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| Standard 4: Overview
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Overview of Standard 4
The College of Education places the highest priority on developing diversity in its curriculum, candidates, faculty, and field experiences. The university's 2004 Strategic Plan has as one of its goals "to promote and integrate diversity in all aspects of university life," which the College of Education plan operationalizes in these steps:
- Goal: Recruit a diverse faculty and student body.
- Objective: Involve members of departments in their departments' faculty recruitment efforts. Create a COE minority teacher education student support/resource group.
- Strategy: Compare the diversity of the departments' applicant pools to the market availability for that group before approving candidate pools. Track numbers of minority teacher education students completing certification programs.
- Accountability: Diversity Team
This section of the report will address faculty and candidate retention and recruitment, design of the curriculum, and diverse field and clinical experiences. The following items are examples of the unit's direction and efforts:
- Over the last five-year period, 154 minority teacher candidates completed Initial programs, a 100% increase from the five years prior to this review cycle.
- During the past academic year, all three new tenure track positions in the unit were filled by minority faculty.
- The unit expanded an administrative/professional position to include recruitment and retention of minority teacher candidates.
- The unit re-focused the TESOL program, instituted the Master's of Education in Counseling, and created a new emphasis in Educational Differentiation. We believe the latter program is the only one of its kind in the country.
- The unit adopted national curriculum standards for Social Foundations and revised courses to emphasize diverse perspectives about education and schooling.
- The unit revised its mission and vision statements to emphasize Social Responsibility. and utilizes it as a guideline to measure unit progress.
The unit is proud of these achievements and efforts, especially in an area of the state that has not been known for diverse perspectives. Grand Valley is located in a region of the state admired for its stability and relative prosperity. The strengths of West Michigan are in large part the legacy of the Dutch immigrant population that settled here in the late 1800's. Their work ethic and values are credited for establishing neighborhoods and communities, maintaining manageable costs of living, and generating steady economic growth beyond what almost any other area in the state has experienced.
Until recently, however, diversity has been less characteristic of the area. Sometimes this fact lends itself to affectionate caricature, other times to harsh criticism. The West Michigan landscape is changing rapidly, however, due to societal forces and expanding populations. Civic leaders and residents admit-as do many College of Education candidates themselves-that the very characteristics which served the area so well in the past may also have limited other cultural, political, and ideological perspectives. Most candidates want to grow beyond these limitations. The unit believes it is critical to provide experiences that enable them to become the best educators they can be for all students.
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