What teachers need beyond recognition

On World Teachers’ Day on October 5, the government is set to recognise the contributions and accomplishments of 100 teachers in various sectors. The prime minister is expected to award these distinguished teachers who have made meaningful changes in the lives of their students and the institutions they served. The government has decided to increase the number of teachers to be recognised to 100 from the previously allotted 12 this year, reflecting its commitment to bring the spotlight back to education.

This national-level recognition will motivate many of us, particularly at a time when there are several instances of teachers being humiliated at their workplaces. Take the case of Sylhet Engineering College, where teachers and employees were confined by students for nearly 33 hours last week. Simply from reading the news, we cannot verify or reject the claims of institutional grievances. But we can see that the teachers and administrators failed to meet the students’ demands. As a result, there is no mutual respect. We cannot condone the students’ action; they need to understand that having a legitimate purpose does not justify every method. However, administrators cannot invoke respect for teachers in order to avoid answering reasonable questions either. Hence, the issue of honouring teachers in our situation remains problematic.

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If we really want to make Teachers’ Day meaningful, the first priority should not be honouring select teachers but protecting all teachers in the country from disrespect. Equally important is to offer protection to our students from abuses of authority. We need to understand why and how teachers lose their respect. It is not pleasing to come across images where teachers are physically abusing, molesting, and even sexually harassing their students. Then there are issues of discrimination where some students get preferential treatment over others, often when they opt for private tutoring. The revelation that thousands of board examination scripts were rechecked due to incorrect grading exposes the corruption in the system. The education minister has expressed his dissatisfaction over the poor quality of teaching at different levels on several occasions. Indeed, there are many reasons to be upset about the quality of our teaching and teachers. The paltry pay that our teachers get is never enough to recruit the best. And the compromises that we make in recruiting teachers have a lasting impact on the nation’s foundation.

Gone are the days when the nobility of a teacher was guaranteed. The old-fashioned pedagogical model that treated a teacher as a sage has also lost its currency. A classroom today is a place for active learning where learners are encouraged to share their voices, ask critical questions, or even challenge authority. Unfortunately, many of our classrooms have yet to move away from the older forms of classroom authority that discouraged inquiry and concealed mistreatment. Even at the university level, I have seen teachers holding onto the age-old tradition of maintaining a power dynamic and classroom hierarchy. A teacher must have the authority that rests on knowledge, fairness, preparation, and care. But that authority should not come across as a power position. Before we expect anyone else to respect teachers, teachers themselves have responsibilities in building that respect.

There are lessons to be learnt from the culture of political retributions. More than 800 selected primary teacher candidates have yet to join their stations because their police verification is not complete. Verification may be necessary, but candidates need clear information, predictable timelines, and reasons behind the decisions affecting their futures. Teachers need to detach themselves from partisan politics, careless teaching, and arbitrary grading. The recent experience of teachers’ evaluation by the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union has shown how students want their teachers to be not only academically sound but also professionally approachable, politically neutral and trustworthy.

As a member of the teaching fraternity, here is my wishful thinking for the respect of teachers. Teachers must feel safe at their workplaces. Teachers’ unions have become largely defunct or dormant, and there is no mechanism that can deal with threats, assault, confinement, and coerced resignations. Meanwhile, the long verification process and the witch-hunting have raised questions about the fair employment process. We need transparent appointments, timely pay, and reasoned promotion decisions.

The pedagogical approaches worldwide are changing to cater to the needs of the time. There should be ample opportunities for professional growth, sustained mentoring and development.

We also need to ensure academic autonomy. Frequent changes in textbooks and assessment without adequate consultation can make teachers feel abandoned and excluded. Teachers need to have the flexibility to learn from the best practices, use multimodal teaching methods available online, and exercise academic judgement for the betterment of their students.

Above all, accountability should be reciprocal. There must be some toolkits through which both students and teachers can raise concerns.

On this Teachers’ Day, let us not simply recognise ideal teachers. Let us take a moment to reflect on what makes a teacher ideal. The role of a teacher involves helping students connect information to understanding, testing an assertion, living with uncertainty, and disagreeing responsibly. Teachers have the instincts to notice when students are struggling or withdrawing. They know who has latent talent and who is afraid to speak up in a classroom. Mechanical performative metrics may not know the human side of a teacher. It is the human attributes that make learning possible.

It takes time for teachers to become teachers. They are not AI with a language learning model to feed them with instant patterns. In a changing world, teachers will need to give their students the foundational structure so that they are not glossed over by superficial knowledge and trendy skill sets. In order for teachers to be respected, we need to train our teachers so that they know how to deal with students’ AI-generated instant answers. Teachers today need to design tasks that reveal how students think and apply ideas to unfamiliar situations.

The real honour the government can show this Teachers’ Day is to give teachers not only medals and cheques but also their agency back. Teachers need training, time, and institutional support. Only by guaranteeing the bare minimum can we turn our teachers into changemakers.

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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