In the fall of 2003 a number of factors came together to create a fertile environment for developing an alternative, pre-service teacher education model. The overarching goal of the model is to diversify a rural university’s credential program(s) by developing and offering alternative paths toward teacher certification within the constraints of a traditional, fifth-year program. The vision of the model was a collaborative effort conceived by two institutions: Humboldt State University’s (HSU) School of Education and the East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC) Elementary Charter School.

The partner institutions are located 275 miles away from each other on the northern California coast. HSU, founded in 1914 as a normal school, serves a vast, rural area and enrolls approximately 7,500 students in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. Although HSU serves a geographically-diverse region that includes a high concentration of indigenous American Indian tribal communities, the HSU student population is primarily White. In contrast, the EBCC Charter School opened its doors in 2000 in metropolitan Oakland and serves an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, urban K-5 population of 190 students.

In “diversifying” the HSU credential program we mean to increase the different types of field placements available to HSU candidates, broaden the methods of course delivery through the use of technology, and diversify the HSU credential candidate pool by attracting students whose life situations or career paths don’t align with our traditional program structure. In the pilot year (2005-06) of the model’s implementation, the HSU Elementary Education Program and EBCC launched a distance teaching internship cohort based at the Elementary Charter School in Oakland. Seven credential candidates are working full-time as interns for the K-5 school year while earning their multiple subject credential through HSU.

The required 40 units of credential coursework are structured as a combination of online distance learning and 16.5 days of intensive workshops/seminars on the HSU campus. The full-time internships do not require credential candidates to be the “teacher of record” for a particular classroom, but are designed as apprenticeships with each intern co-teaching with two mentor teachers over the school year (one upper elementary and one primary, alternating Fall/Spring semesters.)

In addition to co-teaching, interns have daily/weekly/monthly school-wide duties and responsibilities such as recess monitoring, tutoring, attendance at staff meetings, planning and implementation of school-wide events, before and after-school activities, and/or field trips. The interns are enrolled as EBCC AmeriCorps Education Award Only Members and earn a modest stipend of $18,000 (plus benefits) in exchange for 1,700 hours of service at the Charter School. Upon successful completion of the program, each intern will meet the requirements for a California 2042 Preliminary Multiple Subject Credential and receive a $4,725 post-education award.

In structuring the EBCC internships as full-time apprenticeships, our theory is that immersion in daily life at the school, without having to assume responsibilities as the “teacher of record” for the credentialing year, will broaden and deepen the learning opportunities for our student teachers. We believe that many of the most salient learning opportunities are embedded in the daily life of the school, woven throughout the formal and informal situations and relations, inside and outside the classroom.

At the root of this thinking is Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory that views learning as being less dependent on a master teacher and more an interdependent aspect of the “organization of the community of practice of which the master (or teacher) is a part” (1991, p. 94). For Lave and Wenger, the character and structure of learning is formed-reformed and renegotiated over time-by the actual practice in which the learner is engaged.

Engagement in activity and the growing involvement and familiarity with the environment, participants, tools, and artifacts of the practice offer the learner a window into the history and traditions of the work, as well as a way of discovering and establishing one’s place in the practice. Lave and Wenger argue that this participation in the community of practice “may well be a condition for the effectiveness of learning” (p. 93).

HSU and EBCC believe that the integration of the interns into the fabric of the school, from the EBCC staff orientation before school starts to the final day of school in June, allows credential candidates more time to experience and begin to make connections between teachers’ work, learning, and the organization and politics of schools and school systems.

East Bay Conservation Corps Elementary Charter School

EBCC offers a very different pre-service teaching placement than is possible in the traditional HSU elementary education credential program. The Charter School is located in a busy, urban neighborhood on the Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville borders and enrolls a student population that is 54 percent African American, 22 percent multi-ethnic, 14 percent White, 7 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian, and one percent Pacific Islander. The families and students are also linguistically diverse with home language backgrounds that include Spanish, Punjabi, Japanese, and Burmese.