Naturalistic inquiry applied to the evaluation of a teacher education program

Abstract

A team of six teacher educators (in addition to the authors, other team members are Susan Peters, Michigan State University; Ginger Fisher, Holy Family College, Philadelphia; and Tom skrtic, University of Kansas) was invited to evaluate an innovative teacher education program which has merged elementary and special educatin into one major. Naturalistic inquiry methodology was employed to evaluate the program. This paper (a) presents a theoretical and philosophical discussion of naturalistic inquiry and differentiates it from quantitative methodology, (b) takes the reader through the entire naturalistic evaluation process from the initial site visit through the writing of the case study and the audit, (c) provides a brief description of the organization of the case study and a limited discussion of the major findings, and (d) discusses implications of naturalistic inquiry as they apply to this particular study and to evaluation of teacher education programs in general.