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On The Poor Conditions Of Teaching Practice In Nigeria -By Bamigboye Judah Segun

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This literary intervention arises from the writer’s urge to draw the attention of Education policymakers, public intellectuals, government officials and the general citizenry to the vicious Frankenstein rearing its ugly head in the Nigerian education sector, and, more specifically, in teacher training and education.

If indeed, a nation’s education sector cannot grow beyond the quality of her teachers, then there is an exigent need to holistically address the highly unacceptable poor conditions under which future educators, otherwise dubbed teachers-in-training, are being trained towards becoming tomorrow’s teachers of the unborn generation.

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It isn’t a pretty picture. The teacher training program is operationally designed to expose the potential teachers to practical, hands-on experiences regarding the teaching profession. Under a particular period of time(which various across polytechnics, colleges of education and universities), the students are posted to various primary or secondary schools to observe the exercise under the supervision of a permanent teacher(of the same discipline) in those respective schools in order to garner the experience,nurture and motivation needed to become skilled teachers upon graduation.

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However, several anomalies have been observed over the years which has further dented the credibility of the Nigerian-styled teaching practice program in the widely applauded recognition of the need to professionalize the teaching profession.

First, this writer can’t but mention the highly egregious manner with which the teachers-in-training have been overused across private and public schools in the country. The veteran supervisory teachers now anxiously await the posting of student teachers to their schools not necessarily because of their desire to tutor them to their best levels, but to have ‘ a helping hand’ who now has all the teaching, marking, coordinating jobs given to him. Recently, a friend once reported how he was transmogrified into a permanent teacher, lesson-note, writer, assembly coordinator within his first week of assuming duties in his school of primary assignment! Even Sophia the Robot would be amused!

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The danger in this shocking narrative is in the handover of the academic future of the young, impressionable learners into the hands of a rookie teacher-who is still miles away from perfectly acquiring the requisite pedagogical and solicitous knowledge required in independently supervising young learners. In this warped system, the veteran teachers now take the backseat, taking a ‘holiday’ from work when they are actually expected to work on both the potential teachers and the students/pupils.
Also, if one of the plethoric aims of the teaching practice program is to ensure the professionalization of the teaching profession, then the current system is nothing but a colossal step backward into the abyss of delusion and gross impossibilities.

For every profession, of which TEACHING IS CHIEF, it is widely expected that the period of internships-teacher training in this sense-should offer incentive such as stipends to incite the urge in the participants to give it their all and cover for minor expenses in transportation, feeding, and other miscellanies. Not in this teaching practice system-genus Nigerians.
Several students teachers have offered grippingly harrowing tales of how they are being posted to schools miles away from their places of residences without commensurate pecuniary incentives to cover for the transportation and logistical expenses.

The rather banal argument that since the teaching practice program is an academic requirement for the award of the bachelor of education degree, the student teachers should not be renumerated, is at worst preposterous and a product of a warped mentality.

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In well-developed societies where teachers and the teaching profession are well recognized and appreciated, the teaching profession is usually a reference point in terms of high renumeration and rewards for services rendered.

This cannot but remind one of a famous popularized meme where a stakeholder within the medical profession in Germany once asked Chancellor Angela Merkel why the teachers are better paid than Doctors in the country.RESPONSE: How can you earn more than those who taught you?

No better argument can be advanced for the imperative of stipends for teaching practice students than the fact that their counterparts from the medical, dental, pharmaceutical professions are well renumerated during their internship years across medical institutions within the country. What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.

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Conclusively, in furthering the argument for a 26percent budget funding of our education system as proposed by UNESCO, emphasis should be laid, not only on the infrastructural and pedagogical dysfunctionalities confronting our education system, but also a holistic review of the present near-neglect of the personnel sector.

When student teachers are exposed to the most healthy of working conditions, this would boost the self-confidence and verve that has attained a total demise amongst student teachers across the federation.

Bamigboye Judah, wrote from Obafemi Awolowo University.

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