A Sound Framework for ICT Integration in Indian Teacher Education

Introduction

Manas Ranjan Panigrahi (2016) in his edited book entitled ‘Resource Book on ICT Integrated Teacher Education’ wrote, learning is not learning if a formative shift in one’s cognitive schema has not occurred and teaching is not teaching if one has not learned. Noel Pearson (an Australian Aboriginal Activist) bluntly put it, “if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught” (Pearson, 2009, p. 35). But teaching is not simply about talking to students about a body of subject matter knowledge rather it is a lot more than that. If learners have not learned anything, then all a teacher may have done is ‘talked’ to them, or given them a “lecture”, hence it is about influencing one’s cognitive schema with new knowledge and realisations and/or new approaches to viewing reality; it is about moving minds (Laurillard, 2012). Laurillard (2012) further said unlike the natural sciences, education generally, and teaching in particular, is best seen as a design science which has the aim of continuous quality improvement based on best practices. Teaching is about motivating students to want to learn (see Keller, 2008; Mathews, 2009). It is about placing “students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions” (see Robinson, & Aronica, 2009, p. 238), and “great teachers have always understood that their real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students” (p. 249). But this high idealism of modern teaching can only be harboured by a teacher through a proper teacher education program only.