Higher Education Culture—A Fit or Misfit With Reform in Teacher Education?

Abstract

Collaboration and innovation in teacher education are essential ingredients for preparing teachers for increasingly diverse and challenging school populations. In the United States, one in five children lives in poverty, and the numbers of children who speak English as a second language are increasing rapidly (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). If institutions of higher education are to prepare teachers for all students, current program structures and faculty roles must change substantially. Current practice, however, shows less than dramatic change. Some advocates of teacher education reform have cited funding patterns in schools of education, adherence to horizontal staffing of faculty assigned to specialized course loads, lack of public school teacher involvement, and an absence of a moral and ethical imperative throughout the program as barriers that continue to prevent reform and growth in teacher education (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998; Tom, 1997). State policies allowing alternative certification, limiting the number of credit hours in teacher education programs, and prescribing discrete teaching behaviors in the evaluation of teaching also continue to impede program change (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Some faculty may perceive such state policies, along with other regulatory influences such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), as constraining program development in teacher education rather than as guides for quality. The Holmes Partnership accomplished certain outcomes in teacher preparation, such as the proliferation of the professional development schools (PDS) concept, but it did not take strong positions on state and national policy. The lack of unified action in areas of state policy by leading institutions of higher education may have contributed to the stalling of reform (Fullan et al., 1998). The literature of practice in teacher education urges reform that includes collaboration across disciplines essential to educating teachers for increasingly diverse student populations (Blanton, Griffin, Winn, & Pugach, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1996). Those disciplines may include special education, social work, general education, family and child development, counseling sociology, and educational leadership. Researchers have identified barriers to cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education that are largely administrative or social in nature. Barriers may include lack of incentives in faculty reward structures, inordinate amounts of time in already burdened faculty schedules, absence of understanding of interdisciplinary program development by administrators, lack of institutional resources, unwillingness by administrators to engage in creative faculty assignments, differences in philosophy among faculty, special interests and protectionist issues held by faculty, rigid thinking, and lack of respect across departments (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Miller, in press; Miller & Stayon, 1998; Tom, 1997). The culture of higher education has traditionally maintained rigid conceptions about content and practices for preparing teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Tom, 1997). A decade of rhetoric about reform and the proliferation of the PDS concept would suggest that reform in collaborative teacher education is underway (Holmes Group, 1995). Interpretation of the status of institutional reform, however, may depend on whether one reads institutional mission statements and other documents, or whether one talks with faculty. In this article, we discuss findings of a qualitative study undertaken to explore the culture of higher education as it fits with proposed reform in teacher education and further describe existing barriers and supports. Although reports from administrators and official institutional documents continue to describe trends toward reform in definitions of scholarship and reward systems for faculty (Glassick et al. …