A letter to the teachers of English: 90Yet another curriculum revision [Archives:2005/860/Education]

Dr..M.N.K.Bose ([email protected])
Associate Professor of English,
Faculty of Arts, Ibb
Dear Fellow teachers,

I was involved in yet another curriculum revision in my University; something I should share with you. It was a workshop for revising the curricula of all the departments in a Faculty, a genuine attempt to revise the old curricula in order to bring in new ideas in the teaching of all the subjects in that faculty. The leadership intended that a revision of curriculum is inevitable and good especially because it is a Faculty of Education and the teachers produced in the Faculty should be up-to-date with new information in their fields of study. Good intentions, no doubt.

Experts in the subjects concerned had been drawn from various institutions and gathered in the Faculty and all the arrangements had been carefully made for the workshop. What surprised me was the time allotted for the discussion of the proposals to the new curriculum in each department; I had to convince myself that all the necessary interactions had taken place between the teachers in the Dept. and the experts in the subjects before they met in the workshop.

A curriculum is a serious document and the revision of it with new thoughts and information needs to be done with a lot of care and attention because, as we have seen, any flaw in it will have serious consequences and result in handicapping generations of learners who will be guided by it. An example was presented in one of the earlier letters. A curriculum revision is not an activity where you can be in a hurry.

The English curriculum which has resulted from the workshop, though not the best, is better in that it has useful elements to enable the learners, who are going to be teachers of English, to achieve their goals. The new curriculum has proposed courses like Computer Use, Classroom observation and Management, Preparation of English Teaching Materials, English Language Testing etc, which will enable the student teachers to learn more about their profession in the Faculty before they enter the classrooms as teachers. One of the notable changes proposed to the new curriculum is to club the literature courses genre wise, teaching the novels of the 18th and 19th century in one course, for example. It was received well by the teachers of literature courses, as it would give them greater freedom to choose the best works of several centuries to teach. Such changes in literature courses can be taken up in other faculties too.

The workshop was a rewarding experience mainly because of the participating teachers' enthusiasm and the interest they have in equipping their learners with the latest information. But, in my view, we are at times overenthusiastic and forget the ground realities and the unfortunate result is that we are thrusting down the throats of our unwilling learners what they tolerate just because it comes from us, the respected teachers. This happens mainly because we overestimate our learners' abilities or misjudge them; I'm aware that we should not insult the intelligence of our learners either, but judging them correctly is a pre-requirement to fix up our priorities in our teaching and even a slight error in this exercise may result in great damages. One of the ways of doing this to test them often with a mind to judge their abilities and observe their performances objectively, 'objectively' is the catch word here. Let's do it, shall we?

Yours fraternally,

Dr.M.N.K.Bose.
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