Teacher Education as Stewardship of Place: Growing Secondary Teachers for Rural Oregon

• In Event: Portrait of a Program: Reconceptualizing and Revitalizing Rural Teacher Preparation

Abstract

Our public university began as a normal school and is still the only four-year, higher education institution for 100 miles in any direction. The next closest teacher preparation program is 175 miles away. This paper explores the questions and tensions that have emerged in our Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT), secondary-level licensure program as we heed the call for regional universities to be stewards of place (Dunfee & Vaidy, 2015), to take seriously our responsibility to diversify and deepen the teacher workforce and to respond to rural, teacher workforce needs. Most of our graduates will teach in small town and rural Oregon, so what we do here is deeply entangled with place.

This paper considers two important questions to guide our program:
(1) How do we interrogate our policies and program design in order to help diversify rural Oregon’s teacher workforce?
(2) How should we respond to rural teacher shortages?

The demographic make-up of our secondary MAT student body roughly mirrors the demographics of Oregon (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018) but as our state becomes more diverse, it is increasingly important to develop teachers from diverse cultural, racial, linguistic and economic backgrounds (Villegas & Irvine, 2010). As we begin to open the door wider, however, traditional ideas of who graduate students are and what resources they have at their disposal quickly break down and we must build supports into our program that meet the needs of those students. Our MAT students are older, more rural, less affluent, and more likely to be first generation than they were in the past. About half of our students are parenting or caretaking; 35% report rely on public assistance programs, 18% experience housing insecurity, and 15% food insecurity. This paper describes the evolution of institutional, programmatic, and interpersonal supports as well as the assets our students bring to the program.

Furthermore, Oregon teachers hired on temporary licenses must complete a teacher preparation program within three years or lose their jobs. This can be a serious hardship for teachers in far-flung rural communities; the very communities that increasingly rely on untrained teachers with temporary licenses. Over the last four years, candidates with temporary licenses have made up roughly 20% of our secondary MAT cohort and we have, consequently, made changes to what Authors (2019) call our conveyance in order to serve them. This paper describes our efforts to do so deliberately, with intention, and in the best long-term interests of rural teachers and rural students.

Finally, given the questions above, how do we navigate the complex demands of university policy and compliance fidelity to an alphabet soup of standards, regulations and accreditors (edTPA, CAEP, INTASC, ESSA etc.)? The paper will describe our attempts to use a practice-based evidence lens (Eppley, Azano, Brenner, & Shannon, 2018) to speak back to some of these policy mandates. To take rural Oregon seriously means that we must be not only responsive, but responsible in our practice--to be stewards of this place.

Author

• Jesse Moon Longhurst, Southern Oregon University