Canadian Association of Teacher Education (CATE) Working Conference on Student Field Experiences - Winnipeg, Manitoba - November 2009

Hmnn . . . looks like I forgot to add a blog posting about the Canadian Association of Teacher Education's (CATE) Working Conference on field experiences for pre-service teacher education programs. This conference was hosted by the University of Manitoba and was held at a hotel in Winnipeg in November, 2009. Dr. Irene Naested, Dr. Jodi Nickel, and myself represented Mount Royal University at the conference. I must admit that I was initially skeptical about the personal value of this working conference as we still have not received the necessary funding ($$$) to proceed with our B.Ed. program at MRU. But . . . the conversations with Education faculty members from across Canada who are deeply engaged in developing, delivering and evaluating field experiences for pre-service teacher education students provided me with some VERY valuable insights that I hope that I'll be able to one day utilize for our own program.

I was the recorder for my workshop roundtable group - so I've actually got a pretty good set of notes from the conference. Some of the key conference "take-aways" that my group identified included:

• An increased awareness of diversity of field experiences and teacher education programs across Canada
• The importance of sharing what we learned with our colleagues in our home Faculties of Education
• Highlighting the importance of “teacher education” research – specifically field supervision as research – increase status
• An awareness of language and tensions around field experiences
• A recommendation that field experience supervision should be listed under research – rather than service

Next steps for the group include:

• Focus of final paper should be on field experiences
• 4000 word length for the papers
• Consider and discuss the assumptions you make in the design of your field experience in your program
• Suggest program changes or conceptualization of program – consider or discuss what would count as “evidence” for change in your program (research agenda)
• Single-blind peer review (authors don't know who reviewed the papers) – authors of papers review two other papers – focus on improving the quality of the paper – want to create a document that will be useful to our colleagues in teacher education programs
• Deadline for publication for CSSE in May 2010 – submit final version of paper by Dec 31st