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by Nihal Cooray , Director General , National Authority on Teacher Education

Not every narrative is a case, and cases themselves have distinct characteristics. Teacher educators who have studied and written their own cases identify these attributes of cases:

* a case uses narrative writing techniques;

* a case is based on a meaningful knowledge base;

* a case is interesting to read;

* a case emphasizes rather than telling;

* a case invites the reader to become immersed in the experience;

* a case is built as single concepts or ideas which promote serious thinking. They also allow for teaching as part of the curriculum;

* a case ends with a kicker - that is, instead of ending with a resolution or leading students to the correct answer, the ending raises a question or dilemma. Good study questions make the mind buzz. Some are so provocative that they continue to dwell in the mind for years. These questions keep students thinking, searching for understanding.

They are questions of magnitude, provoking examination of ideas worth knowing and thinking about. They are rarely rooted in certainty. It is the very reason they make students think. Good study questions add vigour and breadth to case-method teaching; poor study questions diminish even a good case and bog the discussion down in the land of irrelevant.

Small group work

Another feature of case-method teaching is seen in opportunities for students to discuss, in small study groups, their responses to the study questions that the case raises. These small group sessions may be arranged by out-of-class assignments. The small group discussions give students their first chances at examining the issues, ideas are tried out with each other in the safest of environments.

Will case method teaching make a difference in the education of teachers and teacher trainees? Will such methodology go for the preparation of teachers what it has done in the education of business school graduates and doctors? What are the promises of case-method teaching, and what are some of the obstacles that lie in wait for the callow, inexperienced but intrepid teacher educators? And what is the prognosis for case-method teaching in teacher education?

Pre-service and in-service education students who are given their first experiences with case-method teaching will likely not, at first, be willing participants. They will insist on answers. '

Tell us what to do', they will cry, feverish in their quest for certainty. Cases, far from giving answers, elevate ambiguity. Student teachers must be encouraged to move from their dependency needs to positions of autonomous functioning. They should not all the time learn to implement decisions of others. They should be courageous enough to make their own decisions. They will have to learn that responsibility for learning is theirs, that there is no one 'out there' who will be able to tell them; that they must find the ways to knowing and understanding for themselves.

Equipping or enabling?

I shall now turn your attention to a more particular example to demonstrate a crucially important factor in teacher development which has not been sufficiently explored by researchers in teacher education. One view of eduction is that it provides young people with the knowledge and skills necessary for functioning in later years as useful and productive members of the society. Educational effort, on this view, should be directed to defining expected outcomes more and more accurately and to relating means to ends more and more directly. This I would call an 'equipping; procedure in education - a procedure by which the learner gets equipped with the knowledge, skill or pattern of behaviour envisaged as educational ends.

A different view of education is that it provides young people with opportunity and support in realising their potential, in the form of understanding or ability. This view recognizes that the demands to be made in later years can be varied and unpredicted, and that individuals will need to meet those demands in varied ways, such that there is a measure of fulfilment to themselves as individuals. Curricular content is therefore, designed not on a specification of 'future needs but on an understanding of learning processes and of learners' current states'. I refer to this as an 'enabling' procedure in education - a process of developing the learner's capacity to extend and adapt what is learnt in the face of varied and emerging demands. The enabling procedure does not aim at any form of specific preparation but, provides a broader base for further learning in response to a wider range of specific functions. Further, an equipping procedure aims at conformity and assesses success in those terms.

Manpower planning

An enabling procedure, by contrast, provides for divergence and regards ongoing change as a part of its achievement. Here it would be useful to see the distinction between 'human resource development' and 'manpower planning', the former implies an enabling procedure while the latter suggests an equipping procedure.

It is possible to regard equipping and enabling as merely two ends of a scale, on the grounds that any given pedagogic procedure is only more or less an equipping or enabling one and, as illustrated in our discussion. However, the concepts of equipping and enabling are still distinct and can contribute to pedagogic understanding as well as pedagogic action. Teaching is an equipping procedure to the extent it seeks to link means and goals directly and relies on a prediction of specific uses for learning outcomes. It is, conversely, an enabling procedure to the extent it posits complex mediating processes between means and ends, such as the development of a system as competence, and conceives of learning outcomes as being able to meet unpredicted demands.

While a equipping procedure treats learning as the obverse of teaching and expects teaching and learning to be coextensive, an enabling procedure regards teaching as merely a support to (or favourable condition for) learning, the two being neither coextensive nor necessarily similar in form. Less obviously perhaps, an equipping procedure permits the teaching operation to be defined and justified in its own terms, through a kind of logical deduction from teaching objectives to teaching activities: learning can be assumed to follow (or else to be prevented by non-pedagogic factors) as long as the logical deduction can be seen to be sound. An enabling procedure, by contrast, is necessarily open to challenge not only in the light of learning outcomes but on the hypotheses it makes about mediating processes: methodology is continually subject to theoretical challenge and to consequent re-evaluation.

Secondly, formal education by its very nature exerts pressures in favour of instruction as an equipping procedure. State syllabuses imply an expectation of uniform learning outcomes from large numbers of classes and, since learners in any large system vary largely in their initial state and learning pace, teachers are faced at various points with a choice between teaching as an enabling procedure and a covering of the syllabus as an equipping procedure. State syllabuses also act as public declarations of educational intentions and attempt to be persuasive by stating learning outcomes in terms of their specific uses, rather than as general ability. Syllabuses are translated into sets of teaching materials which are looked on as fixed quanta of texts and exercises to be gone through in each classroom, thus setting up a choice between catering to learning and competing the course book.

Progress

Educational administration attempts to monitor, inspect or regulate progress in teaching in different classrooms, interpreting progress as the portion of syllabus or course book covered and thus endorsing teachers' choices in favour of equipping procedures. Finally, public examinations powerfully reinforce the expectation of uniform outcomes, encouraging learners, teachers and parents alike to give preference to examination - preparation over learning - to ensure arrival with or without the experience of travel. It is easy enough to conclude from such facts that an enabling procedure is unrealistic in formal education but a more constructive view would be that such pressures on equipping procedures make it all the more important to try to maintain and strengthen an enabling perspective in pedagogic activity - and to explore possibilities of stating syllabuses and examinations less prescriptively.

Thirdly, language education is specially susceptible to being interpreted as an equipping procedure, because language is, from one point of view, easily-observed and easily-specified verbal behaviour , and, from another point of view, a highly complex cognitive system whose development is extremely difficult to predict and specify as a normal outcome. It is difficult to tell how much instruction can be expected to lead to a given degree of system-development, when learners can be expected to move from reception to genuine production, what types of error can be expected disappear at what stage or, indeed, whether a given instance of learner behaviour represents evidence on the internal system or merely a piece of verbal imitation. As a result, language education as an enabling procedure involves coping to a large extent with the unknown and the unpredictable.

Important

This increases pressure on the adoption of a simple view of language as directly-transmitted verbal behaviour, justifying an equipping procedure in pedagogy, but, once again, it also makes it especially important to preserve an enabling perspective and to seek at least to reduce the role of an equipping perspective.

The distinction between equipping and enabling has relevance for the training of language teachers as well, and I will point to some aspects of it in the rest of this part of the paper.

Education has to provide for the future not just by ensuring future conformity to current predictions or predilections; on a larger view, it needs to accommodate ongoing change and help to ease the process of future change. It has been noted that language education is specially susceptible to an equipping perspective; it can be added that an enabling perspective is specially important in language education because language is, in its more central roles as a facilitator of thought, a facilitator of change. All teacher education specialists and researchers should look into these perspectives and explore fresh avenues for teacher preparation and teacher development.

(From a paper presented at the seminar on Current Issues in Education sponsored by the American Institute for Lankan Studies at the Marga Institute on May 18, 2002.) (Concluded)

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