NCTE to Reintroduce One-Year BEd Program

The National Council for Teachers Education is planning to restart the one-year Bed course this year in line with NEP 2020 recommendations, post a decade-long hiatus, stated the council chairman Pankaj Arora yesterday. This course is for students who have completed 4-year bachelor’s degree or obtained a master’s degree.

“One-year BEd programme will be for four-year undergraduate (UG) students and two-years postgraduate students. It will not be offered to those who have completed three-year UG programmes and they have to enrol in two-years BEd programme. Institutions offering the two-year BEd programme will have to become multidisciplinary institutes by 2028,” Arora told HT.

Explaining how NCTE moved from a one-year to two-year BEd programme, Batra, professor of Education at Delhi University (DU), said, “Universities in independent India continued to offer the one-year B.Ed. program that was inherited from the colonial era. NCTE, the regulatory body established by an Act of Parliament in 1995, did little to change this reality. In 2011, in response to the Maharashtra government’s opposition to NCTE’s recognition of a large number of private teacher training institutes, the Supreme Court constituted a high-powered Commission under justice JS Verma to review the sector of teacher education and the functioning of NCTE.”

“The report of the Commission on teacher education was accepted in toto by the Supreme Court. One of its main recommendations was to change the BEd program into a two-year program to move beyond the colonial framework, contextualise the preparation of teachers in India’s diverse socio-cultural context and provide sufficient time for study and reflection on school knowledge, interdisciplinarity and pedagogic approaches. The NCTE notified the new teacher education norms based on commission recommendations in 2014. With this, teacher preparation in India was able to break colonial shackles,” added Prof Batra.