Page 12 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Kasanda

teaching for understanding and the perception that the students we teach
are incapable of learning mathematics, will result in teaching for
regurgitation of meaningless facts and symbols that fail to bring to the
fore the taught content and the importance of mathematics in the lives of
our students. In such a situation it is not the students who are failing, but,
it is us teachers and lecturers who are “failing” the learners and students
entrusted to us to educate.

TEACHER PREPARATION, ARE WE GETTING IT RIGHT?

Teacher preparation takes different shapes and forms (Kasanda, 1995).
Some of these include a hybrid form in which pre-service teachers
combine both content and professional subjects at the same time. Often
the content is taught by the different Faculties or Schools, while the
professional courses are given by the staff members in the Faculty of
Education or Schools of Education. In other cases, pre-service teachers are
first introduced to the content in the subject in various Faculties or
Schools, obtain their Bachelor degrees, be it in Science or the Arts and
only after this do they decide to take a Diploma in Education that will
enable them become qualified teachers. Two main criticisms of this mode
of providing content first before the pre-service teachers do the Diploma
is the cost that will be involved during the extra year of study they will be
involved in attaining the professional qualification and the delayed entry
into the teaching profession.

In some countries such as the USA teachers are licensed by the different
States for them to practice their profession. Should our teachers be
licensed as evidence of their proficiency in their subject area? There are
advantages and disadvantages to each form of teacher preparation
chosen. Nonetheless, at the University of Namibia we have decided to
adopt the hybrid method because we believe that this method enables the
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