How do teacher educators engage with Indian education policies?

Teacher educators are criticised in Indian education policies, academic research, and media reports for failing to implement policy reform. These criticisms centre around teacher educators’ practice being lecture-based, promoting rote learning, and not addressing student teachers’ beliefs and backgrounds. However, few studies investigate how teacher educators engage with Indian education policies and what this means for their teacher education practice. This necessitates the need for a first-hand understanding of the complex relationship between education policy reform and teacher education practice through the voices of teacher educators in India. In Indian education policies, teacher educators are tasked with preparing teachers for quality education. However, quality education is conceptualised in various ways in these policies, each with implications for defining the role of the teacher and thereby teacher education practice. In this regard, it is important to examine how teacher educators understand quality education, what this means for their teacher education practice, and if and how this is related to Indian education policies. Accordingly, the overarching research question and subquestions for this study are: How do teacher educators engage with Indian education policies? 1) How do teacher educators understand ‘quality education’? 2) Which Indian education policies do teacher educators describe as important, and why? 3) How do teacher educators explain their teacher education practice? The study used an in-depth qualitative research design to investigate the research questions. Fifty-two virtual interviews were undertaken with teacher educators based in universities, colleges, and NGOs across India. The data were analysed using an adapted form of Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The findings demonstrate how teacher educators draw on their personal views and experiences to understand quality education and explain their teacher education practice, though this is sometimes aligned with the prescriptions and recommendations of Indian education policies. The study points to the significance of teacher educators’ professional preparation in India, and the need for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programs that respect teacher educators’ professional autonomy while enabling them to translate education policy reform in contextually-meaningful ways. This thesis makes four key contributions to teacher education research. First, it illustrates how the distinction between different types of Indian education policies – Acts, Regulations, National/State Policies, and Reports - serves an important analytic function in explaining the relationship between education policy reform and teacher educators’ practice. Secondly, it interrogates the complex notion of causality in education and the role of NGO-based teacher educators in India, with implications for conceptions of the role of the teacher educator in achieving social transformation. Thirdly, it addresses the universal-contextual dichotomy in teacher education by suggesting that understandings of (and practices for) quality education and preparing teachers for quality education can be simultaneously relevant across the world, while also meaningful to the local context. Finally, drawing on the findings and their attendant insights, the study proposes some principles for a reimagined teacher education curriculum for India