The main idea presented in this paper is that successful adoptions of educational technology are usually a consequence of the decisions made by a teacher about her critical competitors. We begin with a definition of "critical competitors" and likely interactions between the humans and their newest technologies. My goal in writing a paper with such a focus is that other educators will choose to examine some of the controversial perspectives and debates associated with using technology in educational settings.

Critical Competitors

The term "critical competitor" first emerged in Scriven's 1981 work on product evaluation (Scriven, 1981). Scriven used "critical competitor" to mean a creative alternative which adds value and provides comparable or even better results. For example, Scriven recommended that during 1970's print-based instruction was still a viable critical competitor to CAI. Ragsdale (1988) extended Scriven's usage to include equally agreeable alternatives to computers in all curricular areas, including Phys Ed. In Math Education for example, peer tutoring was seen as a critical competitor of CAI. Around this time, critical competitor adopted an axiological, more context-dependent meaning: 1.) that something is gained and something lost; 2.) that student literacy is likely to suffer over the short-term; 3.) that student clicking with a mouse will replace the requirement to remember anything; 4.) that typing may replace social interaction; and, 5.) that their student assignments will tend to reflect a group mandate. Then in 1990, Geisert and Futrell introduced four "paradigms of computer use" (i.e., task-defined, timed, milestone and open), and four possible "users-per-station" (i.e., one, small groups or whole class). In this way, critical competitors were seen as important decisions about competing needs among students, facilities and instructional intent. Knowing our critical competitors, therefore, means knowing how to prioritize our computing requirements based on factors under our control.

Motor Learning

A critical competitor for many novice users of educational technology is the time it takes to complete a task with a keyboard, mouse, scanner or other input device. Since the 1950’s in fact, completion time has been a critical competitor to student aptitude, motivation, software attributes, teaching method, and other factors in educational technology; that is, time required to access a site, time required to pull down a menu, and required time to type a paragraph. The need for a more accurate prediction model of movement-time in computer input tasks has been stronger than it has been for the past thirty years. Bit mapped displays and office and desktop metaphors have replaced nested menus and command lines. Cursor and function keys have been largely replaced by computer mice and pull-down menus. Arguably, the best understood measure of task difficulty as it applies to the time required to complete a task is Fitts’ Law (Fitts, 1954). Psychomotor studies have shown high correlations between Fitts’s measure of task difficulty and the time required to complete a task (MacKenzie, 1991). In comparing four devices for selecting text, Fitts law was found to provide good movement-time prediction for a mouse and joystick. In a Keystroke-Level Model for predicting user performance times, Fitts law was cited as an appropriate tool for predicting pointing time (Card, Moran & Newell, 1980). In weighing the cognitive benefits of movement time and task difficulty then, should one paraphrase text by keyboarding-in the text, scan with a hand scanner, or use a mouse to "block and paste" from someone else’s web page? The correct response to this question can now be expected to improve efficiency of using computer software and online services.

Another critical competitor for many novice users of educational technology is the growing requirement for learners' to shift their attention between detailed information presented visually and gist information presented in auditory prompts (Mann, 1995c; Mann, 1997c). We know that gist is best assimilated by listening, and detail through reading; gist and detail may be considered to be critical competitors of one another in educational technology (Mann, 1995b; Mann, 1997b). In this way, sound design is a parsimonious approach to retain our multitasking efficiency while reducing the cognitive load associated with using computer software or online services. Similarly, auditory design as well as visual design should be considered critical competitors in educational technology.

Teacher Competencies

When educators begin to feel informed enough to get beyond the intimidation of technology within the educational system in which they work, they tend ask someone, "What do I need to know?". At this moment, the process of understanding one’s critical competitors begins. And a wise response should be, "know something about each of the thirteen ‘Technology Foundation Standards For All Teachers’ established by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)" (Thomas, 1993). These are:
 

• Demonstrate an ability to operate a computer system to successfully utilize software.
• Evaluate and use computers and related technologies to support the instructional process.
• Apply current instructional principles, research and appropriate practices to the use of computers and related technologies.
• Explore, evaluate and use technology-based materials, including applications, educational software and associated documentation.
• Demonstrate knowledge of uses of computers for problem solving, data collection, information management, communications, presentations, and decision making.
• Design and develop student learning activities that integrate computing for a variety of student grouping strategies and for diverse student populations.
• Evaluate and select and integrate technology-based instruction in the curriculum of one’s subject areas and or grade levels.
• Demonstrate knowledge of uses of multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications to support instruction.
• Demonstrate skill in using productivity tools for professional use, including word processing, database, spreadsheet and print graphic utilities.
• Demonstrate knowledge of equity, ethical, legal and human issues of computer use as they relate to society and model appropriate behaviours.
• Identify resources for staying current is applications of computing and related technologies in education.
• Utilize computer-based technologies to access information to enhance personal and professional productivity.
• Apply computers and related technologies to facilitate roles of the learner and the educator.

That said, the assimilation process requires diligence with the technology (Poole, 1997). And at the institutional level, the implementation of the assimilation process has been identified as an important catalyst for educational change. There have been three distinct approaches to assimilating technology into educational institutions: "transformationalism", "collaborationism" and "incrementalism". See Mann (1994) for an explanation of each of these perspectives. The preferred position advanced in this paper is incrementalism. Incrementalism is consistent with the Japanese management practice of kaizen, meaning "slow, never-ending improvement in all aspects of life" that focuses on quality control. Continuous improvement differs from the classical Western approach to improvement principally in that it relies on an investment in people, not on equipment. Incrementalists propose that inservice courses in educational computing be provided to assist instructors in how to implement computers in the instructional process. Preparing instructors to cope with and use computers in the classroom and laboratory is considered to be a complex task, continually buffeted by technological advances and constrained by resources. "Unless instructors become advocates of the change, the innovations are implemented pro-forma, if at all".

At most levels of the educational system, successful changes to educational computing with a minimum of discomfort requires policy-makers' attention to certain factors. The first factor affecting the successful adoption of the distributed learning environment is the support and leadership exhibited by the administration. Many educational computing facilities, however, are still planned and managed by non computing administrators. "It is only when faculty see chief administrators using technology do they feel the need to learn it themselves". A second factor affecting the successful adoption the distributed learning environment is an incremental adjustment plan-of-action. This type of planning should reflect the current total quality management trend in business which advocates several small-steps' over the complete replacement' approach. The probability of successful implementation increases when technology plans are tied to the goals of the institution. Carnegie Mellon University has implemented a major inquiry called "The AAAA Initiative" which is expected to produce recommendations in the next few months. The A's ask, "What makes it routinely possible for anyone, to send or receive anything electronically from or to anyplace at anytime?".

In most educational settings, it seems that there is still a range of experience and expertise in educators’ knowledge and skills with technology. From the limited research (Mann, 1994; Schrum & Berenfeld, 1997), it appears that incremental implementations should logically occur in three stages.
 

• Stage One: From Extracurricular to Curricular Enhancement. At this stage, educators do not redesign their curricula or teaching practices to enhance courses with web-based activity. The use of the Internet and web-based material is often introduced as extracurricular activity, though preferably still within I.S.T.E. Standards. After an exploratory period, these activities are then introduced into specific courses.

• Stage Two: From Curricular Enhancement to CMC Modules. Educators in most educational institutions still lack the training, experience, or confidence to abandon their conventional teaching practices in favour of new and unfamiliar ones. In most educational settings, this lag is apparent throughout the entire educational subculture (See Mann, 1994). Nevertheless, some educators who have successfully augmented their curricula with the Internet and web-based activities tend to approach the next stage of technology integration by inserting specially-designed web-based modules into traditional courses; again, preferably within I.S.T.E. Standards.

• Stage Three: Telecommunication Fully Integrated Into Curricula. At this stage, integrating the Internet and other computer-based activities into daily instruction is more challenging than merely downloading files or sending email. Full integration of technology using I.S.T.E. guidelines eventually requires a redefinition of pedagogical goals, restructuring of curricular offerings, provision for instructor training and support material, and sufficient online tools for the collection of student data.

• be more interactive with each other than when engaged in other media based courses
• be using the provisions for greater open-ended intellectual pursuits
• have greater access to specialized visual and auditory capabilities
• access more diverse information sources often located at very remote locations
• engage in greater partnering, learning from other users, use of a broader range of colleagues
• be more attentive, with fascination, to interesting collections of resources and tools
• have greater access to training material at a time that is convenient and away from school or home and
• more research oriented and using a greater number of general query strategies.

• their individual proficiency with using the Internet as a system
• pitfalls in getting started with the basics such as access to accounts
• inconsistencies such as slow speed and inconvenient access times
• the amount of personal skill to be intuitive and use information more aggressively when seeking solutions to problems
• relations that would be designated as assisting but more often appear to be indifferent and
• the recurring cost, a view not fully understood.

• The Canadian Technology Network, CTN

• Canada Human Resources Development provides a searchable database for training who would deliver information in course detail

• The Western Economic Diversion site leads to examples of training provisions in Western Canada

• Web Training Solutions provides PCWeek review of on-line training

• Evaluation Strategy (http://www8.zdnet.com/pcweek/reviews/ibt.html)

• Inside Training Technology a trainer's magazine that offers numerous tips

• Newfoundland Council of Higher Education

• Human resource development programs available from Human Development Canada

• The University of Chicago site that provides a large collection of internet tools (http://www.uchicago.edu/inet/about.html)

• TCM Hotlinks, a human relations site that provides HR-related internet resources sorted alphabetically.

• American Society for Training Development
• ASTD Conference
• Internet training journal that reports on on-line course experience

• general policy papers
• comparative examples of training provisions
• samples of student work
• views of colleagues from other nations
• means to exchange their individual perspectives
• evidence that training standards are under constant review
• access to standardized assessment procedures
• models that better describe how the internet can be used to augment traditional practices.

• Site provides Canadian Education Links Nova Scotia

• Ontario site for adults with physical disabilities
• New Brunswick training and support services for individuals with disabilities
• Newfoundland and Labrador Using technology to help individual with disabilities

A sign over a door in the Arts and Administration Building at Memorial University of Newfoundland announces the Department of English Language and Literature. There is a tacit understanding about both the nature of courses and the structure of debates that take place within the department. Literature, in any of its many contested forms, provides the backbone for departmental calendar entries; the English language, its structures and nuances, round out the department's academic parameters. Baccalaureate programs are devised based upon this traditional liberal understanding of the discipline. Until very recently in Atlantic Canada, this constructed definition of English is what high school students, parents, school officials, and teachers of English understood to be the boundaries of the discipline.

Starting in the early 1990s, a significant change began to take place in how secondary English language arts curricula were constructed and taught. Classroom teachers began to be guided by theories of language and literacy that were linked to the social sciences and to social learning in particular. University notions of English, that is as a discrete subject, no longer guided the building of Atlantic Canada's secondary school English programs. Efforts to dovetail objectives with tertiary English department requirements and regulations were severed and new links forged with computer technology, genre, and media studies. This silent coup left new and veteran secondary teachers of English scurrying to prepared materials that supported the objectives of the new curriculum.

The teaching of English as a discipline, when compared to history, mathematics, religion, and some of the sciences, is relatively new. Applebee (1974) traces the subject's traditions back about 130 years. In the United States, English (the study of literatures and language) evolved out if the 1873-74 Harvard University entrance examinations. States Applebee, students were to write a composition on

one of the following works: Shakespeare?s Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Merchant of Venice; Goldsmith?s Vicar of Wakefield; Scott?s Ivanhoe, and Lay of the Last Minstrel. This requirement institutionalized the study of standard authors and set in motion a process which eventually forced English to consolidate its position within the schools (p. 30).

The writing of university set entrance examinations structured the content and form of the discipline within secondary preparatory schools and imposed upon those involved in the discipline a clearly understood purpose for its continued study.

The teaching of English in Britain evolved from different roots. The genesis of English studies began in various colonies as a form of indoctrination and subjugation. Morgan (1990) documents that English in Ontario used language practices at the level of theory to set language and literature cultural policy for the province. Yeoman (1990) reports that the Department of English at the University of Nigeria is being closed because of its links to past colonial oppression. The British literary canon and the teaching of written and spoken English worked its way back to the schools and universities of the British Isles around the middle of the 1800s. The setting of Oxbridge entrance examinations required grammar and public schools to teach a literary canon and appropriate composition skills to allow students to pass examinations and gain entrance to various tertiary institutions.

This traditional understanding of what is at the core of an English program lives on in the universities of Atlantic Canada. Regional electronic university calendars invariably describe English courses as either the study of various European, Irish, or North American literatures, or the study of composition and/or language. An analysis of the English degree requirements in the calendars of the University of New Brunswick, the University of Prince Edward Island, Acadia University, and Memorial University of Newfoundland reveals the preparation future teachers of English acquire as they work toward graduation. In general, students are required to complete between twelve (MUN) and fifteen (UNB) courses chosen from various periods in the history of the western literally canon. All four universities require a course in Shakespeare. UPEI requires a course in Old or Middle English while others require a course chosen from amongst the literature of the 15th, 16th, or 17th centuries. Two universities, UNB and MUN, require a course in English language and rhetoric. Acadia requires students to select two courses from amongst 20th century British, American, or Canadian literature. UPEI requires either an American or a Canadian literature course while UNB and MUN have no requirement in these areas. On average, half of a student's program is made up of electives. Typically, English majors have a diverse collection of courses and might have built a program that shares little with other matriculating students. Striking is the lack of a degree requirement in any Canadian or Atlantic literatures. Thus, the only course that future teachers of English can be said to have in common is a course in Shakespeare. No negative judgment is intended or leveled at this approach to the study of English language and literature. Indeed, a cursory examination of English programs in the universities of western and central Canada (Universities of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Western Ontario, and Brandon University) indicates the above description to be quite representative of degree requirements. What is consistent within English degrees is the structure of the literary theory and text analysis that students experience. Since the 1970s different literary theories have been added to New criticism. Structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and constructionist theories of text analysis are the tools English majors now use to examine the canon.

University conceptions of English and hence literacy, what Myers (1994) calls decoding/analytic literacy, is typically marked by generic concepts delivered to passive learners through textbooks or anthologies. In turn, students studied the material individually and reproduced it by demonstrating their understanding through pencil and paper tests, analytical papers, or tutorials. The century long dovetailing of university and secondary school conceptions of English studies, and associated notions of literacy, lasted until the 1980s. In this decade teachers of secondary English started to use other theories to examine texts with their students and to accept reader response and other forms for students to demonstrate the depth of their textual engagements.

This new way of teaching and learning led decoding/analytic literacy to give ground to transactional/critical forms of literacy and was spurred on by such scholars as Rosenblatt (1978), Iser (1980), Crossman (1982), and Sholes (1985). Individual learning succumbed to collaborative learning in schools, preconstructed learning outcomes gave way to student constructed meaning, the quest for the ultimate literary criticism gave ground to confirming and deconstructing personal and aesthetic readings of texts. The 1980s also began to see the inclusion and use of a variety of nonprint texts (music, film, television, photojournalism, etc.) in the secondary English classroom. Viewing was added in numerous constituencies to the discipline?s traditional secondary school strands of reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

The 1990s have seen the inclusion of representing (multimedia presentations, web pages, 3-D constructions, models, etc.) within the parameters of secondary English language arts. Representing has brought the discipline's core strands to six. More recently, a seventh strand has appeared. Information manipulation through computer connections is appearing in various revised English language arts documents (see for example the high school documents of the Western Canadian Protocol-Common Curriculum Framework and the Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation).

Thus alongside traditional liberal university English department conceptions of what it means to be literate, have been added visual, media, electronic and information literacies. Canadian secondary school students are now expected to ?read? not only books, but also the world and to evaluate and respond to an ever expanding variety of texts. These texts appear in a cacophony of Englishes that are marked by variances in register, accent, subcultural style, origin, and technical nuances. Kalantzis and Cope (1997) and the New London Group coined the word 'Multiliteracies' to explain the negotiations students engage in as they navigate through interconnected community, entertainment, and working lives. While secondary students are still expected to respond to their readings in traditional ways, new curricula objectives would have them responding to texts in an infinite number of constructed multimodal forms.

The new parameters of English language arts in Atlantic Canada's secondary schools are marked by the four traditional core strands from an earlier time and three additional strands. It is important to understand that for instructional time purposes listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, representing, and technological information manipulation are all treated as equals in the curriculum. While the core strands of the discipline have been increased by 75%, what is to be read has greatly expanded into media and computer accessed information and texts. By including viewing and representing strands, the ways students of English are expected to demonstrate their understanding of texts has experientially increased. In this reconstruction of the discipline, various literatures are having to share space with, and surrender ground to, what the Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation (1997) documents call 'communications'. Indeed, the fictive world of literature is no longer central to senior secondary English education. The new vision challenges tacit academic conceptions of the workings of the discipline. It is a conception that has broken sharply away from the university's notions of what it means to study English by including postmodern, commercial, entertainment, technotainment, and networked discourses. This new vision relies greatly on technology to both find and create the texts used in instruction. It is a vision that will force teachers in Atlantic Canada to notice the fracturing of English as a clearly delineated subject.

Clearly, what is emerging is a new conception of English that is much broader, more inclusive of a variety of texts, and radically different from past or university conceptions of the discipline. With its goal of balancing more traditional works with more contemporary ones, including works which bring new or previously neglected voices into the classroom, and its call for alternative ways of knowing and being, a secondary curriculum emerges that is broad in both scope and vision. How university English departments adjust to the English education that secondary students have experienced remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the difficulties of teaching traditional English programs is becoming apparent at the end of the century. Goodwyn, Adams and Clarke (1997) use the following quotation from a British teacher with eight years' experience to demonstrate both the cultural forces at play and the difficulties of teaching traditional book-based English as media and technologies impact classroom discourse:

The growing gap beween tertiary and secondary conceptions of English is not a minor one. Peel and Hargreaves (1995) found in their interviews with experienced teachers of English in Australia, England, and the United States that many of them ?believed the gulf between secondary and high education to be even greater than the gulf between primary and secondary" (p. 41). This new vision brings into question the appropriate prerequisites new teachers of English should have if they are to successfully teach the various parts of the new regional English curriculum. A minor in cultural, media, and/or computer studies could become a requisite for entry into Atlantic faculties of education.

English methods professors who are aware of changing curricula and the gradual change in secondary constructions of English may understand the work English departments are doing but they do not necessarily vision English the way their colleagues do in the Arts faculty. Dillworth and McCracken's (1997), in a survey of United States English and English education professors, state that many students arrive at college to "quickly discover major differences in outlook among their English and English education professors, differences not only about what is significant in the discipline but also about the fundamental procedures for constructing significance" (p. 14). For Atlantic Canadian students who enter consecutive degree programs it is key for them to be able to spot and understand the divergence of the two discourses and understand how new regional curriculum documents conceptualize English education.

In this decade, English language arts, probably more than any other school subject, is being buffeted by a variety of forces that are questioning received culture and linguistic forms. Some English language arts educators are beginning to ask who will be drawn to major in English and subsequently go on to become its teachers? There is a call from poets and authors to maintain the distinctiveness, the separateness of English from other disciplines; to not lose sight of the textual experiences first found with poems and in books. A widening gaps exist between those who feel English is about a liberating aesthetic engagement with fictive texts, those who feel it is about ideas and patterns of literacy and reading, and those who see it incorporating the digitalized worlds of cyberspace.

Until tertiary and secondary constructions of English come more into line it is important that English methods professors and their students understand the gap between the two worlds and explain the different constructions of those worlds. Dillworth and McCracken (1997) use the following quotation from an English education student as an exemplar of the various competing ideologies an English education student faces in trying to develop a personal philosophy toward English education and bridge the gaps between worlds:

This paper reports on the perceptions of consultants in consulting situations in less industrialized countries (LICs). Twenty-one consultants in the United States and ten consultants in Canada were interviewed in depth. They were asked to describe their experiences and give vignettes pertaining to periods of their consultations overseas and also to respond to a set of specific questions. Most of the Americans had worked in Southeast Asia in the area of public health and medicine, while the Canadians had experience working in Africa, Latin America and Europe in various areas. The responses of these consultants provide us with rich facts and insights into the process of consulting and knowledge of the variables in the consulting situation which may prove useful to project managers in both regions of the world.

Our concern with consulting and project management stems from our understanding of the development process in LICs and from our awareness of the fact that multinational teams engage in Research and Development projects. These teams investigate and resolve problems of local, regional and international concerns in growing numbers every year. We maintain that these two activities - investigating and attempting to find solutions to pressing problems - are facts in global life today. The movement of consultants, advisors, and experts across cultures and nations has increased in recent years and perhaps will continue to increase at a steady rate, although, perhaps, the economic downturn will likely be an adverse factor, at least for 1998-99.

Further we note that project managers do not operate in isolation; their interaction with others is embedded in the contexts of international R and D organizations whose activities, in turn, reflect the totality of international relations at a particular time. This is also the case with consultants and the consulting organizations. Factors such as who seeks consultation, from whom, when, under what conditions, and with what purposes, objectives and goals give specific character to a particular consulting situation. Thus both consultants and project managers interact with others in a specific social situation while performing their respective roles. It is clear to us that the definition of the social situation is often problematic, and that roles of consultants and project managers would be likewise problematic. Further we observe that consultants' interaction with others differs in many ways from the interaction which the project managers experience. One of the differences is that consultants are involved in performing narrower and specialized roles, whereas the project managers' responsibilities are much broader and comprehensive in scope. Therefore, it is our contention that insights and facts provided by consultants can be meaningfully utilized by project managers at various levels of their operations. One can fully appreciate the point being made here by familiarizing oneself with some of the basic ideas underlying symbolic interactionist approach to human behavior or conduct.

Briefly, the symbolic interactionist approach emphasizes the fact that human conduct or behavior is a product of human interaction which always takes place in a social situation. Human beings, through their own acts and interactions with others, either maintain or change the structure of social situations in which they find themselves performing several tasks. Each individual self enters into social situations with certain forms of awareness or social consciousness. The others, too, enter in the situations with their own respective forms of social awareness or consciousness. This implies that human interaction is always purposeful and qualitatively different from interaction among animals. In human beings, social act or behavior is an outcome of complex processes of perceiving, thinking, articulating, interpreting, and forming lines of actions in mind. This means that before and while human beings act they take into account the actions of others in the social situations. Thus, human behavior is not merely a function of those individual psychological qualities which individuals bring into interaction, but function of the interaction itself. Blumer has rightly argued that many social scientists have failed to recognize the significance of interaction by treating it as "a mere forum through which sociological or psychological determinants" result in certain behavior. As opposed to this, he argues that interaction "forms human conduct, instead of being merely a means or a setting for the expression or release of human conduct." And human conduct cannot be comprehended apart from the actual contexts in which it occurs. What interests us here most is the fact that what individuals actually do (in this case the consultants and project managers) in social situations (e.g. consulting or project management situations) and how they do what they do are crucial factors in comprehending human behavior and its social consequence.

Several methods are suggested by scholars to study how people carry out their activities in various social situations. A method suggested by Lofland includes the following four steps:
 

1. Getting close-up to people actually acting some place in the real world and developing intimate familiarity (with them and their situation),

2. Focusing on and delineating the prime or basic situation the scrutinized people (i.e., those people who are actually acting) are dealing with or confronting,

3. Focusing on and delineating the interactional strategies, tactics, and so on, by means of which scrutinized people (in our case consultants and project managers) are dealing with the situation (e.g., consulting) confronted,

4. Assembling and analyzing an abundance of qualitative episodes into disciplined abstractions about the situation and strategies delineated.

If we decide to follow the above method we will have to be physically present with consultants in their consulting situations in order to comprehend how consultants in various cross-cultural and international situations interact with others, evolve new behaviors, and carry out their roles. Obviously, this style of participation-observation research is time consuming and expensive. Surely, this kind of qualitative research will enhance our understanding of consulting process. However, given the financial and time constraints all we could do is to try "getting close up to people..." who have actually acted somewhere in the course of their career. In our case these people are, as mentioned earlier, thirty-one consultants who were interviewed in depth in an informal setting.
 

The total number of consultants interviewed was thirty-one. Out of this twenty-one were based in an American University and ten were working in a Canadian University. There was only one female in the Canadian sample while there were four females in the American sample. All of them except three females in the American University have an M.D. or Ph.D. in their respective fields. The age range of these consultants was between thirty-nine and seventy years. Most of them were in their late forties. Either by birth or naturalization the nationality of twenty-one consultants in America was American. Similarly the nationality of consultants in the Canadian University was Canadian. The first language of all the consultants was English except for four. A number of them were bilingual or multi-lingual. Most of them were Christian. Only six were of Asian extraction; the rest were White. The consultants in the American sample had spent relatively more years overseas in a cross-cultural situation than the consultants in the Canadian sample. In the American case the range was three to fifteen years while in the Canadian situation the range was one to three years. Only two consultants in the Canadian case had more than fifteen years of experience working in a cross-cultural situation. All of the consultants had secured positions at their respective universities and had published number of articles and reports.
 

All thirty-one consultants were asked to describe their experiences and give vignettes pertaining to periods of their consultation overseas (i.e., what do you think about the consulting situation?). In addition, ten consultants in the Canadian university were asked fifteen more questions (see Appendix A).

The remainder of this paper is concerned with analyzing, classifying, describing the experiences of these consultants, and formulating "working hypotheses" or generalizations which we hope will help project managers (1) in identifying and contracting appropriate consultants, (2) in evaluating their roles in a given situation, (3) in designing needed educational and training programs for consultants, and finally (4) in making project management more effective.

Responses to the open-ended question (What do you think about the consulting situation or what is your perspective of the consulting situation? Please describe your experiences and give vignettes as consultant) are classified into two broad categories:
 

A. Conditions under which consulting services are requested.

B. Problems that are encountered in delivering consulting services.
 

The analysis of the data informs us that consultations occur under three general conditions. The first condition is that of rapid socio-economic changes at the international level. Forces of change require fundamental restructuring of the existing social and cultural institutions of less industrialized countries (LICs). Put in another way, increasing global interdependency (social, economic, political, cultural and legal) creates a need for obtaining consulting services by the LICs from the ICs. The ICs in turn are interested in delivering these services for various social, political, cultural, and above all economic reasons of their own. Therefore, it is not very surprising to witness growth of huge consulting organizations in the ICs both in the private and the public sectors. These organizations are contracted for delivering varieties of services to LICs by various international agencies such as UNO, WHO, World Bank, to name a few. The consulting services are delivered on short or long term basis. The objective and subjective nature of dependency of LICs on ICs influence the exact mode in which consulting organizations deliver their services.

Secondly, the need for consulting services arises when there is a crises situation of personal and social nature; that is, when those in authority and power come to perceive that something is lacking (e.g., basic knowledge, technical know-how, material resources, legitimizing authority, professional and peer support, etc.) in their situation which is undermining their capacity to mobilize human and natural resources available to them in solving pressing problems that they are facing. These authorities feel this stress manifests a sense of urgency. Their resorting to requesting consulting services is a last minute rescue operation. The expectations of those who request consulting services are that outside consultants will somehow bail them out of a difficult but temporary situation. The consulting organizations and those agencies who contract them are well aware of this condition of their clients and in many cases do not hesitate in taking advantage of this situation for their own benefits. Thus in many cases consultants are hired on ad hoc basis without having any long-term perspectives on their role in a program or project. However, ad hoc recruiting of consultants serves other latent functions of these consulting and donor organizations.

Thirdly, consulting services are sought when there is a bond of "brotherhood" among consultants and consultees. That is, depending upon previous acquaintances and institutional linkages experts at national and international levels seek consultation from each other for professional support and for enhancing one's status, prestige and power in a stratified social order. The point is that there now exists a community of consultants at national and international levels with its own network, culture and sub-cultures, with an interest in creating conditions for growth and survival.

B. Problems in the Consulting Situation

Our analysis shows that consultants encounter many problems. Some of the most important problems they identified are classified in these six categories: (1) problems related to purposes, goals, objectives and implications of consulting, (2) problems related to organizations of consulting agencies, (3) problems related to local social structures, (4) problems related to lack of supportive systems, (5) cultural misunderstandings as a problem, and (6) factors contributing to other problems in consulting situations.
 

1. Problems Related to Purposes, Goals, Objectives and Implications of Consulting
 

In their interviews all consultants indicated that one of the major problems in consulting situations is to clarify purposes, goals and objectives of consultations. Expectations surrounding consulting situations are often not clear to those involved in it. For example, contracting agencies (i.e., donor agencies like FAO, World Bank, etc.), consulting agencies, and the counterparts in the LICs (receiving or requesting party) usually tend to have unrealistic goals which cannot be operationalized under the existing national and international institutional arrangements. In many instances consultants do not understand the language (i.e., the format of proposals, documents, business letters, etc.) in which the counterparts request consulting services. On the other hand clients do not know what sorts of services they should precisely be requesting and therefore expect consultants to perform miracles.

The consultants interviewed pointed out that some provision for rational discourse on the contingent and ultimate ends of consulting is necessary in order to arrive at a common definition of goals, purposes and objectives for which consulting services are requested and offered. Contingent ends are those social goals which are characteristic of a particular historical period. Even when these goals are realized they do not provide the conditions for individual fulfilment. Ultimate ends point to those social conditions which both permit and encourage the fulfilment of individual life. Increase in GNP is a contingent end but the well-being of all human beings in an interdependent world is the ultimate end. Utility is contingent; loving is ultimate. In general, social relationships are contingent when human beings involved become things or objects in the eyes of another, and therefore are subject to exploitation. These relationships are also perceived by many in consulting situations as anti-human, abstract, and alienated. On the other hand ultimate ends are trans-historical, in the sense that they are grounded in attributes of the human species and not in a specific social or cultural forms. Ultimate ends strive to overcome the vast network of historical and socially conditioned conception of reality in order to create conditions in which it becomes possible to transcend alienated social relationships. In the absence of trans-historical ends, consulting services run into the risk of becoming mechanical, positivistic, and alienating because consultants, consultees and project managers are involved in interaction by necessity. That is, they are interacting in order to merely survive rather than to freely and consciously choose creative activities which extend, develop, and realize those social relationships which are non-exploitative and free of distortion. This does not mean that contingent and ultimate ends are mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are dialectically related. What should be then the basic motivation underlying consulting and project management? The answer may lie in the comment of one of the consultants who said that "ultimately we got to preserve humanity." By this she meant that it is the effort to create the conditions necessary to realize human ends that should be the basic motivation in consulting and project management.

Situations in which a shared definition of the contingent and ultimate goals is lacking (which are part of the total environment in which consulting services are provided) lead to several other problems related to consulting. Three problems can be isolated from the interview data: problems related to training of local participants; problems surrounding evaluation, effectiveness, credibility and accountability of consulting. Each of these problems is briefly discussed below.

First, problems related to training were discussed in relation to duration of the consulting assignment and the life of the project. Generally, it was mentioned that either a consulting assignment should be of short term (six weeks or less) or long term (at least two years). In certain cases repeated short term (two or three weeks) visits by consultants were considered beneficial in the sense that this pattern did not make consultees dependent on outside consultants and thus avoided the dependency syndrome of the counterparts on the consulting services. Some consultants believed that ideas can be communicated in a short period of time, that a mere presence of a consultant beyond a certain time does not do any good, that minimum guidance is required after initial consulting had taken place, and that it is good to leave the local counterparts alone and let them take care of their own problems.

On the other hand, those consultants who visualized long term assignments as more beneficial pointed out that in short term, one-shot consultation, no provision is made to train the client in specific areas of competencies. Also, there is no provision for up-grading the skills of clients and for follow-up consultations to ensure that the client has attained the required or needed skills. Instead of reducing dependency, one-shot consulting situations tend to perpetuate it. The clients are usually overwhelmed by the mystique surrounding consultants (i.e., the feeling that consultants know the answers and will "fix" our problems). This encourages some consultants to feed on the situation. This is specially true in cases where the clients do not know how to use the consultants to their advantage because consultees lack competencies required to challenge and evaluate consultants' activities. Consequently, it is not uncommon to note that some consultants destroy local organizations and "kill" programs and projects without damaging the market for consulting services. There are many levels at which consultees can be trained. High levels of training programs should also be available to consultees so that they can learn those competencies and skills which will allow them to deal with high powered consultants confidently, who also play a decisive role in the setting up of evaluation criteria and the definition of effectiveness. Thus, the credibility and accountability of consultations tend to be located in the structure of sponsoring agencies and not in the client agencies. As a result of this, consulting often becomes a unclear and one-sided activity in which there is no room for learning and feedback. That is, generally there is no adequate built-in mechanism in a consulting situation whereby the client could set up meaningful procedures for evaluating the consultant's report. Further, sponsoring organizations tend to have built-in requirement for a certain amount of consultation.

Secondly, the question of who defines the needs for consulting services is an important one in the discussion of problems surrounding evaluation, credibility, and accountability of these services. Too often needs of clients are dictated by the sponsoring agencies which give their own employees some degree of role flexibility and mobility. On the other hand, consulting organizations too, once contracted, tend to create continuous need for their own kind of consulting services. Thus, marketing of consulting packages is often an integral part of the overall operations of consulting and contracting organizations.

A project manager needs information on a number of questions related to the organizational and task environments of both consulting and contracting organizations. Some of these questions are: What are the factors that make consulting and contracting organizations behave in the above ways? How do these organizations manage to penetrate the clients' situations and create needs for constant flow of consulting contracts? How are the institutional structures of these organizations linked with the overall global structures of interdependency? What role do consulting and contracting agencies play in global interdependency? Under what conditions does consulting become a two-way learning process? What are implications of two-way consulting situation for selection and training of consultants and evaluations of their activities? As far as we are aware little research exists which throws light on such questions.
 

2. Problems Related to the Organizations of Consulting
 

In ICs consulting organizations exist in the public and private sectors of the economy. Within these organizations consulting services are packaged, presented, and delivered to the clients in different modes. The structure and functions of these organizations affect the delivery of consulting services - both in terms of quantity and quality - and each mode of delivering services has its own consequences for the client's situation.

Usually, consulting services are delivered to the client at three different levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary. At the primary level consultants are asked by the client to get involved in the planning process of a project from the very beginning. On the other hand, at the secondary level consultants are asked to focus their efforts on explaining to the client what had gone wrong with the planning process and to interpret the recommendations of the previous consultants. In other words, at the secondary level consultants are often asked to perform a "cleaning up" operation. At the tertiary level of involvement, consultants are requested to legitimize the planning process and give visibility, respect, and status to the project. Thus consultants' roles vary according to the level at which the consulting services are requested and delivered.

Another point which the consultants emphasized during their interviews is that consulting takes place at village, town, city, district, region, state, national, and international levels involving different degrees of technical and professional expertise. All these factors make consulting process a complex reality and have various implications for contracting consulting services by the client.

One of the problems in contracting consulting services is certain attitudes of consulting organizations. Usually each consulting organization had developed its own standardized system of delivering its services based upon certain beliefs and assumptions. One such assumption is that its own system of delivery, with minor changes, can be perfected to serve requirements of clients everywhere. By basically ignoring the complexity of a client's changing environment (social, political, cultural, economic and legal) this notion of packaging consulting services somehow perpetuate the secondary level of consulting at the expense of client's resources and ignorance.
 

3. Problems Related to the Organization of the Local Institutions
 

Other problems of consulting are related to the organization of local institutions. Often there are internal rivalries and competition among local institutions which are reflected in the local politics. It is not uncommon to observe that long drawn-out local political issues tend to impede the capacities of local institutions to carry out certain tasks in the changing national and international environment. Besides, structures and functions of the local institutions are generally adopted from the colonial situation and need revamping in order for them to absorb new technologies and flow of resources from outside. Lacking adequate understanding of these two factors consultants, donor, and consulting agencies are inclined to have unrealistic expectations about the capacities of local institutions to achieve certain goals. Their unrealistic expectations may in fact conflict with the goals of the local institutions and the aspirations of person who work in them. For example, internal rivalries and competition often reflect genuine concern and fear about one's own job security, status, prestige, chances for future promotions, income and working conditions. Usually, any sort of linkage of a local institution with outside sponsoring and consulting organizations are seen by local persons as an opening of new opportunities and a chance to attain desired upward mobility through establishing personal and professional contact with the outsiders. This insensitivity to local institutional structure and internal politics -- especially underestimation of the real or anticipated aspirations and expectations of people working in these institutions acts as a barrier to successful consulting.

It seems that project managers will be well advised to make sure, as much as possible, that an open ended opportunity structure remains a built-in criterion in designing, implementing, managing, and evaluating of his/her project. The fact is that people everywhere, at all levels of society, do worry about their job security, income, and working conditions. It is a basic question of survival.
 

4. Problems Related to Lack of Supportive Systems
 

The importance of supportive structures in LICs is stressed by most consultants. A successful consulting effort is contingent on the nature of these structures, and on the degree these are accessible to consultants and to their counterparts in order for them to carry out the assigned tasks. One of the problems in this situation is that supportive systems (e.g., bureaucracies, courts, communications technology, research and development centers, information systems, transportation system, centers for social and cultural activities, libraries, scientific and technical information clearing houses, etc.) are inadequate or often inaccessible both to the consultants and the local counterparts even when they are present in LICs. This is because cooperation and coordination among various local institutions are lacking due to political and other social factors. However, in certain situations supportive systems are available to consultants only and not to the counter parts. This creates difficulties in the professional and social relationship among them. The local experts interpret unequal accessibility to their own institutions and resources as unjust and perceive this situation as an example of the lingering legacy of colonial rule. A fuller understanding of the organization of supportive systems in LICs and of the dynamics of political processes which affect the functioning of these systems will enhance consulting efforts.

On the basis of the various observations made by the consultants who were interviewed it is suggested that project managers may like to develop a set of criterion by which they can interpret local political processes. An informed analysis in turn may serve as guide lines for their actions in managing their projects. For example one experienced local politician - cum-bureaucrat from a Southeast Asian country communicated to an audience that he and his colleagues have formulated their own tentative test for understanding the survival of various political regimes in the region. The test, he claims, helps him and others in understanding changing political realities in Southeast Asia. By using the test bureaucrats, politicians, and various experts can make informed judgments about the impact of social, cultural, political, economic and legal forces on the local infrastructures and supportive institutions.

The basic assumptions underlying the test are that in Southeast Asia people are basically concerned with providing their people with education, housing, food, clothing and other basic goods and services necessary for survival. Further they are interested in the questions of national unity; economic stability; development of institutions of R and D and supportive infrastructures; how to modernize without losing their cultural roots and touch with the rural-based population; self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-respect, and freedom from domination of super powers. According to these local political analysts in Southeast Asia the question of survival in the LICs is defined quite differently than in ICs. One of the differences is that in ICs people are concerned with maintaining a high level of standard of living whereas people in LICs are concerned with the availability of necessities of life. In this context the ongoing debate on the formation of a new economic world order is highly significant.

These political analysts suggest that by looking at some specific indicators one can infer the nature of local institutions in many countries in Southeast Asia. For example, instability of a particular political structure along with the weakening of local supportive institutions can be inferred if the leadership in a country (a) is investing its resources abroad, (b) is staying in power by polarizing different factions, (c) is regarding opposition as an enemy or adversary, (d) is using intelligence services for its own survival as opposed to the security of the country, and (e) is corrupt. Further, instability and lack of support systems can be inferred if (f) development is city-based rather than rural-based, (g) greater number(s) of talented people are employed in the private sector than in the public sector, (h) immigration is high, and (i) substance of political debate is trivial rather than based on serious policy issues.
 

5. Cultural Misunderstanding as a Problem
 

All the consultants attached great importance to cultural variables in consulting and believed that such factors as values, ethics, perception, language, socialization, speech pattern, self-image, communication styles, and definition of a situation, to name a few, somehow contribute to cultural misunderstandings. Each of the consultants had his/her own anecdotes and stories to tell. These are so personal, elaborated, and diffused that it is impossible here to describe them in detail.

However, three perspectives on sources of cultural misunderstanding can be isolated from their comments. These are labelled as follows: faulty communication, unequal social structures, and negotiated social reconstruction.

Faulty communication perspective seems to emphasize the point that when a number of people from different social-cultural backgrounds work together there is bound to be vast cultural misunderstanding arising out of their social interaction. This is so because attitudes, values, intentions, and behavior of participants are usually guided by individuals' socio-economic backgrounds. In cross-cultural and international interaction situations they are more likely to be uncoordinated. This unfortunate misunderstanding can be improved if one can just improve the communication among the participants by making them realize that each of them is involved in complex, institutionalized social activities, that the purpose is to achieve certain agreed upon social goals, and that recognition of the purpose by all will benefit both the individuals and the particular organizations with which they are associated.

On the other hand, the unequal social structure perspective tends to emphasize the fact that sources of cultural misunderstanding lie in the unequal distribution of social power and other valued goods in society such as occupation, income, education, status, prestige, leisure time, and other alike things. Thus cultural misunderstandings can be reduced by reducing the gap among the powerful and the less powerful. Achieving this goal requires fundamental changes in social structure.

The negotiated social reconstruction perspective combines both the above-mentioned perspectives by emphasizing the point that changes both in faculty communication and in unequal social structure are necessary to reduce cultural misunderstandings. This can be achieved by encouraging dialogue among people around mutual problems. The ultimate goal of this perspective is to create a preferred world order which is conducive to human survival.

One can gather from the above discussion, as mentioned at the out set of this paper, that consultants enter into consulting situations with certain perspectives (forms of consciousness) and this will influence their style of consulting. This would also be the case with donor, consulting, and local organizations. A project manager may like to take these facts into account in his/her effort to manage the project in a cross-cultural situation and decide for him/her self how he/she should go about dealing with the issue of cultural misunderstandings.
 

6. Factors Contributing to Other Problems in Consulting
 

The consultants pointed out that there are a host of other factors which contribute to numerous problems in consulting. For example, technical expertise is only one factor in the selection of consultants. In specific cases, age, sex, class, ethnicity and race of consultants play crucial role in establishing successful consulting and professional relationships with the local counterparts, and in the resolution of problems. An older professional woman of Southeast Asian extraction may be perceived more effective in her consulting task which requires establishment of child care facilities, recruiting and training of local female health workers in Southeast Asian countries than a white, young male doctor. Knowledge of the local language(s) and dialects facilitates consulting. Nationality of consultants seems to create initial difficulties in establishing a healthy relationship and communication among the consultants and the consultees. For example, when an American consultant in India states that "population growth is a problem because it affects national interest of the United States," nationality becomes a negative factor in consulting. Further, there are many theoretical and methodological issues. These relate to availability of quality data and information which can be used for analyses purposes. Usually, much of the initial effort of a new consultant is focused on establishing reliability and quality of information with which he/she has to work. Experienced consultants become well acquainted with these problems and have worked out effective channels of communications with their counterparts. In many cases they try to get involved in the primary stage of consulting and provide help to the counterparts from the very beginning in deciding the mode of data collection, analysis and the nature of information which is needed for attaining certain goals. There is a great need for developing data-based information systems in LICs.

In this section we summarize the perceptions of the thirty-one consultants about consulting in less industrialized countries and suggestions made by them to improve the consulting process.

Firstly, consulting should be approached from a larger socio-cultural and historical perspective. Local and international societal conflicts should be well understood by consultants. The way global interdependency is interpreted by a particular developing country is one of the crucial factors in professional and personal relationships among consultants, their counterparts in LICs, and contracting agencies.

Secondly, consulting should not be a one-shot activity. Implications of long/short term consulting should be well thought out before hand by considering it a well planned social activity. A sense of realism should be maintained as it related to the expectations, goals, and objectives of consultation.

Thirdly, technical expertise of consultants alone is not adequate input in effective consultation. Consultants should be selected on the basis of their experience in living in the clients' culture/country and interacting with counterparts in their cultural and ecological settings. Cultural sensitivity on the part of consultants should be an important variable in selecting them. Personality and socio-cultural background of consultants should also be taken into account during the selection process.

Fourthly, upgrading of clients' skills and competencies should be built into the consulting contract. Most of the training should be done in client's country using local examples. A majority of the participants should be local people. In many cases consultants are needed to be present physically only for a short period of time to help their counterparts set up training programs at early stages. There after funds and other material resources should be supplied directly to the counterparts to run these programs. However, follow up procedures should be included in the consulting contract (e.g., a retainer system) to enable consultants to return and work with the client whenever the need arises. The need for consultation should be determined by the clients. Consulting organizations should invest in research and development activities that are directly related to training and up-grading of skills and competencies required by the client.

Fifthly, criterion for assessment of participants' (both consultants and clients) activities should be included in consulting proposals. Procedures should be worked out to evaluate consultants' reports and be included in the contract from the very beginning. A super-consulting structure may be devised to catalog specific activities and capabilities of various consulting institutions with the purpose of providing the client more adequate information about the quality of consultation available. The information may help the client in selecting consultants and in evaluating their work effectively.

Finally, the consultants emphasized the fact that although cultural sensitivity and professional knowledge in one's own field of specialty are important factors in delivering consulting services effectively, nevertheless consulting should be considered an art form.

APPENDIX A

In this appendix responses of the ten Canadian consultants to the following fifteen questions are presented in a tabular form:

• What sorts of things have the professors been asked to do?
• What sorts of things have professors actually done in their field-based activities?
• For whom were services provided?
• What discrepancies are found between particular requests and the actual consultant activities?
• What competencies are used in responding to particular requests.
• What competencies are identified as lacking in reference to particular consultant activities?
• What is the value of these field-based activities to the scholarly field and to the professional person?
• Of what consequences are particular services rendered?
• What are the current issues and questions perceived by you as consultant in your own field?
• What is the likely future of the concerns and emphasis in your discipline?
• What skills are likely to become more important in light of those anticipations?
• What are the consequences of particular kinds of experiences in terms of continued or expanded professional involvement?
• What is your model of man or human nature?
• What is your model of man and society or how do you conceptualize relationship between man and society?
• What is your model of modernization? Or what is your thinking on modernization?

** Dr. George Hickman, Memorial University, read this and an earlier related article "Cross-National Consultation in International Collaboration," The Morning Watch Vol. 21, Nos. 3-4, Fall 1994, pp. 33-42, written by this author. The author thanks Dr. Hickman for reading these articles and providing valuable comments. Dr. Hickman has extensive experience in international, national and local consultation processes. Needless to say, the author bears sole responsibility for ideas expressed in these articles.
 

 
The Globe and Mail refers to itself as "Canada’s National Newspaper". National, in the sense that it is distributed across Canada and makes an attempt to cover stories from all parts of the country, it is usually described as a paper with a decidedly business/right wing, conservative viewpoint. On Saturday, June 28, 1997 it carried an editorial by William Thorsell entitled "Taking the Measure of Our Education Systems" (Saturday, June 28, 1997, D6) which vividly illustrates the pressures being applied to education today:
 

In the very next paragraph, Mr. Thorsell questions whether Canadians really value education. He states:

Mr. Thorsell attacks what he calls the "corkscrew curriculum" in which all students proceed at the same rate, but not the same pace, through the system. He concluded: "The combination of hard-to-measure goals and corkscrewing (which saw the end of external, general exams) reduced the accountability for spending public money or students’ time." The result, he claims, is that mastery of basic skills began to deteriorate. Parents found it hard to monitor their children’s progress, and "higher proportions of education taxes went into "supporting missions" such as counselling, extracurricular activities and special interest/needs programs." In Mr. Thorsell’s view, funding the education system has led to a form of "indirect taxation without meaningful accountability."

In every part of our country, and in other countries in the Western world, similar views are being expressed. Accountability and testing are indeed buzz words of the 1990s. Mr. Thorsell applauds the solutions which he identifies across Canada:
 

Although not addressed by Mr. Thorsell, Atlantic Canada is also engaged in similar measures. In fact, comparisons of educational systems across the country, and even internationally, make one wonder where all the common ideas for reform spring from and how they are circulated so efficiently among educational bureaucracies. The Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation (APEF) is identifying core learning outcomes in mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies. An indicator program is in place to allow standardized testing based on these anticipated learning outcomes. Departments of Education are assuming responsibility for district, provincial, and national testing and comparisons. If School A is not measuring up to School B, then school councils composed of community members, parents, teachers and administrators (another creation of the 1990s) will want to know why, and the provincial departments (or ministries) of education can investigate. To prefect techniques in this area, many administrators have travelled to distant school districts to see first hand what is happening there. For example, just a few years ago, a team of educators from Newfoundland flew to Kentucky to observe their attempts at school reform through accountability and testing.

This situation should concern all teachers. For many educators, the reaction to Mr. Thorsell’s comments is to ask, what is education if we ignore hard-to-measure goals such as "self-realization, curiosity, awareness, creativity, open-mindedness, tolerance, gentleness, and critical thinking"? Furthermore, are they "effectively beyond measurement" (as Mr. Thorsell states) or are there ways to measure them?

Educators may react to the challenge that such a viewpoint poses by becoming angry with those who hold views similar to Mr. Thorsell’s; they may then try to ignore that viewpoint and proceed as if it does not exist, holding on to their beliefs and hoping that others will support them in what they consider valuable work. For example, a typical teacher can continue to plan and teach units, devote long hours of one-to-one assistance and help to students, assume a leadership role in school-wide professional development and engage with colleagues to master new and emerging technologies that will assist in the teaching and learning within the school. This is the path that many teachers have chosen in the past. They shudder at the very thought of becoming politically active and would not know where to begin. They would argue that they know and their students know that they work hard, that what they do is important and helpful, that they do not have the time nor the interest to do more. You could ask, what is wrong with such a response?

To ignore what Mr. Thorsell is saying will lead to changes in teaching which may be problematic for many, because although teachers see the value of the different ways they do their work, it is seldom documented. Our research ( Brown & Sheppard, 1997a; Brown & Sheppard, 1997b; Sheppard & Brown, 1996) reveals that even in the most recognized schools with strong programs and qualified professional teachers, there is seldom any indication of how programs contribute to student outcomes. The problem is that much of what teachers do falls into the category of goals that Mr. Thorsell rightly identifies as "hard-to-measure".

There is, however, another choice, which is to accept the reality that in today’s environment there is a need for accountability. Process goals, such as those involved in helping students learn how to learn, to become independent, life-long learners, are indeed hard to measure, but the important point is that they can be measured. It just requires a different approach to measurement. Part of the problem is that too many teachers in the past have assumed that everyone would support and believe in the need for programs and approaches they saw as important. Because certain values were important to them, many assumed that they would be important to everyone else as well. In this post-modern world, teachers need to recognize that there is no longer an overriding belief in anything. They can no longer take for granted that the goals they endorse are endorsed by the education system, or if they are, that the system will agree on how these goals can be reached. Teachers will need to be politically astute, and that begins by recognizing that there is a need for evidence to back up what is valued.

Our research reveals that schools are not defining learning outcomes well, but others outside the school are. In Canada, education is a provincial rather than a national responsibility. However, provincial departments of education are voluntarily forming themselves into regional groups such as the Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation (APEF). A similar Foundation exists for western Canada. Their mandate is to establish learning outcomes for what they have labelled as core. In addition, editorial writers and other journalists have their own criteria. All educators need to examine and understand what measurements are being used by editorial writers such as Mr. Thorsell. Most would agree with Mr. Thorsell’s conclusion that in the end, a major goal for all schools is: "Instructing the next generation about how the universe works, where our civilization came from, why it values what it does and what’s on the agenda next". However, those who commit themselves to a career in the classroom want far more than that – they want the "hard-to-measure" goals for all students as well.

Why have non-educators, such as Mr. Thorsell, determined a narrow range of outcomes on which schools are to be judged? Why does he (and others) seem willing to judge the reputation of schools on only those measures easy to obtain? We may not like the answers we hear, such as this example from Stoll & Fink (1995):

Teachers would be wise to do some private soul-searching and ask themselves how comfortable they would be if asked to show the link between what they do and student outcomes. They need to ask themselves also whether their professional values are reflected in the essential learning outcomes accepted and shared by their colleagues and by the larger community. Teachers who know they are doing a good job need to ask themselves: Who else knows how well I do what I do and the importance of this function to students’ learning? How can I show improvements in student achievement scores? In the current political environment, it is critical that teachers identify and articulate the learning outcomes that they want measured, and determine ways they can be measured, for "What gets measured, or assessed, gets valued. If schools do not measure what they value, what others choose to measure will be valued" (Stoll & Fink, p.167). In the research that we are doing, we were told that all teachers need to show that their work is directly or indirectly related to students’ learning outcomes. In the restructuring that is taking place, only those programs seen as contributing to the mission of the school will survive.

To bridge the gap between process or hard-to-measure goals and the need for accountability, there needs to be a greater emphasis by teachers and schools to identify what the important goals in schooling are, to develop measures for such goals, and ensure that they are collected. If teachers perform other critical functions, such as providing peer coaching and training for their colleagues and participating in school improvement initiatives, they need to show that such activities also contribute to student success. For those involved in the education of teachers at the university, there is a need to ensure that programs provide students with the ability to understand and interpret the findings of research, and as well with the knowledge and ability to engage in research themselves. A current imperative is that a research base be built that will provide the evidence that is so badly needed. To do so, the gap between the university researcher and the school practitioner must narrow.

The research program that we have developed is an action research model (Calhoun, 1994) which involves us, both members of a university faculty of education, as "critical friends" (Lieberman, 1995, p.3) in the schools in which we work. We are actively engaged with school teams in an effort to obtain information and data which are beneficial to us and the school. We see this as a very promising way to develop and test theory and to conduct research, including how best to identify and measure the hard-to-measure goals held within the school.

One thing is clear -- teachers cannot leave the determination and measurement of school goals to administrators, other teachers, or outsiders. It is too important for that. They need to recognize their responsibility for they cannot assume that others hold the same educational values that they do. It is at the school level that teachers will need to ensure that the goals that the profession values are measured; that the contributions of teachers from various programs are identified as making a real difference to students’ learning outcomes, and that these outcomes be measured. Teachers have a professional responsibility to work with colleagues in determining the learning outcomes that are valued in the school, and to be leaders in finding ways in which they can be measured.

Professionals in education, whether they work in universities or in schools, want schools that are providing the best possible learning experiences for students. However, the day is gone when anyone can rely only on his or her individual intuition as to what the best is. Neither can teachers assume that the outcomes they value will be measured by standardized provincial or national tests. The current society requires evidence and is demanding greater accountability. All groups in education are in danger of being discredited and disregarded unless they provide that evidence. Schools need to become learning organizations (Senge, 1990), where collectively the staff makes the best decisions they can for the students they serve. This will require a new type of professionalism for teachers and a commitment to continuous improvement for schools through a process of self-evaluation and learning. Increasingly parents and the community can work with schools to identify the learning outcomes that need to be valued and measured, and they can be supporters in the fight for a school system that will provide such an education.

These are difficult times in education for all those who believe in the value of programs such as music, physical education, social studies, drama, and art, and who see the value and need for qualified teacher-librarians. Many people in our society are seeking tax reductions and are unwilling to support educational programs in the way they were in the past. Politicians are responding to these demands, and as a result, senior administrators and government bureaucrats are being given reduced budgets and asked to trim their expenses. They are being forced to make very difficult choices, and as it is in nature, it is the weakest that will not survive. For too long teachers have tried to avoid the need for public accountability. Focused on the classroom and the student, they have been reluctant to become politically sensitive and responsive to the public’s movement towards increased accountability. They can avoid it no longer. If teachers do not stand up for the outcomes they value and measure them, others (such as educational bureaucrats, special interest groups within the public, government members, the business community) will hold teachers accountable for outcomes they value. Teachers need to ask themselves: is this what we want?

In October 1997, a two-day professional in-service and strategic planning session was held by the Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, at the Littledale Conference Centre in St. John’s. Participants were members of the Faculty of Education and personnel from four provincial school districts which have a direct involvement in teacher education in this province.

At the above session a number of participants presented papers. Following the presentations, they were involved in question/answer sessions and focused group discussions. In this section of The Morning Watch, we include papers prepared by Singh, Pugh and Rose, as well as "working hypotheses" prepared by Collins & Mellor, May-Follett, Williams and Noseworthy.

The idea of "working hypotheses" comes from the interactionist perspective developed by G.H. Mead and Jane Addams. What it means is that various individuals and organizations get involved in advancing a number of solutions to social problems in order to improve society. Deegan explains that these solutions are labelled as working hypotheses "because they require constant reconsideration and re-evaluation in light of changing conditions." See Deegan, M.J. & Hill, M. (eds.) (1987). Women and symbolic interactionism. Winchester, MM: Allen & Urwin, Inc., p. 443. A number of the following papers are in effect "working hypotheses." They initiate "reconsiderations and re-evaluation" of recurrent issues relating to the internship program, the internship workshop, and student teaching.

The general purpose of this paper is to underscore the need for reflective and critical internship programs in teacher education. To this end, the underlying premise of the Reflective and Critical Internship Program (Doyle, Kennedy, Ludlow, Rose & Singh, 1994) is described briefly, and each of the four main components of the internship experience (intern, cooperating teacher, university supervisor and context) is examined in light of its unique role in, and contribution to, a reflective and critical internship experience. As part of this examination, I raise a number of issues regarding the very complex relationships that exist between these individual components, and propose that this Quad Relationship (Rose, 1997) is a critical feature of a reflective internship program. In this regard, many basic issues and practices surrounding the development, administration, and evaluation of internship programs, might be clarified by first examining the fundamental nature of each of the individual components of the Quad, and then exploring the many and varied interactions that occur between them. As a starting point in this process, it is my intention in this paper to raise questions surrounding the general development and delivery of an internship program that strives to be comprehensive, meaningful and effective for all participants and stakeholders.

In putting together this paper, I have drawn upon research undertaken by a research group established in the Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, a number of years ago. Both as a member of this group, and as a Faculty member still actively involved in working with music education interns, cooperating teachers and supervisors, I am reminded continuously of the exciting possibilities that the internship program holds as it is identified as being the most important experience of the teacher education program (Doyle et. al, 1994).

It has been the belief of our research group that, in order for teachers to be productive and transformative in their practice, they need to have developed a critical pedagogy (Doyle, 1993; Giroux, 1989; McLaren, 1989; Weiler, 1988; Kirk, 1986; Apple, 1982b). Such a pedagogy stems from a social and cultural consciousness that encourages both self and social knowledge, political awareness, educational relevance and productivity. It is our belief such a consciousness requires reflection, analysis and critique.

One of the most important facets of teacher preparation has to do with the development of both personal and professional knowledge. This includes awareness as to how individuals, e.g., interns and their students, fit into a super-structure of educational, political, cultural and social ideals. A basic premise of our work with interns is that the development of such awareness stems from the process of reflection and continuous critical examination of the various components of education, culture and society (Rose, 1994),

We have found that an excellent opportunity to nurture the process of critical reflection in teacher preparation exists within the internship program (Doyle, Kennedy, Ludlow, Rose and Singh, 1994). The internship experience can serve as an important step toward the bridging of theory and practice, the formation of teacher identity and the development of social and cultural consciousness. It is our contention that such a step is vital to the ongoing development of a critical pedagogy.

At the heart of the internship experience is the intern. This particular experience represents a crucial and transitional time for interns in that they are juggling many pieces of a very complex whole. They are asking questions and seeking answers, testing theory, discovering rules, expectations, traditions and beliefs, developing new values and meanings, searching for roles and identity, and attempting to build a practice that is relevant and meaningful for them and their students. Given the complexity of this experience for the interns, our research group identified a need for, and ultimately felt a responsibility to develop, a context for the internship experience that not only allowed for but also nurtured the process of acquiring personal and professional knowledge and skills toward the development of a critical pedagogy. Our overall goal was to facilitate and nurture interns' personal and professional growth primarily through the enhancement of both self and social understanding. Through structured and pedagogically devised sessions involving dialogue, sharing, examining, viewing, questioning and analyzing, the interns, as well as all the other 'players' involved in the Internship Program, e.g., cooperating teachers, supervisors and administrators, were actively engaged in the process of reflection and analysis. We felt that this process provided the framework for a comprehensive 'program' for interns that was supportive and facilitative, yet challenging in nature and design. The need for such a dialectical process in the development of reflective and critical practice is pointed out by Kemmis (1985). He states, "Reflection is an action-oriented process and a dialectical process... it looks inward at our thoughts and processes and outwards at the situation in which we find ourselves... it is a social process, not a purely individual process in that ideas stem from a socially constructed world of meanings" (p. 145).

The Reflective and Critical Internship Model (RCIP)

The primary outcome of our research to date has been the development of the Reflective and Critical Internship Model (Doyle et al., 1994: 10-15). Building on the work of Smyth (1987, 1989) and others, the basic framework of this model includes five pedagogical categories, or forms of action, through which pre-service teachers travel in their construction of knowledge, skills, identities, beliefs, values and practices. Specifically, these categories provide a lens and a means through which teacher educators and students can examine the development of teacher thinking within a broad context of educational, socio-cultural and political ideals and practices.

These five pedagogical categories or forms of action are:
 

• Describing/contextualizing, e.g., what is the context, case, situation, orientations and realities of a particular practice? These questions include the elements of who, what, when, where, and how.
• Bringing and recognizing cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977), e.g., what do the various partners bring to, and ultimately come to value throughout the internship program? What theories, ideologies, practices, prejudices and taken-for-granted realities are brought tot he process of teacher professionalization?
• Engaging in communication, e.g., what are the various forms of engagement involved in the internship process? How do we recognize different voices, communicate effectively with self and others, and reflect on the political and social nature of schooling?
• Problematizing dominant practices and discourses (Phelan and McLaughlin, 1992), e.g., is there a willingness and ability to ask questions, entertain doubts, be disturbed about teaching and learning worlds and the discoursed that pervade them? How do we create a process of meaning-making in which teachers infuse dominant discourses with their own purposes and intentions?
• Functioning as transformative intellectuals and cultural workers (Giroux, 1988, 1992), e.g., how might we transform our practice in a fashion that marks a real difference between being an educator and a trainer? How do we come to view pedagogy as a form of cultural production, as opposed to basic transmission of information and skills? Do we encourage interns to examine the relationships between schooling, pedagogy, cultural practices and social power? Do we strive for a language and a practice of possibility and change?

The Quad Relationship

It is within the context of the RCIP Model, briefly described above, that I now discuss the underlying issues that comprise the Quad relationship in the internship program. The interconnected and interdependent relationship(s) between the intern, cooperating teacher, intern supervisor and local context are at the heart of an internship experience grounded in critical pedagogy. These four 'players' are in constant engagement and interaction. The success of the individual internship experience, in its design, development and facilitation, is very much dependent on the nature and quality of the interactions between each player in the Quad relationship. It is when the intentions and actions of these players are fused in conscious, well planned and organized ways, that the potential for a reflective and critical internship experience may be realized.

As a starting point in understanding the complexities of the Quad relationship, I have outlined some of the primary roles and/or issues surrounding each player in a reflective and critical internship program. These roles/issues stem from the needs of the RCIP Model as it may evolve into practice:
 

 

The INTERN is:
 

• exploring, observing, examining and critically analyzing teaching practice
• searching for, and attempting to establish, a professional role and identity
• seeking to work safely and effectively within inherited spaces and practices
• merging personal and professional philosophies and theories with practice (toward praxis)
• developing skills in fundamentals of teaching (communication, classroom management, methodologies, evaluation…)

• attempting to operate 'successfully' within a very complex environment of expectations, traditions, values and beliefs (often involving conflict and contestation)

• making connections between, and developing understandings of, teaching and learning
• recognizing the influence of past experiences and knowledge on current practice
• learning to value the cultural capital of self and others
• striving for success and excellence (e.g., evaluation/recommendations).

The COOPERATING TEACHER is:
 

• providing a context and setting for the internship experience
• demonstrating expertise in teaching (i.e., knowledge and skill)
• facilitating hands-on teaching experiences for the intern
• nurturing the intern's development of professional practice
• providing consistent feedback and general support for the intern's developing skills and understandings
• encouraging and assisting the development of reflection-in-action (e.g., cycle of observation-reflection-action; turning awareness into action)
• encouraging the intern to incorporate own ideas and experiences into the teaching experience (e.g., experimentation, trial and error)
• raising critical questions and challenges about issues and practices inherent in the teaching/learning process (i.e., to aid in the development of critical thinkers and doers)
• assisting the intern in his/her development of understandings about the schooling process (e.g., culture of school, teacher-student relationships, connections to parents and the community, political considerations, economic realities…).

 

 
• operating as the main link to the University (Faculty of Education)
• guiding both the intern and cooperating teacher through the various process-related and administrative details of the internship program
• working with both the school and university to provide a supportive, safe and meaningful environment for the intern
• assisting the intern in his/her connecting of current teaching experiences with existing knowledge in various educational, social, cultural, political theories and paradigms
• providing safe spaces/sites for the intern, through pre- and post- conferencing and reflective group seminars, to work through and 'make sense of' issues, practices and experiences as they arise
• facilitating opportunities for quality interaction between the cooperating teacher, intern and supervisor (i.e., planning, goal-setting, ongoing evaluation, analysis…)
• nurturing and guiding the intern in his/her formation of teacher identity and professional practice
• providing consistent, appropriate and relevant feedback to the intern regarding teaching experiences throughout the semester (e.g., relating to current issues and practices of a particular subject matter and/or context)
• engaging the intern in critical and reflective analysis (e.g., raising critical questions and challenges about ideologies, belief systems and practices; helping the intern to locate his/her work within both subjective and objective frameworks).

 

 
• nature of the site (e.g., rural/urban; large/small)
• history and traditions relating to the context (e.g., values, beliefs, expectations…)
• individual and collective personalities/cultures existing within the context
• the philosophies, concepts, skills, practices, beliefs, traditions and value systems associated with the particular subject area
• the interconnectedness of subject matter with the teaching and learning process (i.e., philosophies, pedagogies, methodologies…)
• the context and setting in which the subject matter is being experienced (e.g., social studies classroom, music/mini/ multimedia/computer workstation, biology lab, choral rehearsal)
• the expertise required of all participants (intern, cooperating teacher and supervisor) in the subject matter, in order to provide the most comprehensive, relevant and meaningful internship experience

• all that influences what teachers and learners do within the discipline or subject matter (e.g., constraints, perceptions, expectations, traditions… that may be peculiar to the subject matter and context).


 

Having identified the main components of the Quad relationship, I will now highlight briefly some guiding principles that underpin the fundamental nature of the RCIP model.

 
• The importance of the development of a partnership model involving the university, school districts and individual school communities. The partnership model must have as its foundation the realization of, and commitment to, the internship experience as an integral component of teacher education
• The recognition and need for establishing a partnership program that has as its basis the development of critical, reflective and intelligent practitioners. Such a program would recognize and value the internship experience as more than an apprenticeship program.
• The recognition of the intern as the central figure in the delivery of the internship program. A relevant, meaningful and pedagogically sound internship experience needs to be designed and implemented for each intern.
• The need for expertise in each 'quadrant' of the internship experience - intern, cooperating teacher, intern supervisor, and context. Expertise in this instance would be characterized for example by such elements as appropriate intern preparation and background (intern), identified excellence in teaching and subject area competence (cooperating teacher), appropriate academic preparation regarding the nature of the internship experience (intern supervisor) and, appropriate school/community placement (context).
• The need for the development of a 'system' of partnerships that recognizes and values the contribution of each participant to the success of the internship program. Such a system would require regular consultation, communication, interaction and program evaluation.
• The recognition of the important role of, and need for, ongoing research at the core of the internship experience (e.g., classroom pedagogy, the pedagogy of supervision, the nature and development of teacher thinking and practice…).
• The need for an efficient and effective administrative component in the Faculty of Education that would serve primarily to support the academic and pedagogical nature of the internship program.
• The need for ongoing professional development for cooperating teachers, intern supervisors and administrators involved with the internship program. The establishment of a standard of academic, pedagogical and administrative excellence would provide the foundation and rationale for the establishment of an agenda for professional development designed to meet the needs of a reflective and critical internship program.
• The need for a renewed commitment to excellence in education, and particularly to teacher preparation.

 

Underlying the RCIP Model and Quad relationship are some very important questions about issues such as personnel, expertise, administration and program evaluation that need to be explored and analyzed by all parties involved in the internship program. Some of the questions I pose here will serve to stimulate this process as we strive continually to refine and improve current internship programs. As we realize, some of these questions may not be new, but they do represent the complex issues surrounding the development of an internship program that is grounded in critical pedagogy.

 
• Who is the intern? What are his/her particular needs and interests?
• Who are the cooperating teachers?
• Who are the intern supervisors?
• How is the expertise of all 'players' identified? How, and by whom, are cooperating teachers and supervisors selected/appointed for their role in the internship program?
• Is there consistency in the delivery of the internship program between urban/rural, small/large school contexts?
• What is an appropriate system for intern placement? (e.g., how are issues relating to expertise and appropriate context accounted for in placement procedures?)
• What is the role(s) of the Faculty of Education? How might the university contribute to professional development programs, research, university-based supervision when possible and/or appropriate, and the overall administration of the internship program?How might an appropriate balance be struck between academic and administrative needs and agendas?
• What is the role of school districts as they partner with the university to provide appropriate and excellent internship experiences for interns and their supervisors.
• How should we deal with the complex issue of intern evaluation in a manner that is fair, consistent and meaningful?
• What are the needs of each partner in the internship program? For example, is the intern matched with a cooperating teacher who has identified expertise? Is supervision occurring on a regular basis? Is there a clear understanding about the pedagogy of supervision? How are workload concerns addressed for both cooperating teachers and intern supervisors?
• Are cooperating teachers and intern supervisors provided adequate time in their general workload allocations, as well as adequate resources, to meet the needs of the internship program generally, and the individual intern specifically?
• Is there a system in place that provides for ongoing professional interaction between all key players in the internship program? Is there time devoted to professional development in the form of seminars and workshops that focus on the various aspects of the internship experience?
• Is it possible to establish a formalized system within the teacher education program that addresses the issues and questions raised above? Such a system would include for example, provisions for a) the selection of cooperating teachers and supervisors, b) the formation of appropriate partnership connections involving 'official' affiliations, and designations, c) the recognition of excellence within the educational system as it relates to the internship program, d) the development of connections between the internship program, teacher certification, and general professional development plans and policies within professional teacher organizations (e.g., Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers' Association).

 

The internship program plays an integral part in teacher preparation. The Reflective and Critical Internship Program can provide an effective site for the nurturing of aspiring educators, as well as for the continued nurturing of many individuals who are already involved in the educational system. The overall goal of the RCIP is the creation of teacher education programs generally, and internship programs specifically, that are focussed on, and engaged in, the development of conscious, knowing, and active participants in the educational process. A critical form of this engagement involves reflection, analysis and critique. A process of engagement that is structured to encourage and facilitate such activities can be a very powerful means toward individual and collective empowerment, leading ultimately to change and transformation.

It is my hope that by exploring the RCIP Model, in conjunction with the Quad Relationship, that we will be encouraged to address, with some urgency, some of the issues and questions raised in this paper. As mentioned earlier, some of these issues are new, others have been with us for awhile. Ultimately, I hope to challenge all participants and stakeholders in teacher education to work toward the continuing development and delivery of internship programs that are characterized by intellectualism, creativity, open-mindedness, flexibility, responsibility and systematic reflection, analysis and evaluation.

Doyle, C., W. Kennedy, K. Ludlow, A. Rose & A. Singh (1994). Toward building a reflective and critical internship program (The RCIP model): Theory and practice. St. John's, NF: Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Doyle, C. (1993). Raising curtains on education: Drama as a site for critical pedagogy. New York: Bergin and Garvey.

Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and resistance in education. London: Heinemann Educational Books)

Kemmis, S. (1985). Action research and the politics of reflection. In D. Boud, R. Keough and D. Walker (Eds.). Reflection: Turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page.

Kirk, D. (1986). Beyond the limits of theoretical discourse in teacher education: Towards a critical pedagogy. Teaching and Teacher Education. 2(2), 1555-167.

Smyth, J. (1987) (Ed.). Educating teachers - Changing the nature of pedagogical knowledge. London: Falmer Press.

Smyth, J. (1989). A critical pedagogy of classroom practice. Curriculum Studies. 21(6), 483-502.

Weiler, K. (1988).  Women teaching for change.  New York: Bergin and Garvey.

All educators, at one point in time, were required to complete a student teaching and/or internship program. In previous years, students attempting to complete internships in the rural areas of Newfoundland would be supervised by a member of the Faculty of Education. Unfortunately, the distance between the University and the individual schools created problems with the frequency of supervision. Not wanting to deny students the opportunity to have experience with the smaller school and/or teaching closer to home, the Faculty of Education at Memorial University proposed that supervision of the interns be the responsibility of the cooperating teacher(s) and the school board officials in the district where the intern was placed.

In October of the 1997-1998 school year, cooperating teachers, school board officials, past supervisors and interns came together with members of the Faculty of Education to discuss the Reflective and Critical Internship Program. It was an attempt to define the roles and expectations of the partners more succinctly as well as to make suggestions for the future.

The present internship program is based upon a "quad" model. There are four major partners in the model: the intern, the cooperating teacher, the internship supervisor, and the subject matter. There was some indication during the institute that students should be included in the partnership because they can influence or be influenced by the intern. For the internship to be successful for everyone involved, all partners must work together as a cohesive unit. In this article, I will be focusing on the suggestions that were proposed for the partners in the internship program.

1. Choosing the Cooperating Teacher

The first step in any internship program is to choose the cooperating teacher. This is affected, of course, by the area of training for the intern. It was agreed that the cooperating teacher should have at least 5 years teaching experience, have a positive attitude towards teaching, be devoted to the job and to the students, and perform other duties such as extracurricular activities. Generally, the best person would be one who could contribute to the overall experience of the intern, not one who would take advantage of having "someone to do the work." The cooperating teacher should see the intern as someone who can contribute to his/her knowledge of new teaching methods, current curriculum information, and variety in the classroom. The two should exist as a cooperative unit where team teaching can take place, but also individual teaching on the part of the intern. It is important to realize that the internship is an opportunity for a new teacher to explore teaching methods to determine which one(s) work for him/her, not to emulate or copy another person.

Introduction

The principles of the collaborative partnership between school districts and the Faculty of Education were discussed. The following principles were reaffirmed:
 

• the partners share in the responsibility of the preparation of teachers through the internship program;
• the University serves in a number of functions, e.g., placement, liaison, research;
• the school district collaborates in placements and monitors the overall delivery of the internship in its district;
• the school district has responsibility for the selection of cooperating teachers and supervisors.

One of the goals of the two-day session was to focus on the cooperating teachers’ role and provide direction for future professionalization of cooperating teachers in all provincial school districts relative to their work with interns. The following were advanced:

Attributes/Qualifications
 

• Has completed 3-5 years of successful teaching;
• Demonstrates excellence in teaching;
• Demonstrates interest in continuing education and professional development;
• Has indicated interest in the professional development of student interns;
• Is committed to the principles, roles and responsibilities of the internship.

Responsibilities
 

• Preparing students to accept the intern as a professional colleague and not as another student or an aide;
• Establishing good working relationships as early as possible, introducing the intern to other school personnel and clarifying their roles;
• Helping and encouraging the intern to explore school records, test materials, teacher resources, and special services, and to ask questions about the students, the school, and the community;
• Presenting to the intern an outline of the long-range goals and the organization of the grade or course;
• Demonstrating good teaching and helping the intern to analyze and understand why it is good teaching;
• Assisting the intern in the critical-reflective analysis of the relationship between theory and practice with the intent of improving practice;
• Facilitating the development of independence of the intern by taking an inconspicuous position in the room while the intern is in charge;
• Conferring with the supervisor regarding the intern’s progress; and
• Preparing reports of the intern’s progress and discussing these reports with the intern.

The supervisor, along with the cooperating teacher, is responsible for summative evaluation of the intern. Supervisors should ensure that interns are given the opportunity and time to reflect on their teaching practice. This can be done in collaboration with the University district liaison person.

Supervisory responsibilities are essential to the internship. The University and school districts will continue to dialogue on this critical aspect of the internship in the upcoming year.

Looking back on what was reflected in the Internship Workshop in September of 1997, I can now see a different reflection than what came to me at the time. Sometimes we educate teachers to work in the ideal situation. The "What ifs..." are discussed to pieces but do not always become a reality for most teachers until they are on their own.

What type of work force are we preparing our interns for? Let’s consider for a moment the number of graduates from the Faculty of Education. Based on that number let’s answer three questions out of a possible hundred:
 

• How many of these graduates wish to move into the teaching profession?
• How many get permanent positions in their chosen field?
• How many become substitute teachers?

I fear that, out of those who wish to continue in their field, a large number become substitutes. Some have the success of moving into a permanent position immediately, but they are few.

In view of this situation, should we be preparing our interns to be substitute teachers first? I am not trying to be negative but to be realistic. Substituting and being in a permanent position are two different jobs. Permanent teachers know their classes. They know what happened yesterday, where they are today and what to expect for tomorrow. Substitutions would mean stepping into someone’s domain for one day. Keeping in mind the importance of delivering the best education possible, in line with our philosophy of education, the substitute could be given an ideal prepared plan for the day or as little as a blank sheet. When a teacher walks into a class, whether it is someone else’s or his/her own, a plan may not always work out. They must be prepared for setbacks and build on the positive experiences.

I recommend to the interns that, just as doctors on house calls are prepared with a doctor’s bag, they, too, should have a teacher’s bag. When packing, they should think of being a substitute first; then, if they later find themselves in a permanent position, they should use it to help themselves and their classes grow. They should never count on someone else to be prepared for them. They should prepare themselves to be their own particular kind of teacher and use the rest as a gift.

The following are a few ideas for a teaching bag:
 

• Letters from a scrabble game (language can be so much fun in large or small groups).
• A list of large words in which one can derive smaller words.
• A Knock…Knock book.
• Two packs of playing cards (lots of Math and Science already built in).
• A few hit CD’s.
• "The Important Book" by Margaret Wise Brown (ideal for Health, Religion, Social Studies or Art at any grade level).
• Space for more things.

As Educators, we should reflect not only on teaching itself, but on the types of teaching we are preparing our interns for. In completing an internship program, substituting should be a major part of the course requirements.

One of the never-ending truths in teaching is that "nothing is never-changing." Indeed as I look back on the occasions that I have had to "play" this role, and as I prepare for the third time to take on this challenge, I find myself once again reflecting on the truth of this phrase.

For what is teaching but the constant quest for a new approach, a better, more relevant way to present material, to encourage students to find out the truths of life for themselves? How many times have we thought ourselves all prepared for the year ahead because we have been given no new courses only to find that in reality we have more work instead of less, since each year we must "revise and edit" what we accomplished the year before? These statements also apply to the cooperating teacher who tries to guide the intern through his or her thirteen weeks in the school setting while, all at the same time, must juggle other expectations - those of their students and their parents, their school administration, and, of course, their own. All this must be accomplished while trying to ensure that the intern gains "some idea" of the "job." I use the expression "some idea" purposely. After thirteen years as a classroom teacher, I am still not sure that I have a total comprehension of the intricacies of the "job." Education is constantly evolving, the skills required by both students and teachers always changing, the students we teach never exactly the same as the year before. As we ourselves struggle to cope with these changes, we must at the same time anticipate what to pass on to our interns.

They say that "doing is learning," and for that reason the internship, or better-expressed, practice teaching, is all-important. Nothing in the preceding five years of university course work can possibly totally prepare an intern or new teacher for the realities of the classroom. As a cooperating teacher, this presents a dilemma. There are certain pieces of information vital to the intern’s success, knowledge that will be needed as of the intern’s first lesson taught, as of his or her first interactions with students. Since in teaching, doing is learning, how can this information be imparted or its possession verified before the interns put themselves in front of thirty students ready to examine and test their every word, movement, glance, decision?

This is what makes the internship unique. An accountant knows his/her accounting skills, a dentist masters his/her dental care procedures. In the case of the apprehensive intern, however, (of whom a lack of apprehension would illustrate exactly my point - that no amount of book learning can actually illustrate or explain to a prospective teacher the extent of what (s)he is about to face), there are so many secondary factors which can negatively influence his or her even getting the chance to pass along the accumulated knowledge of twenty-plus years of living, so many factors which can effectively destroy any plan that any teacher (not just the intern) may have for a particular learning session.

For these reasons, a cooperating teacher must "tread softly," must ease the intern into this all-important exercise. An enjoyable internship experience can make all the difference between an intern ready to take on the challenges of his/her own classroom, or one who questions if (s)he is even cut out for the career into which (s)he has already invested so much time and money. It is through discussion and reflection regarding everything the intern observes and experiences, from the seemingly unimportant details such as who sits where or whether students should be allowed to go to the washroom to the seemingly more important, such as curriculum and teaching and questioning techniques, that the intern will grow to be ready to face the challenges ahead. No incident is too minor to be insignificant.

I must mention what I believe to be one of the most important lessons of the internship - the realization on the part of the intern that the school experience will not teach her everything there is to know, will not show her everything there is to see. An internship is, in large part, an unrealistic experience. Never again during her career will the young teacher have someone to "hold her hand," someone to have already established classroom and behavioral expectations with the students, someone to help her to prepare each and every lesson plan, someone to help her manage her classroom merely by his or her authoritative presence. What must be gained through the practice teaching is the ability to "roll with the punches," and the realization that he or she has chosen a rewarding career, but one in which there is nothing that is "never-changing."

What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Are there other ways of doing it?
Simple questions but where are the answers?
Will the art of reflection provide insights?

When a teacher engages in reflection...

She interrogates herself, questions her everyday practices;
She quarrels with her beliefs and her views;
She re-evaluates her instructional methodologies;
And boldly, courageously, redefines her philosophical paradigms!

She poses questions...she embarks on a quest for solutions.

Who creates the curriculum?

The Context and Introduction

Several recent reports on educational reform in this province provide a discourse on school improvement. The reports suggest the need for developing a positive school culture, since such a culture is necessary to attain the following outcomes:
 

• educational excellence
• high retention rate
• high graduation rate
• high achievement
• high employability of graduates, and
• school accountability.

The reports also talk about transmitting to students a set of personal, spiritual, cultural and critical values for citizenship and democracy. They also suggest that the school improvement process should be student centered and should take the developmental needs of students into account. For an in-depth review of the reports one should read Katherine Dundas' Master's thesis in which she critically evaluates many other points in those reports.

Following the discourse presented in the educational reform reports, I suggest we can talk about the need to develop reflective and critical internship cultures to attain goals set in the reports. Not only should the focus be on developing reflective and critical internship cultures, but such cultures should be built on the real and anticipated needs of teacher interns. After all, the internship exists mainly, if not solely, for teacher interns.

The way I see it, there are many internship cultures, and therefore I suggest that we should not think or talk about the culture of internship or a culture of internship. I say this because it is obvious that teacher interns grapple with multiple contextual and situational realities which constitute the total internship process.
 

For the purpose of discussion in this paper, I would like to mention three predominant cultures which the teacher interns and those who work with them during the internship process need to fully understand and learn about. These three cultures are:
 

• the culture(s) of partnership
• the culture(s) of collaboration
• the culture(s) of reflective and critical internship in teacher education.

It should be noted that each culture identified above can itself be conceptualized as having many sub-cultures, and so on. This is so because the total internship process and teacher education themselves are embedded in multiple and complex social, cultural, political, economic and organizational realities.

Before I discuss these three cultures, a few more general comments on the interns, the internship process, the school, and the society are in order.

Teacher Interns, the Internship Process, and School Improvement Initiatives

Both our own research and other research in these areas show that teacher interns will sooner or later inherit complex school and classroom cultures. In these contexts, as the reform reports points out, they at least would need to know the following:

1. How to translate provincial learning objectives with practical learning experiences in the classroom
2. How to prepare instructional plans
3. How to prepare lesson plans
4. How much time to spend on different tasks in classrooms
5. How to manage the classroom
6. Different teaching practices and strategies
7. The prescribed curriculum content
8. How to build a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy skills
9. How to persevere
10. The effort and time required for high achievement.

Preparation of programs for school is a very important task. Therefore, teacher interns should be able to prepare programs to be used in schools. The structure of these programs must provide their students a structure of intellectual skills which will include inquiry, inference, reflection, critical and creative decision working, analysis and evaluation. Moreover, these programs should enhance students' technological competence and prepare them as good citizens. Similarly, teacher interns also are expected to learn how to address and nurture students' physical, emotional, social, spiritual and moral needs.

In the final analysis, the school and the internship process are expected to produce educated persons in this province. The educated person, according to Learning for All: The Foundation Program Report (1996), is

The reports suggest several school improvement initiatives in order to produce educated populace. For example, the Challenge for Excellence Reports (1990) states:

A change process can be evolutionary or revolutionary. In democratic societies, an evolutionary change process is often more effective. This is accepted by the above report as it points out:

And it should also be realized that

The report recognizes important roles played by educational personnel and other partners in the change process. It states:

The discussion presented above clearly leads us to conclude that it is obvious that teacher interns have to learn an integrated approach to curriculum which allows them to do all the things mentioned above in the context of the school. These expectations held for the teacher interns clearly put great responsibilities on the shoulders of cooperating teachers, internship supervisors and school personnel. All these people, as partners, are expected to enable teacher interns to learn a lot. To meet this immense responsibility, a great deal of thinking, talking and doing is required. For it is through conversations with each other that we are able to resolve our problems critically, creatively, imaginatively and reflectively.

The Three Cultures of the Internship

A. The Partners and Their Cultures

I return now to the discussion of three internship cultures: cultures of partnership, cultures of collaboration and cultures of reflective and critical internship in education.

As discussed above, our schools are expected to produce well-rounded educated persons to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century and beyond. Such educated persons can not be produced without the help of various partners involved in creating, managing, implementing and evaluating the curriculum in schools and the internship process. Who are these partners? These partners are (the list is not meant to be exhaustive or in order of importance):
 

• The Department of Education and Training
• Newfoundland and Labrador School Boards' Association
• The schools
• The school councils
• The school districts
• The Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers’ Association and its various interest groups including SAC
• Memorial University
• The Faculty of Education
• Educational consultants from the Department of Education and Training
• Newfoundland and Labrador Home and School Federation
• Newfoundland Association of School Superintendents (SAC)
• School Administrators' Council
• Teachers and internship cooperating teachers
• Parents and their organizations (school councils)
• Program specialists.

All the partners have their own groups, organizations and cultures. There is a need to understand their cultures in a systematic way, if the goal is to improve our schools and educate the populace in a desired direction. This will require, among other things, creating new forms of institutions and communication networks so that we all can have pragmatic, open and endless conversations with each other. For it is through unending interactions with each other that we develop our self. The self in turn enables us to create new forms of knowledge. Based on new awareness we are able to imagine new societies and hope to create them through our actions.

B. Cultures of Collaboration

I have just identified many partners involved in the internship process in the previous section. Many of these partners regularly collaborate with each other to achieve certain educational outcomes in this province. For example, the school districts, the schools, the cooperating teachers, the internship supervisors, the teacher interns and the Faculty of Education collaborate in the delivery of the teacher internship program.

The point is that collaboration, as a form of interaction and conversation, creates its own culture. A great deal has been written in this area and the research is extensive. We have reviewed some of the research in this area and have produced "local knowledge" which shed light on what it means to be a cooperating teacher, internship supervisor and teacher intern in this province and what it means to collaborate with the Faculty of Education as the only institution of higher learning in this province. These meanings become part of the total internship culture, which in turn affect the degree to which the internship program in this province can be implemented successfully.

Therefore, we need to understand various elements of cultures of collaboration. We have, like many others, come to realize that any collaboration is based on trust, give and take (exchange), respect, care and continuous dialogue among all parties involved on an equal basis. It is based on a sense of humility among the participants, acceptance of differences and tolerance of many previously unheard voices. The "global village" built on the foundation of collaboration is not a village built on the unified voice of the people who live in it. This village defies any single true common canon. On the contrary, it is a village built on people's ability and skills in recognizing and incorporating into their daily actions the contradictory voices and experiences of many people who live in it. Collaboration is based on reciprocal exchanges in which participants feel empowered, enabled and socially mobile. It is based on a set of attitudes which encourages inclusion of all partners rather than their exclusion. Collaborative practices and life styles thrive on democratic principles of participation, fairness, justice and equality.

C. Cultures of Reflective and Critical Internship

Similarly, much is written on reflection, reflective and critical education and internship. A rich and extensive literature also exists in this area which links reflective education and internship to larger issues of social policy and nation-building. We have reviewed some of this literature and how it impacts on the locally generated internship process in this province.

Briefly, cultures of reflective and critical internship thrive on conversations of hope and possibilities. These cultures are capable of transcending discourses of despair, gloom and doom. Dooms day talk characterizes many of the education reform reports produced in this province and elsewhere. The reports use piles of statistics to create a profile of the educational system in this province in which very little good is seen to be happening. The numbers are used to create images of crises in society, rather than positively portraying the life styles of people in this province. The reports are more interested in creating an image of Newfoundland society which corresponds to the self-images of those who have produced those reports. Instead of re-affirming the self-images of many people in this province, the reports just do the opposite. More often than not they have become instruments of social policy which undervalues the self-confidence and self-concepts of people in this province.

On the contrary, cultures of reflective and critical education and internship aspire to build a democratic society and to encourage democratic living. These cultures do not shy away from the radical meaning inherent in the idea of democracy by adopting a cynical set of attitudes which re-inforce the idea that issues related to inequalities - social, political, cultural, economic and gender - are unproblematic, and therefore, need not be taken too seriously in education policy formulation and implementation

In addition, cultures of reflective and critical thinking in education encourage continued conversations among all members of society. They encourage unchecked (except for extreme hate speech) freedom of speech and communication in all forms, specifically they encourage previously nonheard and unrecognized voices to be heard and recognized through creating new safe spaces and rights.

Not only this, these cultures encourage all partners involved in the internship process to raise critical questions which challenge the existing status quo or one-dimensional thinking, e.g. schools should be changed to meet the demands of global economy and nothing else. Instead of seeing downsizing and school closure as the only solutions to problems created by a global economy and technological changes, reflective and critical cultures empower people to think in terms of the possibilities of creating new forms of communities, sets of relationships and desired goals.

The Need for Systemic Thinking

In order to understand these three cultures in a meaningful way, we need to resort to systemic thinking as a perspective. Through this perspective we can attempt to comprehend institutional and organizational contexts of the three cultures of the internship discussed above. A series of questions can be raised in achieving this goal. For example, we can start by asking the following questions:
 

• Are the organizations, where these culture are located, learning organizations?
• Do these organizations promote authentic dialogue?
• What kind of culture do these organizations, in fact, create, maintain, promote and perpetuate?
• What kind of cultures do they discourage?

As we all know, the internship process in this province has undergone a fundamental change. Dennis Treslan has presented the historical account of this transition in his article in an earlier issue of The Morning Watch.

The new model of the internship which has emerged in this province is called the Partnership Model of the internship. Andrea Rose discusses some of the characteristics of this model as they relate to reflective and to critical perspective in teacher internship.

My point is that we know very little of this new model. Therefore, we need to learn more about this partnership model through research and candid observations. We will be better served if we produce "local knowledge" about this model. In order to achieve this, cooperating teachers, internship supervisors and school personnel ought to make their observations of the internship process public. This they can do either through presenting their ideas at conferences, in-service programs or through writing in journals.

In addition, we should know the following:
 

• What kind of studies have been done by others about those three cultures, if any;
• What form of knowledge is available in linking those three cultures;
• Who has access to what form of knowledge, in relationship to various partners involved in the internship process?

For example, what do we publicly know:
 

• about cultures of the Department of Education in this province;
• about cultures of the school councils;
• about cultures of the NLTA;
• about cultures of program developers;
•  about cultures of consultants;
•  about cultures of school administrators;
•  about cultures of teachers at various levels in this province;
•  about cultures of the Education Faculty at Memorial University and other faculties at Memorial University;
•  cultures of schools in rural/urban areas of the province.

Linking the Three Cultures: A Proposal

We can build an effective internship process in this province by linking various cultures - cultures of partnership, cultures of collaboration and cultures of reflective and critical internship. This can be done through team building. If done properly, a team building process will create "locally" produced "cultures of teacher internship." This internship culture will enable us to produce an educated person in our province, as articulated in many recent reports on education reform published in this province. Some points made in those reports were discussed in this paper for the purpose of making this proposal.

A huge amount of research exists in the area of building teams. We have reviewed selected studies relevant to constructing a reflective and critical internship through team building in our article which was published in a previous issue of The Morning Watch.

Basically, as we all know, you cannot make people work together by just putting them together in a group. Team building requires systemic thinking and doing. Team building should be based on the experience of people who have tried to build various types of teams in the process of their professional work, as well as on the research done in this area.

In the final analysis, I believe we desperately need to be talking with each other endlessly about whatever we desire to do in our province. Patience, tolerance and an evolutionary perspective on change should be the central focus when we converse with each other. And we must always remember that it is mostly through conversations that we learn how to live together, how to build democratic communities, positive self-concept and caring relationship.

Doyle, C., Kennedy, W., Ludlow, K., Rose, A. and Singh, A. (1994). Toward building an effective and critical internship program (the QCIP Model): Theory and practice. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University.

Dundas, K. (1997/98). The construction of school curriculum and music education. The Master of Education Thesis. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University.

Singh, A., Rose, A., Doyle C. and Kennedy, W. (1996). Collaborative research and the voices of seconded teachers as internship supervisors. The Morning Watch, Vol. 23, # 3-4, Winter, pp. 65-79.

Treslan, D. (1997). The teaching internship at Memorial University. A university-school district partnership. The Morning Watch, Vol. 25, # 1-2, Fall (electronic issue). http://www.mun.ca/edu/faculty/mwatch/current.htm