Teacher Education in India’s National Education Policy 2020: Knowledge Traditions, Global Discourses and National Regulations

Abstract

This article engages with the teacher education (TE) reform approach adopted in India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It locates the policy recommendations in the context and challenges of TE in India and makes sense of the NEP’s vision for the domain. It examines the knowledge traditions and global education policy (GEP) discourses that underlie the proposed reforms, and the translation of the core reform ideas in the national regulatory framework for implementation. The first part of the findings identifies the knowledge traditions and influences of GEP inherent in the policy and argues that NEP’s reform approach is an assemblage of fundamentally inconsistent discourses. The second part examines the regulatory norms and standards of the NEP-recommended TE programme to understand what makes it distinct as compared to similar ongoing programmes. Based on the analysis, the article argues that the proposed new programme is a tweaked version of India’s conventional TE approaches.

Old, but Not Stale: Revisiting the National Education Policy 2020

“…Another source of shallowness arises from the shifting of the surrounding discourses from more equity-oriented ones, to more technocratic and managerial ones. Scholars (such as, Raina, 2021;Sharma & Singh, 2023) have noted that the policy statements and linguistic choices show an allegiance to neoliberal discourses reflecting the influence of global education policy transfer, without systematic consideration of the realities of Indian school education. Within this set of discourses, education is seen largely as a benign process disconnected from its wider sociopolitical contexts and concerned with the productivity of a national-global citizenry in rapidly globalising societies.…”