NCCRESt

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Field Experience Programs

• Addressing Diversity through a Field-Based Center for Professional Development and Technology
  To meet the challenges of student diversity, the Southwest Texas Center for Professional Development and Technology offers school-family-community partnerships with urban schools. Preservice teacher interns participate in field-based experiences where they interact with diverse students in various settings over a semester.
• Assembling Pieces in the Diversity Puzzle: A Field Model
  Offers a model of social-work education that infuses multicultural content into the field curriculum and enhances faculty diversity. One school's field-practice seminars integrate diversity training by pairing community facilitators with faculty facilitators to increase instructors' awareness of diversity; offering ongoing workshops to train facilitators to address diversity issues; and conscious inclusion of diversity content into seminar curriculum.
• Assuring an Appreciation for Student Diversity: Alternatives to Teacher Education Field Experiences
  This report provides an introduction to technology-based materials and mechanisms for ensuring student teachers' exposure to thought-provoking classroom diversity experiences. The paper discusses diversity in modern, multicultural, U.S.
• Authentic Learning with At Risk Elementary School Children
  Children who are "at risk" are differentiated by their difficulty meeting standards for school success. This paper describes a model for a field-based component of an elementary education children's literature course involving in-school tutoring of at risk children.
• Challenging Old Assumptions: Preparing Teachers for Inner City Schools
  Researchers analyzed journals and essays from an elementary teacher education course, examining white prospective teachers' changing views about inner-city schools with minority children as they completed fieldwork and relevant readings. The experiences helped them question old assumptions about urban students and teaching and about the value of multicultural education.
• Discomfort Zones: Learning about Teaching with Care and Discipline in Urban Schools
  Multicultural principles, discipline, and curriculum theory should be integrated and revisited across the teacher-education program via case studies, portfolio assessment, and field experiences. Authors deplore prescriptive, procedural approaches to teaching and value ongoing faculty/student conversations, university alliances with "best" teachers and principals, and trust in children's power.
• Getting from the Outside In: Teaching Mexican Americans When You Are an "Anglo."
  A midwestern university provides cross-cultural student teaching experiences in a southwestern city with a large Mexican-American population. Features include two classroom placements, a course in multicultural education, and bicultural mentors.
• Making Connections: A Cultural Experience for Preservice Teachers in a Predominately Single-Culture Environment
  The University of Idaho (UI) faculty and Lapwai School District (Idaho) personnel engaged in a joint effort to help teacher education students to experience working with students of diverse cultures. The project consisted of two parts: a formal introduction to teaching course and a multicultural field experience.
• Perspectives on a Reconceptualized Early Field Experience in an Urban School
  Teacher education in the U.S. faces a critical dilemma: preparing white, middle-class preservice teachers to teach increasingly diverse student populations in public schools.
• Preservice Field Experience as a Multicultural Component of a Teacher Education Program
  This study examined the effect of pre-student-teaching field experience in a multicultural setting on preservice teachers' cultural sensitivity. Preservice teachers took the Cultural Awareness Inventory before and after a field experience with minority students.
• Providing Preservice Teachers with Experiences in Multicultural Classrooms
  The minority population in North Dakota is very small, less than five percent. Most of the students at Valley City State University (VCSU) are white and from middle class families; only about eight percent of the student body represent diverse cultures.
• Reflections on the Challenges, Possibilities, and Perplexities of Preparing Preservice Teachers for Culturally Diverse Classrooms
  Describes one professor's personal struggle and growth in facing the challenges and perplexities of planning and developing strategies to initiate the critical process of teaching multicultural concepts to teacher education students early in their education by providing them field experiences in urban schools. Student attitudes and attitude changes are discussed.
• The Understanding of Local Context in Teacher Education
  The teacher education program at Western Montana College helps preservice teachers understand how the local context of the rural school and its community impacts student learning and the teacher's role. Coursework and multiple field experiences help preservice teachers identify their own cultural background and give them experience in teaching culturally diverse students.
• Understanding the School Community: A Field-Based Experience in Teacher Education
  Canadian preservice teachers were sent to volunteer in an inner-city Native American elementary school in order to gain some understanding of other cultures and thus examine their own attitudes toward race and culture. The program helped students understand the role of communication in communities and in teaching.