Full Text:
Special education teachers are often prepared to work with special
needs children in programs that are separate from the teacher education
programs that regular education student experience. This fact raises a
lot of questions about the kinds of knowledge and practices students who
are preparing to teach in mainstream classes learn about how to best
serve the learning needs of special education students who are likely to
be in their classrooms. Moreover, most special education coursework is
geared to elementary level classrooms. While secondary education
students often take the same coursework as elementary education
students, there are clearly differences in ways to work with older and
younger children who have mild to moderate learning and/or behavioral
needs.
We are fortunate in this issue of Teacher Education Quarterly to
have four articles that directly address these concerns in the context
of teacher education credential programs. Working mostly with
manuscripts accepted during the editorship of Tom Nelson, and consulting
about these materials with Tom, I have assembled this Spring 2011 issue
to bring to light some of the issues and new work that special education
educators are doing and proposing to ensure that all teachers are better
equipped to understand and meet the needs of special education students.
I think that, at times, those of us who work in teacher education
do not pay enough attention to special education. There are some reasons
for this. Special education is a specialized field that typically relies
on research methods and a knowledge base that is informed in fields that
fall outside of the general teacher education curriculum. For example,
special education students take coursework in reading disabilities,
where the focus is on phonics, decoding, and cognitive approaches to
language processing. They may study behavior modification strategies,
with pre-and post-test assessments. Regular education students study
reading and writing across the curriculum, first and second language
acquisition, inquiry approaches to improving their teaching, and subject
matter content teaching methods.
In this issue, the first three articles examine combined special
education and teacher education programs, one elementary and one
secondary. At both levels of preparation, the focus is on professional
socialization in combined programs, with an eye toward the better
understanding of the norms and values that emerge within these differing
types of programs. In the opening article, Kathryn S. Young points out
that one of most difficult issues to overcome within dual certification
programs is finding ways to socialize teachers toward the needs of all
students, when the educational bureaucracy requires teachers to
distinguish among different types of learning needs and students with
disabilities.
Ann Fullerton, Barbara J. Ruben, Stephanie McBride, and Susan Bert
at Portland State University set out to find ways of doing just that,
combining special education coursework and experiences with secondary
teacher education requirements. As students progress in the credential
program, they learn how to plan for and teach in ways that stress
collaboration and inclusion. A special feature of the Portland State
combined program for secondary teachers is that students also continue
for a Master's degree in which they conduct inquiry into their
classroom practices. The entire merged program is presented in the
second article in this issue. In the third article, Fullerton and her
colleagues present an evaluation of the merged special education and
secondary program. One finding that stood out for me was that candidates
in the merged program "first learn to assess and consider the
learning needs of every students in the actual classroom; to view
learning diversity as a given that must first be assessed and understood
before one can plan instruction." Being in a combined credential
program also meant that candidates identified with both fields of study,
relying on practices and experiences from both interdependently.
The next article, by Yeunjoo Lee, Philip P. Patterson, and Luis A.
Vega, focused on understanding why special education teachers often
leave teaching within three years. Organizing their work around
Bandura's cognitive theory of social learning and self-efficacy,
particularly a teacher's perceived ability to influence learning as
a result of action taken, Lee and colleagues set out to study the
factors that may have contributed to low self-efficacy among special
education teachers. The findings were grim and do not auger well in the
current climate of cutbacks within education: "Teaching context in
the form of lack of support from school districts, lack of resources
(e.g., curriculum supplies, and technology), and heavy workload present
grave perils to teachers' self-efficacy and can weaken the ultimate
success of special education teachers ..."
The other four articles in this issue present portraits of
pre-service teachers from a range of perspectives. The article by
Michael B. Ripski, Jennifer LoCasale-Crouch, and Lauren Decker examines
connections between dispositional traits and emotional states of
pre-service teachers and interactions with students. An interesting
finding from this study is that there was a relationship between higher
reported levels of extroversion and lower quality interactions with
students. That is, being high sociable does not always translate in to
being able to teach well. Moreover, they found that depressive states
were also negatively related to quality interactions.
Ye He and Jewell Cooper studied five first-year secondary
teachers' concerns and struggles as they entered the teacher
profession. Using ethnographic interviews, the authors learned that the
teachers were most concerned about classroom management, keeping
students interested, and parental involvement, and especially making
connections with diverse student populations. All five teachers were
White, and all five had experienced opportunities to interact with
culturally and ethnically diverse student populations during their
secondary teacher credential program, which provided them with a range
of strategies and resources for interacting with diverse student
populations, their families, and their communities.
In the "Role of Legitimacy in Student Teacher," Alexander
Cuenca employed Lave and Wenger's idea of legitimate peripheral
participation in a community of practice as the lens through which he
studied two candidates' experiences during student teaching as they
apprenticed with experienced teachers in the profession. Cuenca
introduced the concept of "tethered learning" to capture
situated learning with a safety net, where mistakes are expected and
serve as learning potentials while students hone their craft. The two
experienced teachers in this study played a key role in assisting the
development of a professional identity for the student teachers who
learned with and from them.
The article by Jennifer Mahon and Jill Packman shares information
about teaching as a career choice and provides a menu of options for how
to engage students in reflection about the pros and cons of choosing
teaching as a career. There are examples of activities and experiences
for lower- as well as upper-division college courses, including student
teaching and internships, with the goal of helping students make
informed choices about entering teaching. The authors argue for
presenting realistic scenarios for teaching assignments, and the lives
of teachers in today's culturally and linguistically diverse school
settings, a theme that cuts across all of the articles in this issue.
--Christian Faltis, Editor