Films and interviews capture the mood at the Second Teacher Educators' Conference organised by the British Council India and English and Foreign Languages University (EFL-U), Hyderabad

Steeped in history and culture and now a thriving global technology hub, Hyderabad is also India’s premier pearl city. It was thus apposite that over a 1,000 teachers, teacher educators, researchers and academics from all over the world got together in Hyderabad and made the city their oyster from 3 to 5 March, for the International Conference for English Language Teacher Educators and Teachers 2012, or “#TEC12”, as its twitter handle went.

Organised by the British Council in collaboration with the English and Foreign Languages University (EFL-U), English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELTAI) and the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), the theme of the conference was ‘Assessment and Evaluation of English Language Teacher Education, Teaching and Learning’.

World’s largest TEC

Michael Carrier, British Council‘s global Director of English Language Innovation, felt that this was the largest teacher educator’s conference anywhere in the world. Prof R Amritavalli, Vice Chancellor of EFL-U, one of the leading specialists on evaluation and assessment in India, stressed the importance of the core theme of the conference, describing it as “the need of the hour” in Indian education.

Watch it all online

Films, interviews and academic sessions from the conference are available on the British Council India Tec 12 playlist

CCE all the way?

The focus on assessment and evaluation meant that there were lively discussions in almost all sessions. Prof Geetha Durairajan of EFL-U set the tone of the conference with her opening plenary session on Open Book examinations. Amol Padwad’s session on ‘Assessment of Continuing Professional Development of Teachers’, Rod Bolitho’s workshop on ‘Dilemmas in Assessing Classroom Teaching’, a panel discussion on diary writing as teacher development tool were only some of the sessions that sparked a lot of discussions.

The current climate in India with its intense focus on improving the quality of teacher education and policy level thrust on evaluation meant that the sessions on Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) drew lot of attention. Jacob Tharu’s closing plenary address  (‘Placing CCE in a Pedagogic Context’) was the perfect take-away for all participants, and other sessions on CCE, for example, those by Adrian Tennant, Lina Mukhopadhyay and Marianne Tudor-Craig kept the CCE issue buzzing and alive all of the three days of the conference.

Networking over coffee

The conference provided a perfect platform for informal professional networking. Rob Lynes, Country Director, British Council India, interacted with key stakeholders from the states where British Council have English language teacher education projects – Punjab, Assam, Bihar, West Bengal, Delhi NCT and Tamil Nadu. “These partnerships are at the heart of British Council’s work in English and Education India and this conference provided a relaxed atmosphere to have frank discussions on our intervention programmes in these states,” Rob said.

Digital leap

One of the striking features of TEC12 was the way the conference breached its physical confines are reached out to over 40,000 people through webcasts, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. All the plenary sessions and many of the parallels ones were webcast, and were viewed by over 6000 viewers in 48 different countries. While 83% webcast viewers were from India, USA, Pakistan and UK followed.

For more information on our work in English language in India contact: Alison.Barret@in.britishcouncil.org and Debanjan.Chakrabarti@in.britishcouncil.org