Project Title:
Serving the Underserved in Teacher Education (a re-purposed proposal of original grant proposal titled Creating an East African Teacher-Education Cohort by Jean Strait)
Project Director and Other Associated Faculty and Staff:
Barbara Bridges, Director of DLiTE Program, Bemidji State University, Contact: bbridges@chartermi.net, Telephone: (320)654-6573
Project Design:
The DLiTE program is a partially online teacher licensure program which provides course instruction and a K-8 teacher mentor for each student. This project would, in addition to the mentor, provide a one-on-one tutor for teacher education students from underserved populations. Furthermore, the teacher mentors would receive a stipend and the students would be reimbursed for transportation and lodging costs of the face-to-face meetings 3 times per year. The project was originally designed to focus on East African students but the East African community did not have enough candidates to create a separate cohort so the program was redesigned to be available to underserved candidates across the state with a target audience of Native American reservations in Northern Minnesota and charter schools in the Twin Cities.
Project Evaluation and Outcomes:
Information about the project was distributed throughout the DLiTE community to American Indian reservation and to 16 MnSCU community college partners. In addition, the project arranged a meeting with American Indian reservation leaders to recruit potential students and the Project Director visited the reservations several times and met with 4-6 candidates on each visit. In addition, other DLiTE underserved candidates were offered tutoring help using funds from this project.
The project was challenged by personnel changes and non-participation and the tragic events at Red Lake Reservation in Spring 2005. Ultimately, 17 students received tutoring support under this projects who had the following characteristics: 1 African American, 2 African Immigrants, 2 Asian Americans, 1 Middle Eastern, 1 Latino, 1 American Indian, and 9 Older than average Caucasians.
Lessons Learned, Dissemination and Sustainability
Based on interviews and reports from tutors in the project, the following lessons were learned:
• Tutoring help was needed most often in the Language Arts with only 2 students needing math help.
• Technology issues did not emerge
• Students preferred e-mail and telephone tutoring over face-to-face
• American Indian and East African students may need tuition support to encourage entrance into a teacher licensure program
• Praxis testing of entering and exiting students indicated a special need for tutoring for Underserved Populations
