Redefining Teacher Roles: Navigating the Problematic

Abstract

The primary objective of Higher Education Institutions is to prepare a new generation – intellectually robust, economically productive, socially committed, culturally sensitive and spiritually inclined — to become useful citizens of society. Teachers play a crucial role in this. A teacher is invested with greater responsibilities than merely teaching. At the same time, he is confronted with many largely contextual problems, depending on the situation he is thrown into and the vagaries of characters he faces. The main characters a teacher confronts, in fact, in day-to-day life, are the students, his colleagues, workplace superiors, institutional authorities, parents, and stakeholders. Interactions with them often become problematic. Compounded with this is his own personal self, personality issues and family problems. Interactions are problematic considering the vagaries of characters and the dynamics of the situation. In any given situation, the characters exhibit different responses. So also, situations keep changing.  These amount to demanding that the teacher acquire a newer set of skills each time and a shift in roles to overcome it. The main factors at interplay are character, context, response and reciprocation. A generality of negatives is generated by each of the characters together and in varying contexts that might require reciprocation. Thus, multiple contexts are created as the characters keep changing, each with different responses. This calls for an appropriate reciprocation that defines the teacher's role. The teacher's role is the total of expected reactions, which ideally require reciprocation to resolve the negatives, together called the problematic. In other words, characters may turn negative, the situation or context turns negative, the response generated is negative, but the reciprocation should be positive. In other words, the role is to navigate the problematic. This discourse aims to examine these in greater detail, especially in the context of the negatives and factors contributing to it.