About Department of Special Needs Education


Faculty of Education (FoE), the recent form/identity of College of Education established in 1956 had first prepared teachers for special education programme in 1967. Until the last decade of 20th century, significant progress has not been made in the teacher education in special education because of lack of specialized teacher educators. This lacking was filled up when seven senior faculty members of FoE came from the US after completing their M.S. in Special Education from the University of Oregon. With their active involvement, three courses were developed to provide at Three-Year B.Ed. and One-Year B.Ed. level. However, these courses were not found to have implemented in three-year B.Ed. Rather, one-year B.Ed. in Special Needs Education (SNE) has been operation since 2003 exclusively at Central Department of Education, University Campus, Kirtipur. A separate Department of Special Needs Education was established at Central Department of Education to run B.Ed. in SNE.

 However, this programme could not run effectively and extensively because six faculty members with M.S. in Special Education had got compulsory retirement and only one of them is working in the Department of SNE. A part time teacher is also working to run one-year B.Ed. in SNE. Hence, there is an acute shortage of human resources/teacher educators who can run M.Ed. and B.Ed. in SNE. Similarly, there is an extreme need of human resources in the field of SNE who can organize short-term training for government officials and school teachers.

 Considering above scenario, it was realized that in order to run M.Ed. in SNE and B.Ed. in SNE, it was necessary to prepare teacher educators who can teach SNE courses at M.Ed. and B.Ed. level in the campuses/colleges of different part of the country. For this, M.Ed. and B.Ed. in SNE programme is being launched with the financial and technical support of Changwon National University under Leading University Project for International Cooperation, South Korea.