Restructure proposal for B.A. in English with Teaching Certification fails to garner votes

by Jackson Carlstrom, Staff Writer

This month, a proposal that may change the structure of the B.A. in English degree with Teaching Certification entered the voting process in academic affairs meetings.

The B.A. degree in English with Teaching Certification as it stands today has students taking the same courses as an English major. Alongside the English major classes are a few new required English and education courses intended to prepare students for English jobs in the education workforce, such as English and literature teachers. Under this new proposal, the B.A. in English with teaching certification would be overhauled and phased out, being replaced with a new B.S. in education degree with a concentration in English.

This new proposal has a long history, dating back around six years ago, when the College of Education suggested that advisors in the College of Arts and Science needed to get their students with teaching certifications out into their field work earlier and proposed a restructuring of the programs. The College of Arts and Science viewed the issue as one of lack of communication rather than the need to restructure any programs, so the proposal was tabled before eventually coming back up around two years later, this time with the rationale that there are too many hours in the teaching certification programs that need to be cut down to allow students to get more pedagogical training to prepare them for the workforce.

The new proposal just recently had its first voting session with academic affairs, facing an uphill battle with many disagreements between the College of Arts and Science and the College of Education. The proposal failed to garner enough votes to go into effect, so while the proposal as it is will not see the light of day, it could potentially come back if it is reformed and reworked.

“I would buy the rationale if our students weren’t graduating on time, if they weren’t passing the GACE teaching exams, and if they weren’t getting any jobs after graduation. But our teaching certification students are doing all those things,” Dr. Michael Moir, Associate Professor of English and chair of the Committee on Academic Affairs, said. “Sure, they may feel a little overwhelmed when they get out into the workforce right now because, frankly, everybody’s working under unusual conditions. But I’m not sure that unusual conditions right now are a good excuse for overhauling a whole program that seems to be working overall.”

It is unclear how this new proposal would have affected students currently in the program, but based on previous program structure changes, mostly new enrollees would be the students impacted. Students already enrolled in the program would probably continue as they are, with the current program slowly being phased out and the new program being introduced for new students as the students of the older program graduate. The sole effect current students would have potentially felt from this proposal is the loss of their current content advisor, as all their advising would now be done in the College of Education.

“In terms of longer-term effects, one thing that I worry about is that teaching is a profession with a really high burnout rate,” Dr. Moir said. “So, I’m concerned that students are going to be graduating with a degree that only qualifies them to be teachers. And if they decide they don’t want to be teachers at the end of the program, or if they teach for a couple of years then burn out, it’s going to be harder for them to adjust and figure out something else than what would be the case with the more flexible Arts and Sciences degree we have now.”

The English proposal was the first one in the pipeline. If a future reworked proposal is successful, then future proposals that are currently in the works include History, Math, Music, and Political Science.