Lynnette Erickson and Nancy Wentworth, of the Department of Teacher Education have published a book that has been used as a resource for teacher education programs. Erickson and Wentworth are editors and authors of three chapters of the book, Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation, and wrote the concluding chapter. The book, an exploration of faculty viewpoints and experiences concerning the accreditation process at various universities, has had continued success since its publication in 2010.

Tensions addresses the challenges associated with meeting national accreditation requirements, which include designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions in teacher preparation. Accreditation agencies certify teacher education programs based on their ability to demonstrate that they meet certain standards considered necessary to ensure that preservice teachers are learning what they need to know to become competent and caring teachers.

While the book has sold 400 copies in print, the ebook has been downloaded over an impressive 8,000 times. Those numbers do not include the copies sold through booksellers other than publishers.

That success of this type of book with such a narrow audience warranted the publisher, Emerald Books, to publish their first paperback edition in their education series in September of this year. That accomplishment is magnified by the subject matter of the book itself. “The kinds of people that would buy this book are not your everyday teacher educators; it would be someone who is dealing with teacher preparation program accreditation,” Erickson said. “Given that, there is a very finite market for who is interested in purchasing this book.”

The book discusses how accreditation impacts teacher preparation programs and what others can learn from the experiences

described in the narratives in the book. “There has been a whole new wave of changes [in teacher preparation program accreditation] just in the last year,” Erickson said. “Changes are on-going. That is the one thing you can depend on, that accreditation is not a stagnant process.” This aspect of accreditation

contributes to the tensions discussed in the book.

Erickson and Wentworth’s work has received recognitions on the publisher’s level. Their chapter titled, “Reflections on the Shared Ordeal of Accreditation Across Institutional Narratives,” was awarded the Outstanding Author Contribution Award for the series Advances in Research on Teaching for the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence in 2011. This chapter synthesizes the most common issues and successes brought up by administrators and faculty from other universities regarding accreditation. Its success is evidence of the importance of a book that could influence the accreditation process for teacher education programs across the nation.

September 24, 2012