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Chapter 17 Reflections on the shared ordeal of accreditation across institutional narratives

Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation

ISBN: 978-0-85724-099-6, eISBN: 978-0-85724-100-9

Publication date: 2 September 2010

Abstract

Accountability requirements established by state and national mandates have positioned accreditation bodies as overseers of institutional compliance and quality control of teacher preparation programs. These bodies then dictate the procedures and criteria for how preparation programs will prove their competence in the preparation of teachers who are deemed highly qualified. This process of mandated accreditation, by its very nature, is imposed as a top-down structure even when it is couched in bottom-up processes. Nearly all of the institutions indicated that they had some type of bottom-up procedures for meeting the top-down requirements of accreditation. Strategic involvement of faculty from the beginning of the process made “it personal, create[d] faculty ‘buy in’, produce[d] commitment, and thus more investment” (Ackerman and Hoover, St. Cloud State University). As Pierce and Simmerman (Utah Valley University) pointed out that both requiring and allowing faculty participation in the decision making process and development of common goals, this bottom-up tactic helped to establish joint ownership of their faculty in the process. Hutchison, Buss, Ellsworth, and Persichitte (University of Wyoming) also indicated that successful accreditation processes require faculty support and input on both the process and the decisions that are made. Indeed, they acknowledged that their decision to include all college faculty involved with teacher preparation was stressful, but central in yielding positive dividends in the process. Utilizing a bottom-up task within a top-down structure positions stakeholders as worker bees to accomplish a project that may or may not be seen to them as having personal or professional benefit – thus tensions are fostered.

Citation

Erickson, L.B. and Wentworth, N. (2010), "Chapter 17 Reflections on the shared ordeal of accreditation across institutional narratives", Erickson, L.B. and Wentworth, N. (Ed.) Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 293-317. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3687(2010)0000012020

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited