SPECIAL EDUCATION

Historical Look at Special Education

Historical Look at Special Education

Introduction

The history of special education is plagued with the longstanding problem of an inadequate supply of special educators. This problem has intensified in the current high-accountability atmosphere associated with public schooling. Schools are required to hire highly qualified teachers, but high turnover and difficult recruitment create a quandary—how to quickly provide quality instruction to cohorts of teacher credential candidates. To add to the problem, school districts must hire unqualified people to fill open positions every year. The new hires must enroll in special education teacher credential programs while teaching full time.

Hiring unqualified teachers creates a unique set of socialization problems for universities who accept these credential candidates. Socialization, for the purpose of this paper, is defined as “the process by which people selectively acquire the values and attitudes, the interests, skills and knowledge—in short the culture—current in groups to which they are or seek to become a member” (Merton, Reader, & Kendall, 1957). University programs seek to socialize new credential candidates into the norms and values of the program.

Defining elements of socialization include shared professional values, a specific technical language and a shared vocabulary and preference for particular pedagogic practices. Credential programs also socialize candidates for the role of 'teacher'—a role that has specific expectations and relationships with others in an educational setting. Traditional credential programs expect difficulty in helping credential candidates learn to teach differently from how they were taught.

Programs also expect candidates to struggle with norms and values learned at the university when they enter the reality of teaching in schools. What happens though, when programs are forced to contend with credential candidates who come to them with prior knowledge and workplace knowledge already in place? Do university teacher education programs have any hope of socializing credential candidates into the role of 'teacher' in the way programs anticipate?

This paper is an attempt to sort out a variation of teacher socialization, one that reworks the chronology of socializing forces. Traditionally, special education credential programs in the USA relied on students who enter teacher education with their own experiences as students, but programs did not have to contend with their experiences as teachers as well. Credential programs could at least try to socialize candidates to the values, skill and knowledge about what it means to be a teacher before people actually became teachers.

Conceptual framework

This paper proposes an alternative model of special education teacher education socialization. The credential candidates in this study not only have preexisting beliefs developed from their own schooling experiences as students, but also have beliefs that have been further clarified, supported, and challenged through experiences as teachers prior to entering a teacher education program. Those beliefs continue to be clarified, supported and challenged during the program, which complicates existing theories on organizational socialization.

In order to theorize about the possibilities of an alternative path to workplace socialization, we must understand (1) workplace socialization, (2) teacher education in the context of socialization into teaching and (3) the particularities of ...