As the Department of Teacher Education, University of Ghana, marks its 10th anniversary this year, the faculty members are calling on government to prioritize the completion of stalled infrastructure projects to ease congestion and improve teaching and research.

Speaking in an interview with Class Media Reporter, Edem Afanou, during the anniversary celebrations, Dr Richard Kyere Asomah, a faculty member and co-Chair of the 10th anniversary committee, said one of the biggest challenges facing the department is office space for lecturers.

“Well some of the problems that we are having as a department under the school would be the office space for lecturers. I think this is something that we cannot underestimate,” Dr. Asomah said.

According to him, the current situation where “two, three lecturers are being put into one room” is inconvenient and affects productivity. 

“Convenience sake, men, female and that is not something we expect. We at least want to have that space so that we can do effective teaching and learning as well as research,” he explained.

Dr. Asomah noted that inadequate office space also makes it difficult to engage postgraduate students one on one. 

“Sometimes we can also accommodate assuming we have our own office spaces we can accommodate our own masters students who come around so that we can have some tutorials or whatever with them one-on-one. But whereby we are sharing the office space with some other lecturers it becomes quite difficult,” he stated.

When asked what the department expects from government, Dr. Asomah said the priority should be completing abandoned projects on campus.

“Well for government we expect that at the end of the day some of the uncompleted projects that they have on campus will be commenced... and then have all those projects actually completed,” he emphasised.

He added that completing such projects would create room to accommodate more students and, by extension, provide lecturers with the office space needed to work effectively.

“So I think infrastructure wise is what we can call on government to actually help improve as far as the government is concerned,” he concluded.

The Department of Teacher Education, under the School of Education and Leadership, College of Education, is celebrating 10 years of training teachers and recording 100% success in teacher licensure examinations since 2016.