ASSESSMENT OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS ATTITUDE TOWARDS TEACHING PROFESSION: A CASE OF THE INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES IN EDUCATION IN ODISHA

Teacher education is based on the theory that “Teachers are made not born” in contrary to the assumption, “Teachers are born not made” teaching is an oldest art and recent science and growing profession. Sengupta (2007) opined that as of today B.Ed. degree is one of such professional qualification, quality and utility of which is under severe criticism. Such criticism stems from the fact that even students coming out of teacher education colleges themselves often fail to glorify the significance and utility of their teacher training in their day to day teaching learning in respective schools. In the year 2007, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) stated that the teacher is the single most important element of the school system and has stressed the need to substantially enhance teachers‟ professional capabilities, standing and commitment to education. The problems of our teacher education system are that knowledge is treated as „given‟ and is never critically examined; there is very little scope for the student-teachers to reflect on their experiences. The evaluation of the prospective teachers is also excessively quantitative and lacks comprehensiveness, with no scope of evaluating the attitude towards teaching profession, teaching aptitude, professional values, interests etc. Thus this study was conducted with the object to assess the types of attitude towards teaching profession of B.Ed. student-teachers continuing their professional study in all three IASE in Odisha. In this regard 120 student-teachers were taken as sample and their attitude towards teaching profession was administered through the standardized tool developed by the investigator. It was found that female student-teachers are having more favourable attitude towards teaching profession than the male student-teachers. The study also revealed that in all three IASE in Odisha, there was not a single student-teacher who is having unfavourable attitude towards teaching, which is a very good sign.