Zeichner, K. (2010).Rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 61(1-2) 89–99.
What happens if a pre-service early childhood teacher attends college, graduates with a degree in teaching, but has never worked with children? If the teacher has little or no experience with young children, chances are the first few years of teaching will be difficult for him/her and the children. Studying child development, theories, best practices, standards of learning and teaching, and curriculum is important, but experience with children is imperative. Would you take your car to a mechanic who has never been under the hood? Would you go to a doctor who never served an internship? Of course not.
Now that I’ve had my say, I will turn to Zeichner. He discusses the newer model of early childhood education classes at many colleges where field experience and interships are a key piece of the learning process. Zeichner points out that traditional college-based teacher education was once considered to be the best source of learning for education students. Zeichner shares this sad but true observation:
Staffed with graduate students, temporary and part-time faculty and with few resources to develop field placements, U.S. teacher certification programs are the Cinderellas of the American university. Ideas and money are rarely spent on coordinating what is learned on campus with what goes on in schools.
(Featherstone, 2007, cited in Zeichner. 2010, p. 89)
In the early childhood education courses I’ve taken at George Mason University (GMU), fifteen hours of field experience and internships are required each semester. Fortunately, many of my fellow students are already working at a child care center or preschool, so the requirements are not too painful. GMU has a coordinator who organizes placements for other students who need them. All placements have to be approved be the education department.
Zeichner examines the quality of initial placement and monitoring of students and finds a lack of consistency and reliability. Some colleges outsource placements to a central placement office where the staff are not trained about early childhood education. Other colleges use grad students from other departments. When students arrive at the chosen schools to observe, there is little or no consistency in how they are treated or utilized in classrooms. I have heard reports by returning students that they were asked to “take over” a class so that the teacher could run an errand, or conversely, the student teacher is sometimes ignored and not allowed to participate with the children. To be fair, the schoolteachers are asked to mentor and teach student teachers on top of their normal work with the children, which seems unfair to me. Additionally, while most college courses require student field experience, there is no standard method of reporting observations or accountability for the learning in the field. Zeichner concludes that unless universities and colleges find ways to prepare future teachers more efficiently, schools will be looking to other sources for new teachers.
