Synchronous Service Teachers as Square Pegs in a Round Hole: Teach For America and (Initial) Teacher Education

• In Event: The Teach For All Teacher Education Experience in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil

Abstract

Objectives and Research Questions

This paper explores the nexus of the TFA experience and teacher education programming. Although a considerable body of research examines, evaluates, and excoriates TFA, limited literature has looked at the ‘fit’ of corps members (CMs) in more traditional schools of education. Moreover, despite a decades-long interaction, the education community writ large, has an underdeveloped understanding of how teacher education programs intersect and overlap with a growing collection of non-traditional routes to teaching, including TFA. This paper therefore investigates TFA corps members’ experiences with teacher education programming. How do they perceive the coursework they complete within graduate schools of education?

Theoretical Lens

In this paper we build on research from the sociology of teachers’ identities and work (Connell, 1985; Lortie, 1975; Flores & Day, 2006; Weiner & Torres, 2016), highlighting the complexity of TFA teachers’ roles as novice teachers. As teachers working full-time, CMs are unlike traditional pre-service teachers in that they are generally already teaching students, all-day everyday. However, CMs are not in-service teachers in a traditional sense either, as few CMs complete previous coursework in teacher education or undertake practicum experiences in schools. These teachers are therefore uniquely positioned in a genre-bending space that exists between pre-service and in-service, or what we are terming ‘synchronous service’ because both training and practice occur simultaneously. Their professional identity is, in some ways, analogous to Derrida’s notion of ‘being as becoming,’ wherein CMs are under development at the same time as they are already doing the full labor of their positions.

Methods

Drawing on our experiences as teacher educators of TFA corps members at Greenwood University—a graduate school of education in a Midwestern city—we examine how the 89 CMs we taught and the 36 CMs we interviewed experienced and perceived their required teacher preparation courses, taken to fulfill state mandates for alternative licensure and to be considered high qualified.

Results & Conclusions

Four key findings emerged from the data. First, CMs felt driven by a sense of immediacy that often got in the way of their success as graduate students, and was exacerbated by the requirements of this particular synchronous service model. Second, CMs were generally surprised by the ease of their coursework at Greenwood. Third, CMs desired courses to be more relevant to their specific teaching posts, and to include instructional activities and approaches tailored for their grade level and content area. Fourth and finally, this confluence of perspectives and factors led to a paradoxical disinvestment on the part of CMs from coursework they deemed to require too much and to teach too little.

Scholarly significance

In addition to examining the experiences of CMs in their interactions with teacher education institutions, this paper posits that CMs, and perhaps other alternatively trained teachers, exist in a liminal space as they complete their synchronous service. For teacher education institutions that choose to engage with TFA and similar organizations, thoughtful programming of university coursework is necessary to improve CM learning – and likewise teaching – during their commitments.

Authors

• Matthew A.M. Thomas, The University of Sydney

• Elizabeth Lefebvre, Bethel University