SES’s four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programmes (ITEP) or the BABEd programmes, aim to bring together multidisciplinary undergraduate education and professional preparation of schoolteachers. The programme envisions to provide excellent quality pre-service teacher education that addresses the longstanding issue of insufficient focus on disciplinary knowledge and lack of its integration with professional knowledge in teacher preparation in India. The ITEP or BABEd programmes at SES will prepare school teachers for two school stages based on the curricular structure proposed by the National Education Policy 2020 (5+3+3+4). These stages are: Preparatory (III to V) and Secondary (IX to XII). As dual major degrees, the programmes will offer the students a holistic undergraduate education equivalent to an undergraduate degree in selected areas of social sciences and humanities relevant for school teaching, as well as provide them the minimum qualification for school teaching at preparatory and secondary stages. These programmes include curricular components based on the foundations of education, subject specialisation, pedagogy courses, ability enhancement courses, school experience, and community engagement. The curriculum will be per the norms of and regulated by the National Council for Teacher Education, which has granted recognition to SES to offer the programmes.
ITEP with Preparatory Stage Specialisation will qualify student-teachers for teaching children in Grades 3 to 5. This specialisation makes this programme unique in comparison with the existing teacher education programmes in practice in the country as it allows an intensive
focus on classes 3 to 5. This school period is critical in a child’s developmental and socio-emotional life/trajectory, as has been established by research. In this phase, at the school, a child is transitioning from play-based pedagogies to more discipline-focussed and autonomous learning. The BABEd Preparatory Stage will prepare teachers who have the knowledge and skills to scaffold this transition, building on the play-based, discovery, and activity-based pedagogical approaches of the foundational stage. The programme will also enable them to integrate approaches that are developmentally and socially contextualised as per the needs of the preparatory stage.
Objectives:
To prepare professional and humane future teachers with:
- a comprehensive stage specific disciplinary and pedagogic knowledge and skills
- ability to integrate the ‘professional’ and ‘liberal’ perspectives
- an analytical and critical understanding of the social context of learners, learning and education
- a humane, sensitive and ethical disposition towards learners and communities
- the skills for preparation for holistic curricular, pedagogic and assessment planning focussed on the learners’ needs
- capacity and skills for creating democratic and participative classrooms
- ability to reflect and inquire into one’s own practice and for continuous learning
- a motivation to work for transformation of education as practitioners by engaging with policies, practices, curriculum, and teaching learning material.