EMU | COE NCATE 2003 Standard 4.D Diverse Students in P-12 Schools

Standard 4.D
Experiences Working with Diverse Students in P-12 Schools

Target: Extensive and substantive field experiences and clinical practices are designed to encourage candidates to interact with exceptional students and students from different ethnic, racial, gender, socioeconomic, language, and religious groups. The experiences help candidates confront issues of diversity that affect teaching and student learning and develop strategies for improving student learning and candidates' effectiveness as teachers.

FETE. Our pre-student teaching field experience courses, called FETE (Field Experiences in Teacher Education) include a substantial diversity experience. FETE 201, which is required for most initial teacher preparation candidates, is structured such that it occurs in a multicultural setting. FETE 401/FETE 402 also occurs in a diverse setting. A diverse setting is recommended for FETE 301/FETE 302, which is taken by most initial teacher preparation candidates. According to materials about the FETE program (see Exhibit 3.11), a "diverse setting" is a school location "in which at least 30% of the pupils attending are language, ethnically, culturally, or socioeconomically diverse. Title I schools are diverse."

Student Teaching. Most student teaching placements occur in a geographical area that approximates (excluding Macomb County, but including part of Genesee County, for example) the seven-county area included in the SEMCOG studies. See Exhibit 4.8 for representative demographic statistics. Schools in this geographical area range from moderate to extensive diversity.

In accomplishing field placements in either FETE or student teaching, candidates can go to the state's sophisticated data base for demographic information. Click here to access this data base, operated by Standard and Poor's. A selection of, say, "Washtenaw County" and "Ypsilanti," will take the reader to local district-wide information about total enrollment, per cent economically disadvantaged, per cent special education, per cent limited English proficient, per cent of single parent households, per cent of adults with at least a bachelor's degree, and median household income. A click on "schools in this district" will take the reader to a list of school buildings in the selected district and, for each, the per cent economically disadvantaged (among other pieces of information).

Advanced program internships and other field experiences. Most advanced program field experiences also occur in the seven-county Southeast Michigan area. As a result, they, too, occur in a culturally diverse setting.

In schools throughout Southeast Michigan, candidates will encounter the usual distribution of students with disabilities. The religious backgrounds of the students will reflect the rich religious diversity of Southeast Michigan, including (in some locales) substantial numbers of families with non-Christian religious backgrounds. The socioeconomic make-up of Southeastern Michigan has enormous variability from community to community, as may be seen in both the SEMCOGS (Exhibit 4.8) and Standard and Poor's data sets. As may be seen in the Standard and Poor's data sets, there are locales with large numbers of students for whom English is not the native language (and the number of languages involved is large). The communities in which there are large numbers of students with limited English proficiency also tend to be communities with substantial ethnic, national, and (often) religious diversity as well.

EMU professional education preparation programs, especially at the initial level, incorporate substantial instruction about diversity and have high expectations of candidates in terms of ability to work with a diverse population. See Exhibit 4.1 for information about the curriculum components that address diversity issues, Exhibit 4.2 for expected proficiencies related to diversity, Exhibit 4.3 for assessments of proficiencies related to diversity, Exhibit 4.4 for outcomes of assessments related to diversity, Exhibit 4.5 for information related to the way we facilitate experiences with diverse students, Exhibit 4.6 for information related to the ways that we facilitate experiences with diverse faculty members, and Exhibit 4.7 for information related to diversity in field experiences.