Marleen Pugach

Serving the multifaceted needs of K-12 students necessitates systems that allow for sustained and intentional collaboration among teacher educators who bring their varied backgrounds and expertise to this work. Preparing general education teachers—who serve as the first line of academic support for students with and without disabilities—calls for thoughtful dialogue that begins at the teacher education level if candidates are to effectively be prepared to meet the academic needs of the diversity of learners. In this chapter, the authors explain how the four drivers of a Multidimensional Framework for Teacher Education for Inclusion can be utilized to structure teacher educator learning communities that promote teacher education for inclusion. These communities are designed to support making purposeful connections across multiple fields of scholarship and pedagogy, and in this way can foster the development of …

Revised and updated guide for prospective teachers with increased detail about the realities of teaching in a changing demographic society, post-pandemic life, societal changes brought about by technology, and the current political moment in education. Real challenges. Real choices. And very real consequences. That’s what today's classrooms are about. That's why Marleen Pugach's Because Teaching Matters, Third Edition depicts today's classrooms as they truly are, while highlighting the enormous impact teachers have on students' lives. The book is organized around five professional commitments—learning from multiple sources of knowledge, using the curriculum responsibly, practicing equity-minded teaching, meeting the needs of individual students in the context of the classroom and school community, and contributing actively to the profession. The third edition focuses on: The current landscape and challenges of supporting multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-ability classrooms across socio-economic levels, and the relationships among students, families, communities, and educators The latest academic approaches for teaching students who have disabilities, leveraging modern classroom technology, the role of legislation and funding, and updates on the current context of teaching and teacher preparation New post-pandemic societal and educational contexts Classroom and school reflections on practice, written by current teachers and teacher leaders in real classrooms and real schools, showing authentic best practices in action. Ideal for Foundations of Education and Introduction to Teaching courses designed to …

Dual certification programs are proliferating as the principal means of preparing teachers for inclusive practice. Drawing on the 1,408 university-based teacher education programs on the 2019 Title II database, we examined the institutional website discourse for every program offering prospective teachers the opportunity to earn a general and special education license. One-quarter of these websites reflected discourse conveying inclusion as a reform, transformational, and equity strategy for teaching; three-quarters limited discourse to the practical benefit of earning two licenses, absent any elaboration regarding inclusive teaching. This raises questions regarding whether these programs serve a robust reform function in orienting prospective teachers to inclusive practice or instead a transactional function that maintains the traditional binary relationship between general and special education.

Although disability is assumed to be part of the teacher education social justice landscape, its position in the context of social justice is contested and has not been informed by an analysis of the empirical record. To address this gap, we examined 25 years of research on social justice in teacher education, focusing on how disability is presented in relationship to other social markers of identity. Disability is only modestly visible within this literature; when included, it is typically treated as an isolated marker of identity, absent considerations of intersectionality. Overcoming this marginalization of disability requires new, robust cross-faculty alliances in conceptualizing research on social justice in teacher education; adopting discursive practices that complicate disability in terms of its intersectional, reciprocal relationship with the full range of social markers of identity; and intersectionality-driven instruction connecting …

The emergence of collaboration as a viable form of professional interaction in schools signifies a fundamental change in the way the teaching profession is conceptualized. Placing deliberate decisions about curriculum at the center of collaboration redefines the goals of the joint enterprise. In terms of curriculum, the decisions this group of professionals made retained Tyrone's connection with real books and real stories rather than limiting his literacy experiences to skill practice alone as the means of supporting his literacy growth. Some schools that practice collaboration do so with the idea that as long as specialists and general education teachers work in the same room, the solution to the problem of how to deliver special services to children has been addressed adequately.

Dual certification refers to a teaching license both for general primary and/or secondary education and special needs education simultaneously. This term is unique to the United States, where licensure policy has traditionally offered options for teacher candidates to earn an initial stand-alone license in either general or special needs education, and contrasts with initial teacher education policy patterns outside the United States, where teachers are not typically permitted to earn an initial license for special needs education alone. Various forms of dual certification have existed in the United States for many decades, but until recently they were not the norm. Contemporary teacher educators and policymakers in the United States have adopted and encouraged dual certification as a way of supporting the preparation of teachers for effective inclusive teaching. As a result, dual certification is viewed as a means of …

Our intergenerational authorial team takes up a central—and unresolved—issue within teacher education for inclusion, namely, the role of curriculum in reconceptualizing pre-service programs. We specifically review literature and policy on how special education teacher educators have approached conceptions of curriculum, using this past as prologue to argue that the teacher education curriculum requires a community of educators constructing a balance between a shared equity agenda to support the preparation of all teachers for inclusion, and the simultaneous need to prepare experts who can effectively share and utilize expertise that addresses the specific learning needs of marginalized learners, including those with disabilities. Unless curriculum is addressed comprehensively, deep transformation will be difficult to achieve, and role clarity for prospective special education teachers is likely to remain unclear …