Inculcate 'universal human values' in faculty: AICTE

After school teachers and students, it is now time for the newly-recruited faculty members of technical institutions to get 'universal human values' lessons and absorb them.

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has come up with its first comprehensive policy for a holistic training of teachers in engineering, management and other technical institutes.

Instilling 'universal human values' in faculty members forms an integral part of the exercise.

However, during the training an equal focus will be on imparting pedagogy skills and other aspects of teaching like preparing a systematic lesson plan, effective classroom interaction, ICT tools and aids for effective teaching-learning and effective methods for evaluation of students.

The technical education regulator has prescribed to conduct the training under two distinct categories of the programmes— The faculty induction program (FIP) will be conducted just after the recruitment and the in-service training program, catering to the specific requirement of the faculty members, will be conducted at various levels of their teaching career.

The policy aims at improving the quality of education based on the recommendation of a 5-member committee, headed by H P Khincha, former vice-chancellor of the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU).

“All the acquired skills are harnessed in accordance with the value perception. Unless a person inculcates a holistic perception and universal human values, all the skills are likely to get misused under the influence of greed, fear, selfishness, jealously etc,” the panel said emphasising on the need for value education to teachers.

The committee also noted in its report that there has been “a spectacular increase” in the number of technical institutions in the past few decades but the thrust on improving the quality of education in such a wide spectrum of technical institutions in the country has been lagging.

The trend in most of the technical institutions in the country, including “even in the pace-setting institutions” such as the IITs, NITs, IIITs, is that the fresh technical graduates and the like do not undergo any training.

“By and large, fresh graduates after M.Sc., M.Tech, MBA or Ph.D are recruited as teachers and are left to fend for themselves in working out their profession with an expectation that they will become competent teachers by trial and error, totally un-mentored,” the panel added.

At present, around 30,000 teachers are recruited afresh every year in technical institutions. Nearly 7 lakh faculty members are engaged in teaching at a total of 10,400 technical institutes across the country.

Under the 'value and ethics' training module: teachers are expected to develop “an adequate understanding” of the essential complementarities of the values and skills as well as a better understanding of “the human reality vis-a-vis co-existence in rest of nature.”