The Teacher Education Reform Process in Ethiopia: Some consequences on educators and its implications

With the emergence of the discourse of TESO, teacher education in Ethiopia has been struggling to change rhetoric and practice by reaffirming a managerially driven reform performance. The terrain is now characterized by fresh, but globally dominant rhetoric. Salient in the emerging discourse is reform mottos and agendas such as 'active learning', 'competence', 'participatory', 'paradigm shift' and 'system overhaul'. However, the process pursued by the 'reform' task performers is noticeably and evidently characterized as a managerial approach which sidesteps pedagogues and pedagogy in favor of fulfilling instrumental, central and market-oriented agendas. The process has so far signaled a 'reform' process which I typically refer to as peripheralization of pedagogical practitioners. Conspicuously absent in the process is a critical vision of learning to teach and a structural continuum that connects faculty and school. The process has so far clung to the reinscribing of traditional modes of doing teacher education which has fallen far short of fulfilling what is in the high sounding rhetoric.