Abstract
We heartily thank the editors of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) for publishing a special issue of the journal on a most significant educator preparation matter: the need to prepare teachers skilled in supporting and educating the diverse individuals enrolled in America’s schools. The rapid rise in the ethnic and cultural diversity of the PreK-12 school population, as well as in the number of students with disabilities who spend most of their time in general classrooms, compels us all to reconsider how their teachers are prepared. We particularly appreciate the depth of knowledge and range of perspectives offered by the articles’ contributors and their frank, “tell-it-like-it-is” presentation style. We urge readers to engage with the ideas presented in the articles, as each adds unique insights to understanding the complexity of preparing educators for the multifaceted diversity of today’s PreK-12 students.
Readers will appreciate how the complex intersections of race, social class, gender, culture, and disability are conceptualized and addressed through varying educational philosophies and strategies for preparing educators to teach such diverse students. As the contributors to this volume remind us, navigating these complexities has been fraught with “decades-old tensions,” “enduring fissures,” and “cultural misunderstandings.” But in today’s world, teacher educators must not be hindered by these distractions. More than 90% of teachers in a recent major survey (MetLife, 2011) said supporting diverse learners with the highest needs should be a priority, and nearly 60% said it should be among the highest priorities. Preparing teachers who can successfully support the learning of every student requires that teacher educators remain open to new ideas and continue to develop preparation programs that respond to the nation’s diverse learning communities. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) is strongly committed to assuring that its members are equipped to reach this goal. The thoughtful articles and recommendations made by the contributors to this special issue will be invaluable to AACTE’s member institutions and leadership in setting policies and future direction for the Association. We must work together to advocate for appropriate legislative, regulatory, judicial, and fiscal supports to align with our efforts.
Each of the contributors to this issue has offered insights to progress, limitations, and future challenges. Collectively, they have framed a vision of teaching that is inclusive—a vision that incorporates the responsibility for the learning of all students within the role of the general education teacher in collaboration with specialists. The articles speak to this vision as a way of fulfilling an ethical obligation to serve all learners. Specific examples of this approach are offered in Florian’s article on Scotland’s Inclusive Practice Project and in Pugach and Blanton’s article discussing collaborative, dual-certification programs.
Suggestions to Colleges of Education
Teacher educators will find much to consider in this special issue. Irvine urges that culturally responsive pedagogy be considered foundational to the curriculum for all educators—which would help assure the common ground called for by Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling and would likely soften ideological positions on all sides. Irvine also suggests structural changes in preparation programs to enhance dialogue around curriculum, field experiences, research methodology, pedagogy, and assessments, and thus to help close the divide between multicultural and special education. She recommends coteaching between special and general education faculty, inclusion of PreK-12 teachers in planning new models for teacher training, and professional development programs for teacher educators.
Irvine points out that many educator preparation programs enroll too few students of color—given that 38% of students with disabilities are culturally and linguistically diverse, but only 14% of special education teachers share these students’ ethnic backgrounds. She further points to the need for colleges of education to attract more faculty of color who will encourage preservice teachers to become culturally relevant educators. These are high priorities on AACTE’s agenda, and more rapid progress is needed.
Rueda and Stillman remark on the common response to the challenge of preparing teachers for diverse classrooms: the compartmentalization of educator preparation programs into specializations, typically organized around student characteristics such as language background, presumed learning ability, and ethnic background. Thus, rather than talking about “education” in our programs, we tend to talk about “regular education,” “bilingual education,” “special education,” “multicultural education,” and so forth. The authors urge educator preparation programs to provide a more nuanced and theoretically sound perspective on culture and education so that all teachers learn to “teach culturally” rather than teaching “about” culture. This perspective should be central to the education experience of all candidates, they argue. Teaching and learning is cultural, and cultural factors are important for all learners independent of any labels or subgroups into which they may be categorized.
Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling highlight the imperative to find collaborative spaces to help close the “divides” within special education and between special education and general education. Working to find common ground, they argue, would benefit general and special teacher educators. They suggest three ways in which these diverse communities could work together with the college of education:
Conduct joint “mixed methods” research projects.
Undertake collaborative inquiry projects, which encourage faculty members from different disciplines to work together and capitalize on the practitioner inquiry movement’s growing emphasis in initial teacher education programs on teacher inquiry.
Create new hybrid programs for initial teacher education that forge new synergies between general and special education.
Clearly, the transformation Rueda and Stillman outline for educator preparation—from the current specialization/compartmentalization mode to a more inclusive and universal ‘teaching culturally’ concept—is long overdue. It would facilitate the collaborative spaces, the closing of the general/special education divides, and the essential common ground that Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling advocate. Villegas’ commentary begins to establish that common ground. As she points out, where disciplinary and practical concerns create differences, underlying philosophical commitments establish commonalities.
Policy Issues
As Rueda and Stillman explain, even preparation programs in states with clear standards for preparing linguistically responsive teachers tend to make incremental, rather than systematic, program changes. In addition, numerous states’ standards still include only vague or no references to student diversity. Attention to special education in general teacher education tends to be similarly marginalized. There is a clear role for national and state policy in promoting an agenda for preparation that embraces diversity in its broadest sense. As AACTE’s recent report “Preparing General Education Teachers to Improve Results for Students With Disabilities” (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2011) suggests, policy should require inclusive preparation and support capacity building. Unfortunately, current policies tend to favor brief preparation and immediate entry to the classroom for new teachers. Developing the skills to ensure a classroom where all members are valued and all instructional needs are met is not an outcome likely from a few weeks of preparation. Indeed, intensive preparation is called for, along with mentoring by an expert teacher and ongoing professional development. The current high-stakes policy agenda that insists on value-added test scores as a proxy for teacher excellence does not promote the sort of inclusive classroom called for in this report. In fact, it is the English learners and students with disabilities who again stand to lose the most, as the system is not built to reinforce teacher work with students who are struggling. Rather, it creates an incentive for teachers to exclude them from their classrooms.
Perhaps educator preparation programs and related policy should follow the lead of the comprehensive reforms underway in Singapore. That nation has identified three critical areas for attention in teacher preparation: values, skills, and knowledge. The Singapore reforms begin with the conviction that every teacher must believe that every child can learn and must know how to nurture that learning. Teachers also are prepared to be team players. Their preparation explicitly challenges assumptions that teacher candidates may bring with them, and a priority is placed on ensuring that candidates learn to value student diversity. Our own nation’s students would be well served by teachers prepared with the conviction that every child is valued and can learn.
Historically, policy regarding the needs and interests of special populations of students has its origins in advocacy. We have been challenged to address the needs of each group under separate funding streams and separate programs and to pursue professional research opportunities as discrete questions of theory and practice. Yet today’s teachers do not encounter students in these silos. They encounter them as a group, some with labels identifying them as members of one group or another and some not. And teachers need to be able to work with the group as a whole, as well as with each unique individual. At what point do we all join forces under the diversity umbrella and come to agree that together we are stronger than we are separately? What will it take for us to coalesce with one voice of inclusion?
The contributors to this volume of JTE articulate support for such inclusion from a variety of perspectives. We need to put our advocacy skills to work and insist on federal and state policy that supports and reflects this common ground.