Abbas Husain - Director, Teachers’ Development Centre, Senior Associate
Abbas Husain is one of the founders of Pakistan’s first professional organization for teachers, SPELT (Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers) in 1984. While his own education has followed the beaten path of MA in English Literature at Karachi University, it was a four-month long UGC course, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), in 1983, sponsored by the Allama Iqbal Open University that gave him grounding in the English language skills and attributes that were necessary as a teacher trainer. He went to the University of Manchester for M.Ed. in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in 1985-86. From April 1987 he began a self-directed initiative of teacher training at almost every forum available in the country: from Teacher’s Resource Centre, to SPELT, to Aga Khan University English Language Unit Karachi, to Kinnaird College Lahore, to Khairpur, to Education Department of District Board Nawabshah; to Ministry of Education, Abbotabad NWFP, to Azad Jammu and Kashmir University Muzaffarabad, to schools all over Pakistan and from the forum of Educacy Foundation, Islamabad. In all these places, Abbas Husain has offered workshops, seminars, papers, and addresses in an unbroken sequence to date.
The annual international conferences of SPELT, for the past 22 years, have offered him opportunities to give leading ideas, strategies, techniques, most of all vision, to the English language teachers. The City School Network, the Beaconhouse School System, the Defense Housing Authority Schools, University Grants Commission [now HEC] have benefited from his innovative ideas and training.In 1992, he joined the Aga Khan University as Senior Language Advisor and Head of English Language Resource Unit. Later, he joined the Aga Khan Institute for Educational Development as Senior Faculty in their M.Ed. program. By virtue of a bilateral relationship of Aga Khan University with University of Toronto and Oxford, he visited the University of Toronto and gained much from the expertise of the visiting faculty of both these august centers of learning in Karachi, Pakistan. In 1996, he founded Teachers' Development Centre, a self-owned, proprietary training institute dedicated to the single cause of the training of in-service primary and secondary school teacher.
In addition to over 13000 teachers all over Pakistan, he has also been a significant contributor to the creation of a cadre of trainers who would have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to conduct meaningful short training workshops in their own schools. The total number of the beneficiaries of the Master Teacher’s Course in 2007 is 229.Teachers' Development Centre has been a significant contributor to a variety of training needs and services. Provincial Education Foundations i.e. (Sindh, Frontier, and Punjab), many NGOs, and school systems in Lahore and Islamabad have all invited him for an ongoing dialogue on improved education in Pakistan.
