Teacher Preparation for Environment Conservation and Gender Equality
Author : Dr. Rajiv Kumar Singh and Dr. Sunita J Kathuria
Abstract :
The United Nation’s 17 global goals i.e. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030 aim to achieve various 'zeros' that may change the world, such as a world without poverty, hunger, ailments, discrimination, etc. Education has the potential to have sustainable development and to improve young people's ability to adjust to the challenging effects of environmental, social, and economic issues. Success in the personal life, workplace, and being a good citizen requires numerous skills that can be very well-honed up under the guidance of a professionally qualified teacher. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also seeks to restructure the teaching profession in order to develop a strong merit-based framework of tenure, remuneration, and promotion, which incentivizes and honors exceptional teachers. The National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), an autonomous educational institution under the Ministry of Education, has brought the global vision into execution by preparing and recently launching a need-based in-service teacher education programme that would guide the users in developing an equity-based healthy environment in teaching and learning spaces. It is named as a ‘Gender Green Teacher' (GGT) project which was accomplished in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an inter-governmental organisation promoting distance and open learning. This project aims to create a 'Gender Green Teacher’ who is trained to integrate the gender and the environment concepts in such a way that it allows the learners to develop a holistic view of these two constructs.
The objective of this paper was to make the teaching fraternity aware of the components and expected outcomes of GGT Course. This paper was structured in two parts. The first part discusses the conceptual framework of Gender-Green, in the global scenario. The second part presents the entire course structure of the Gender Green program launched by NIOS. This course has been designed to increase teachers' capacity building, mainstream gender-environment issues through their instruction, develop positive attitudes among teachers toward gender and environmental issues, and enable them to use and develop efficient teaching-learning strategies to incorporate gender and environmental concerns into the teaching-learning process.
Keywords :
Environment, gender equality, eco-feminism, NIOS, teacher education programme and in-service teachers.
