Hybridizing Teacher Education: When University-Based Teacher Education and Alternative Pathways Collide

• In Event: 61.052 - Reengineering Teachers' Identities: Can We Resist, Appropriate, or Reverse the "New Professionalism"?

Abstract

Objective: This paper reports the findings of an interview study of six university-based teacher preparation programs that integrated alternative pathways to teaching (Teach for America, Teaching Fellows, etc.) The objective of the study was to explore how education schools adapted as alternative teacher preparation programs entered their institutional environment.
Background/Literature: Both university-based teacher education and alternative pathways have been heavily criticized (Bustos Flores, Desjean-Perrotta, & Steinmetz, 2004; Cochran-Smith, 2005; Labaree, 2004; Levine, 2006; Walsh & Jacobs, 2007). Even those who support university-based teacher education have acknowledged its shortcomings (Friedrich, 2014). This study sought to understand how university-based faculty perceived the alternative programs they were forced to partner with and how they were impacted both positively and negatively by this partnership.
Methods: This research is an interview study of six IHE-based education school programs. I investigated six university-based teacher preparation program sites located in New York City. The sites were chosen to provide insights into how different programs were adapting, viewing or competing against alternative in-service programs. The subjects for this study consisted of anywhere from three-to-five interviewees in each education program. This resulted in 21 in-depth interviews (with follow-up interviews in most cases) representing 70% of the targeted total respondents.
Findings: In a general environment hostile to teacher education schools, a preference for quicker, de-academized programs, and a marketized institutional environment (Rowan, 2006), I expected to see a fairly straightforward adoption of alternative practices by university-based programs. This did happen to some extent. For instance, many education schools implemented fast track programs or reduced the number of credits needed for certification and required longer clinical experiences in the local area schools. But I also found that this forced partnership also created a serendipitous hybridization of teacher education, resulting in the potential for a hybrid teacher that combines aspects of both programs. This hybrid teacher is from a different demographic (higher income, more elite education, etc.) than the standard teacher candidate and is recruited by alternative organizations that promote a specific teaching philosophy via a summer pre-service program. In the university, they are exposed to the foundational knowledge of education that is espoused by professionalized programs, which according to some interviewees have been associated with a social justice agenda. Interviewees indicated that the emphasis of alternative programs on learning form experience created pressures for a more clinically rich internship experience. This was a short-lived, yet innovative by-product that reflected a hybridization of the deregulated “new professional” (Exworthy & Halford, 1999). and the traditional graduate of university-based programs. With the creation of Relay Graduate School, these alternative programs (at least in New York) were absorbed into a deregulated, stand alone, non-university environment.

Author

• Angus Shiva Mungal, The University of Texas - El Paso