Enacting Diversity in Dual Certification Programs

Sample

The three collaborative teacher education programs identified for this exploratory study were selected purposefully and can be viewed as critical case sampling according to Patton’s (2002) sampling scheme. Given the recent rapid increase in such programs, those identified for analysis in this study are all relatively long-standing elementary programs that predated the current surge in collaborative teacher education and dual licensure. The rationale for selecting long-standing programs was that faculty affiliated with such programs are more likely to have had greater opportunities to work out philosophical and practical issues associated with merging the preparation of general and special educators and the ways they address diversity. Finally, with regard to sampling, although many collaborative preservice programs exist in early childhood (Stayton & McCollum, 2002), this study is focused on elementary-level programs because of the degree to which issues of student achievement reveal themselves once the academic curriculum becomes more demanding and NCLB testing requirements become more challenging.

The three institutions whose programs were included in the study vary by geographic location; they are each in large or midsized cities, one in the west and two in the east. Program A is located in a small, private denominational college in a city in the northeast. Program B is located in a large public, multipurpose university in a large city in the west. Program C is located in a large private research university in an industrial city in the northeast. All offer initial teacher education licensure at the undergraduate level, and all students graduate eligible for a general and special education license, consistent with the definition of a merged program. The special education licenses graduates of these programs earned were all in mild to moderate disabilities and did not include certification for teaching in the areas of vision or hearing impairment, or more significant disabilities.

Data Sources and Analysis

Data sources for this study included the following program and curricular documents: general program descriptions, program mission statements, course catalog descriptions, advising documents, student program handbooks, clinical experience descriptions and handbooks, and syllabi for required education courses. Documents were collected between 2008 and 2010 via postsecondary institution websites, as well as directly from program directors and/or key faculty or administrative contacts. Course syllabi constituted the major data source and were analyzed for (a) short course descriptions, goals, and objectives; (b) state and/or national standards addressed in the course; (c) distribution of course topics; (d) course assignments; and (e) required textbooks. A total of 44 syllabi were analyzed, including 10 from Program A, 18 from Program B, and 16 from Program C. Where necessary, clarifications and program updates were sought from key faculty or administrative contacts, chiefly via email, but no formal faculty interviews were conducted for this study.

Each complete data set was analyzed by one of the two principal researchers, both of whom are senior faculty members in teacher education in large urban communities, one in special education with primary responsibility for the preparation of special education teachers and graduate students in a state that requires preparation in issues of ELL for all teachers, and for preparing doctoral students in special education, and one in general education with primary responsibility for the preparation of masters level general education teachers for urban schools and doctoral students in urban education. These different experiential bases were viewed as important in bringing multiple perspectives to the analysis of the preservice curricula. The identification and development of categories for analysis were completed as a joint task.

Hatch (2002) described data analysis “as a process of asking questions of the data,” and that “important information is in the data, and by systematically asking the right questions of the data, that information can be revealed” (p. 148). The overarching analytic question in this study was how these programs were conceptualized in terms of the relationship between preparing teachers for diversity of race, class, culture, and language, and diversity as represented by disability. A set of more specific questions spanning general descriptions of programs and specific content related to course and field experience requirements helped focus the analysis and included the following:

Data were analyzed by reading each document multiple times to identify patterns across various aspects of the curriculum as represented in course syllabi and other descriptive program material. Several parts of the data were analyzed with simple frequency counts, a common practice in content analysis (Ezzy, 2002). Where categorization of various aspects of the materials was required to enable frequency counts, for example, in determining whether a course had a primary focus on general or special education, or inclusive education, the authors set general decision rules after discussion. For example, a syllabus was judged in terms of whether it was more recognizable in content as a relatively traditional general education course (e.g., learning and development or literacy methods or mathematics methods), or a relatively traditional course in special education (e.g., an introduction to categories of special education or a course on learning disabilities), or a course that reflected a much higher degree of inclusion—whether or not the course title itself conveyed a more expansive and inclusive focus.

After broad program descriptions, syllabi and textbooks were analyzed, and results placed into matrix form, a second level of content analysis was completed based primarily on the distribution of course topics and assignments in course syllabi. Based on this analysis, an individual diversity profile was developed for each program to capture variations in the ways diversity was addressed across programs and specifically to compare attention with diversity of race, class, culture, and language with diversity defined as disability. These diversity profiles included the following:

Diversity

All three programs refer to diversity and, either explicitly or implicitly, convey the belief that the program is committed to preparing its graduates to teach across a wide range of diversities—in program or unit descriptions, in references to diversity requirements, and/or in references to diversity in specific course descriptions or lists of standards. However, especially with regard to course topics and assignments, diversity appears to be defined more frequently as disability, with fewer assignments specifically exploring issues such as race, class, culture, or language. All three of these programs exist in urban areas of various sizes, where the likelihood of having a diverse student body is at its greatest. It is noteworthy that neither issues of working with English language learners, nor issues of language and power are addressed in greater depth. A faulty assumption that may be underlying this approach to the curriculum could be that if preservice students are well versed in issues related to disability, this knowledge will transfer to the complexity of the interrelationships among race, class, culture, language, and disability.

For two of the three programs, preservice students complete at least some of their field experiences in urban school contexts. This suggests the need for teacher candidates to have structured opportunities to participate in mediated discussions (Seidl et al., 2008) and to use tools of inquiry (Zamudio, Rios, & Jaime, 2008) to foster a critical consciousness with regard to issues of race, class, language, and culture in their practice settings. In other words, the commitment to diversity in these programs requires more than placing preservice students in culturally, ethnically, socioeconomically, linguistically, and ability-diverse classrooms and schools; it requires purposeful deliberation about these experiences—and especially about how diversities intersect. The diversity profile for Program C may suggest some degree of greater opportunity to engage in such mediated discussions, primarily due to the greater number of class topics devoted to issues of equity. It may also be the case that programs do engage students in mediated conversations during, for example, seminars taken concurrently with field experience and/or student teaching. However, it is not readily apparent from syllabi and related course materials that this is taking place.

The question of how merged programs address diversity raises a fundamental issue in the reform of teacher education. If diversity is conceptualized as a series of independent, unconnected social identity markers, paying much greater attention to one such marker relative to another may create an imbalance in the preservice curriculum that has real consequences for how graduates are prepared to work in educational settings that are in fact highly diverse. Most importantly, the PK-12 students these program graduates will teach are not defined by only a single social identity marker of diversity. If students have more experience in practice and in mediated debriefings with disability in comparison with diversity of race, class, culture, or language, for example, it does not seem likely that they are being well prepared for teaching in diverse settings. Further, how might program graduates be contextualizing disability within the larger issues of institutional forces that maintain inequity and marginalize groups of students, forces that place students in the position of becoming vulnerable for failure in school (Seidl & Pugach, 2009)? A construct such as disability itself exists within a larger framework of race, class, culture, language, and socioeconomic class that characterize all students (Pugach & Seidl, 1998). In this regard, Artiles, Kozleski, Trent, Osher, and Ortiz (2010) have suggested that special education has adhered to color-blind explanations of dynamics such as the disproportionate representation of minorities in special education in ways that do not “honor the complexities of racial inequities in special education” (p. 280)—rather than situate the disproportional representation of African American males and Hispanic students, for example, within larger cultural frameworks that acknowledge societal and institutional forces that are always at work in schools and communities. An assumption underlying this study was that programs that are committed to combining the preparation of special and general education would have addressed these issues more substantively and in ways that would contribute to graduates’ clearer understandings of the larger context of racial inequity, the place of disability within these overarching sociocultural and institutional frameworks, and the intersectionality of diversities.

The need to include and strongly emphasize disability in the preparation of teachers is not in question here. Rather, what is in question is (a) why disability seems to be disproportionately addressed in relationship to other diversities and (b) why it is not adequately situated within these larger conversations to acknowledge and interrogate its complexity.

Inclusivity

Related to the issue of diversity is the issue of inclusivity. Although the roots of the term and philosophy of inclusion are tied to individuals who have disabilities, increasingly it is viewed as embracing the need for educational equity and access across all students who are marginalized on many counts—not only those with disabilities (Artiles, Kozleski, & Waitoller, 2011). An assumption in this study is that when programs have been redesigned as a result of greater levels of collaboration across general and special education, the concept of inclusion itself might have been reshaped to reflect this broader conception of diversity and how disability is nested within other social markers of diversity, and not be limited primarily to special education.

Yet evidence that such a reshaping has occurred in these programs is not readily apparent in these data. In Programs A and B, for example, inclusivity seems to be defined as responding to students’ individual differences. Beyond occasional references, the language of inclusion is used infrequently. In Program A, the commitment to meeting individual differences is located in the program mission and appears in courses on, for example, assessment, which emphasize practices such as curriculum-based measurement embedded in systems such as Response to Intervention. The skills of ongoing assessment and progress monitoring are clearly important for teachers to master to support student learning and yet, it seems reasonable to question whether “meeting individual differences” in the absence of greater attention to diversity of race, class, culture, and language is a powerful enough conceptual framework within which to overcome long-standing institutional inequities and situate inclusivity within its larger sociocultural framework. Program C uses the language of inclusion throughout its materials. However, the emphasis on special education and disability continues to be greater than the emphasis on issues of race, class, culture, and language in this preservice curriculum, raising questions about which diversities may be privileged, whether consciously or not, in the practice of developing inclusive programs of teacher preparation.

The Boundaries of Special and General Education

How sharp or blurred are the boundaries between general and special education in these programs? The data suggest several important issues in this regard.

First, when programs are initially portrayed to students in brief program descriptions, such as those on college wide or departmental websites or introductory sections of course catalogs, the instrumentality of emphasizing dual certification as increasing the likelihood of employment may work to perpetuate sharp boundaries between the two. Although programs may be described philosophically as being committed to preparing all graduates for working with diverse groups of learners in inclusive classrooms, the increased marketability of a graduate who possesses a general and special education license appears to hold a prominent place in how such merged programs are identified. This may potentially trump philosophical shifts and perhaps—inadvertently—reify the fundamental duality of general and special education. The assumption operating seems to be that graduates will want to take on the role of either a general or special education teacher—at the same time, the program may make important claims about working in inclusive settings. The realities of the job market and the shortage of special education teachers suggests that those who hold a special education license could find themselves pressured to accept a position as a special education teacher, even if their goal is to work as a general education teacher who practices inclusive education.

Second, it appears that traditional categorical/medical model philosophies of disability, and inclusive philosophies of disability that are based more on the social construction of disability, may coexist within a single merged program, raising the question about whether these conflicting worldviews are adequately problematized by faculty and with students as they move through their preparation. All three programs house traditional categorical special education courses (e.g., Introduction and Characteristics of Individuals with Special Needs, Perspectives on Disabilities, or Characteristics of Students with Mild to Moderate Disabilities) alongside courses with titles such as Introduction to Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms or Teaching and Learning for Inclusive Schooling. If it is the case that such merged programs are meant to be harbingers of more inclusive practice, what is the significance of an apparent reluctance to address this conflict philosophically and programmatically, or to create language (and by extension, preservice discourse and courses or experiences) that might reflect a less dualistic view?

There may be several explanations for this situation. For example, there may be faculty members who are firmly planted in a medical model of disability and who are comfortable teaching only from that perspective; simultaneous offerings from both perspectives may be a practical way of “keeping the peace.” Furthermore, the pressure to respond to state certification requirements and national standards for a general and special education license may be constraining a broader vision of inclusivity (Blanton & Pugach, 2011)—and this may represent an unintended outcome in the development of merged programs of dual licensure. States may require courses with specific reference to special education in their titles and short course descriptions, and specific standards and/or competencies may be grounded in a traditional view of disability.

Finally, as noted above, the language of collaboration, which has signaled a blurring of the boundaries between general and special education, is sparse in these program materials and course syllabi. This raises questions about the relationship between the discourse of inclusive education and the discourse of collaboration. Brownell et al. (2010) have questioned whether collaboration among professionals is an appropriate framework for teacher education to be responsive to students who have disabilities. It is unclear why these programs seem to be downplaying collaboration—or whether it is so firmly embedded within the processes of teacher education that it is not as readily visible as other issues.