New+Emphases+in+Teacher+Preparation+01-30-09

01-30-09 =**New Emphases in Teacher Preparation** = = =  [|Yesterday’s lead article in the New York Times] was on the education funding in President Obama’s stimulus package, which [|the House of Representatives passed on Wednesday]. I noticed that Windham, where I live, stands to get almost $3.5 million over the next two years. I just wonder how that kind of money will get spent. If the federal government requires it to be spent on assessment then I don’t see it helping much, except to tell us what we already know—poor kids do poorly on tests. My other concern is that so much money has already been lost to funding cuts that the stimulus package money will do little more than fill in the holes. I suppose it will be good to prevent the elimination of programs and teachers, but that’s not exactly going to provide stimulus for education or the economy. Obama hopes to sign the bill into law by February 16.

In the meantime, as the elementary school teachers carry on and the secondary teachers emerge from midterm exams and hope to get some productivity out of their students before CAPT descends upon them in early March, I am into my second week with a new batch of future high school English teachers. At first it appeared that I had only seven English Education majors, and mostly English majors, but it turns out that the university’s registration software just hasn’t caught up with the reality of [|the new dual degree] the university senate approved last year for [|Education] majors seeking degrees from the [|College of Liberal Arts and Sciences]. It used to be that if students wanted degrees in Education and their content area, the university required them to complete two sets of general education courses, sixty credits total. As of last year, an agreement was reached to eliminate what some had come to call the gen ed penalty or the dual degree penalty. Now students can complete the five year [|Integrated Bachelor's Master's Degree Program] with two BAs, an MA in Education, and certification, of course. So, it turns out that twelve of my students are seeking dual degrees in English and English Education, and one is seeking dual degrees in English and Elementary Education. Five more are straight English majors, but all are applying to graduate school for Education. I’m excited about this change in policy, and think it will promote much more content area knowledge among teachers than most of us had when we went into our first jobs. I hope the new policy will also attract more students to education because students won’t feel as limited to the field of education should they decide a year or two or ten into it that teaching isn’t what they want to do for the next thirty-five years.

My students seem like a good bunch, and as I’ve done for five years teaching Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers (see below), my students will be corresponding with local high school students and helping them with their writing. Anyone who took Advanced Comp years ago with Mary Mackley, as I did in 1991, will remember doing a similar assignment by print mail with Carol Jonaitis’ students at [|Enrico Fermi High School] in Enfield. When I began teaching Advanced Comp in 2005, I was still teaching full time at [|RHAM High School] and teaching at UConn as an adjunct, so I initiated correspondence between my own high school students and my own undergraduates. This year I will be working with Denise Abercrombie and her sophomore American Literature students at [|E. O. Smith High School], which is very convenient due to the high school’s proximity to UConn. Of course we correspond electronically now. The students will be reading two novels together. Denise chose //[|Into the Wild]//, which she is teaching alongside //[|Walden]//, and //[|Of Mice and Men]//. The students will discuss the books by email, and then the college undergrads will help the high school sophomores to come up with paper topic ideas. When the time comes, the high school students will send drafts of their papers to the undergrads for response. We also hope to arrange for the students to have some face time with one another. Additionally, I created a course wiki for the Advanced Comp class, and we may add the high school students to the wikispace, which would allow them to post material that could be shared more broadly with all the participating students. This will be my first time working with Denise on this, and we’re both excited by the possibilities. The //[|English Journal]// published an article in 2004 (see below) about a similar collaboration, but it was much more modest in scope than we we’re doing. I’m considering writing an article about this collaborative model, perhaps at this summer’s [|Professional Writing Retreat].

I have written in past columns about how fearful school administrators, in particular, tend to be about allowing their students to use internet technologies, but we really have to begin teaching digital literacy. We neglect too much when we exclude it from our curricula and our teaching. This past fall I worked with a former high school student of mine who was teaching English in Egypt to co-facilitate a correspondence between her students and about a dozen of my former UConn undergrads. The students exchanged emails on topics selected by my former student, and we even created a facebook group for the UConn students to use to plan their collaboration. My former student and I hope to do something similar next fall, when she plans to be teaching in Japan. My wife has run an email correspondence program for a decade that requires her UConn Spanish students to correspond with her former professors from [|Middlebury College’s Summer Language School]. These professors teach all over Latin America and Spain during the regular academic year. And then my sister will be teaching English in Barcelona this summer. And there’s Nafissatou MBodj, in Senegal, who went through the summer institute in 2002. So many possibilities. Maybe if I can get my hands on some of that stimulus money!





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