Understanding education faculty members\u27 (EFMs) experiences and perspectives on the B.Ed. Honors programme at a public international university (PIU) in Northern Pakistan

Despite many reforms, teacher education in Pakistan, especially its pre-service component suffer from multiple issues, which have collectively affected its ability to produce graduates for the 21st century Pakistan. Overall, there is little or no improvement in teacher education, teaching and students\u27 learning. Education reforms in Pakistan have been predominantly foreign funded and full of paradoxes in terms of policies and processes, curriculum designing, and infrastructure and sustaining quality programmes. This particular qualitative case study with a phenomenological bent examined the newly introduced BEd.Honors (BEI-1), as one such reform initiative. Conceptually, the study is located within the discourse of teacher education reform as global (western) best practice, via policy borrowing and lending (PB& L). Methodologically, the study explored the programme\u27s objectives, rationale, value, and challenges, and ways of improvement from the lived experiences and perspectives of 8 education faculty members (EFMs) (five male and three female) at a public university in northern Pakistan. The findings showed two paradoxical perspectives: at the talk level the BEd.Honors was seen as a welcome transformative shift in pre-service teacher education, emphasizing research, student —centeredness, theory —practice blend, relevance, flexibility, quality and responsive to the 21st century teachers\u27 profiles and students\u27 needs. At the actual implementation level, serious issues, such as lack of material and human resources, practicality, quality, cultural compatibility, sustainability, were highlighted. EFMs presented contesting views about borrowing of the BEH and its being international good practice. None was able to view the borrowed and contextualized BEH as a culturallyinvasive, intellectually- depriving and strategically-shaping the minds and bodies of Pakistani perspective teachers in a way that might be more towards more global market rather than needs of independent Pakistan. Their criticality was limited to the implementation issues. This study confirms the complexity of teacher education reform and of the borrowing of the global best practices as solutions. It raises questions for future studies around how solution to Pakistan\u27 teacher education should come from within