My Turn

Teachers’ council should end UCE

T

he much-awaited Teachers Council of Malawi is finally here and has embarked on cleansing the teaching profession by asking teachers and student teachers to get registered.

While the registration and licencing fees stirred concerns and resistance, over 70000 teachers complied with the law.

Interestingly, the council opened a two-year window for teachers without education qualifications to get a university certificate of education (UCE).

It is commendable that every teacher has to meet basic standards.

However, I have problems with the council not regulating the year-long university programme that allows non-education graduates to become certified teachers.

UCE was introduced to address the shortage of trained teachers. It allowed the Ministry of Education to speedily offer graduates from other fields simple pedagogical knowledge amid the rising demand for education.

In Malawi, the dawn of free primary education in 1995 forced the government to co-opt everybody from the street to meet the surging demand for teachers.

However, most of these recruits were not graduates, so they did not qualify for UCE.

If they were, this could have been a quick remedy.

Now that the country has many unemployed teachers at all levels, do we still have to allow non-education graduates to teach?

No. They should be banned from teaching because they are just doing UCE as a career option having failed to secure jobs in their fields.

Teaching should not be an escape strategy. There are many unemployed teachers. Give them something to do.

Previously, it was difficult to stop the influx. Now, TCM has a big task to regulate teaching and make it truly professional. One of the big issues it needs to address is the UCE scam.

The universities offering this certificate are just responding to demand. The same universities offer programmes that do not respond to the labour market, creating another market through UCE.

They should review whether their programmes are needed even by the universities themselves.

Graduates are doing UCE after years of unemployment and teaching seems the easiest to penetrate.

Education programmes offer teachers pedagogical knowledge and content to make teaching a reality.

UCE only offers pedagogical knowledge and assumes they have the content.

They might have the general content from their field of study, but it was not streamlined to teaching. 

UCE places more emphasis on pedagogy knowledge, overlooking the content knowledge of the trained teachers and the trainees’ ability to blend content and pedagogy.

Integrating the content and pedagogical knowledge, as do education programmes, makes learning simple and learner-centred.

UCE holders are just introduced to crude concepts that take time to sink and in less than a year they are released into the education system.

Teachers have a clear training frame often overlooked by UCE training.

Teachers learn content and pedagogical knowledge in four years, yet someone from other fields goes away with the same privilege of being a teacher in a year.

Stop manipulating standards.

The country no longer requires UCE teachers. It needs fully trained teachers, whom we have in abundance.

The council’s regulatory role is to ensure every teacher is qualified, competent and up to standard.

The regulator will be abdicating its legal role if it continues to allow teachers with no teaching background to continue joining the noble profession.

Universities should continue to offer UCE to those who need it for other opportunities such as lecturers in non-education programmes where many teach without knowing what it means to teach.

As we are fixing our country, people need to realise that there is more to teacher training than just a paper.

Universities are already producing an overload of teachers to allow uncensored competition.

The council should put a deadline when nobody will be allowed to teach without an education degree, regardless of whether they have UCE.

UCE is just an income-generating activity for universities that produce unemployed “graduates”.

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