Using a Classification System to Probe the Meaning of Dual Licensure in General and Special Education

The alignment of the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the transparency of low achievement of students who have disabilities under the testing mandates of NCLB have converged to create substantial renewed interest and activity in collaborative programs of teacher education—a term used to describe program redesign that brings together teacher preparation for general and special education to improve education not only for students who have disabilities but also for all students who struggle. Such preservice efforts (often referred to as “dual certification” or “dual licensure”) are not only proliferating at a rapid pace, they are proceeding in the absence of analytic frameworks to consider collaborative teacher education more critically, to create a common discourse around this trend, to capture variations in collaborative teacher education, to clarify its multiple meanings, and to uncover assumptions under which such program development is taking place. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to simultaneously make sense of and problematize the landscape of collaborative teacher education, based on a classification system of program models.