thinking we need, but we also need to have an efficient management to nourish and nurture the teacher and the pupil.

In the present day world, there is a tremendous change in the mode of teaching (pedagogy), hence in the role of a teacher. Nowadays, education institutions are not only the centers of learning, but also banks of earning, because what was yesterday, may not be the same today, and what is today may not be same tomorrow.

Gone are the days where the traditional chalk and talk teaching methodology was prevalent. It has now been replaced by the walk and talk method in  present day pedagogy. A teacher is no longer a spoon feeder, s/he is a guide; the better word for a teacher is facilitator and for the student, it is learner. I feel that a teacher is not only a facilitator but also a stabiliser, because s/he has to put the student in the proper track, if the student goes this way or that way.

A teacher also plays a role of a catalyst in classroom to speed up the reaction of the learning process, rather than a knowledge bank. Further, in modern times, a teacher must be a good psychologist and he has to know the student interest, their lifestyles, their attitudes, aptitudes and their behaviour. An effective teacher is a psychologist, musician, actor, helper and above all, a friend. There is a greater responsibility as there is a lucrative package on the part of the teacher to identify the personality of a student.

There are two images, the real and the ideal. Real image is one which the person has or possesses and the ideal image is one what the person wants to become. If your real image coincides with ideal image, s/he becomes a very successful person, if not, s/he is a failure.
These two images have to be identified and should be identical. For example, if a person has a talent for teaching right from student life and is interested in the teaching profession, s/he can aim not only to become a good teacher, but also a great teacher. Here the real image coincides with the ideal image.

On the other hand, if a person has administrative talent but not in teaching, (this is his/her real image), but s/he wants to become a good teacher. They cannot as the real image does not coincide with the ideal image.
Therefore, if a teacher can identify and differentiate these images in the personality of students through class work, seminars, quiz programs, group discussions, lectures, field work etc., and show them the right way for his future depending upon his/her talent and aptitude, s/he will definitely become a successful person in his life beyond the shadow of doubt and self esteem will be higher. Hence, the role of a modern teacher is multidimensional.

On the whole, we need to have two exhaustive resources for sustainable development, one is, physical sources with state of the art facilities, high-end technology on one hand and the other, efficient human resources like creative teachers, students of critical thinking and magnanimous management to march forward towards quality and excellence and ultimately sustainability in higher education.

(The writer is the Founder Vice-Chancellor of Apex Professional University)

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(Published 15 April 2015, 16:19 IST)

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