Dear H-World,
I have recently been asked to weigh in on what I think the appropriate credentials would be for a high school teacher offering either World or American history courses for college credit through my institutions dual enrollment program. Our issue is that we are a regional insitution that serves many rural high schools, which translates into teachers who are asked to teach in a couple of different disciplines. So, our applicants for dual enrollment do not always have a degree in history. I am curious how other insitutions/states have handeled the matter? What types of credentials do you require of a teacher offering a dual enrollment course?
Thanks in advance,
E
5 Replies
Joshua Fahler
I teach AP World History at a suburban high school near Houston. Because of how Texas structures its courses, students may only take US History as a dual enrollment/dual credit course.
The local cooperating community college requires teachers to have a Master's in the subject area in order to teach the course. The school district asks the teacher to manage the classroom and take attendance while the professor teaches the material.
I'm not sure if this is realistic for a more rural setting, but I would imagine a Master's in the subject area would be required at the least.
-Josh
Kathryn Green
This is an important issue. At the university where I teach, which is a rural regional university facing the same issues, we come down on the side of requiring a Masters in History in order to teach a dual enrollment course in our program. The students in this course are going to be getting college credit from our university. Thus we don't see how offering a dual enrollment course with instructors who might not necessarily teach at the university level would be appropriate. We all know there are university teachers that we wonder about as well as high school history teachers who are quite capable of teaching at a college level. But the most policy-driven way to decide this issue is to require the teachers to have the minimal credentials which would allow them to teach at the university. I think that the regional university accreditation body would also require this.
Jim Rogers
Hi Eric,
I work at a regional baccalaureate university, with many rural high schools. My department insists that all of our Dual Enrollment courses have SACS-qualified instructors (Masters degree with 18 graduate credit hours in the discipline), the same as we demand from our adjunct instructors. We also insist that they use the department-required textbook. We've been doing DE for several years now, both at High Schools and HS students at the University in our courses directly. Generally, we've had good experiences with DE.
After all, the DE students are striving for college credit. So their instructor should be qualified to provide college-level instruction.
AP is of course different, given the testing criteria.
Happy to discuss this further. Hope that helped!
Jim Rogers
Professor of History
LSUA
Hugo Hernandez
Hi, Eric,
Dual enrollment appears to be a strategy to increase the Full Time Equivalent Student as enrollments drop due to a number of factors, one of which is the improved economy and rising minimum wage. In order to meet growth goals, our college is also seeking to offer courses off campus. The captive high school student has been deemed a potential audience.
Our community college district in California requires that the instructor teaching the college course through dual enrollment meet the Minimum Qualifications for the subject/discipline at the college itself. Since the classes are college courses and transferred as such the main difference is that they take place at the high school and not at the college. Here's a link to the Min Quals for California.
http://asccc.org/sites/default/files/Minimum_Qualifications_Handbook_for...(MB2)_020212.pdf
The main benefit to students, as I see it, is that they need not take the AP exam for the college credit.
Eric Martin
I just wanted to extend a note of thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to my query concerning qualifications for high school teachers teaching dual enrollment courses. I wanted to let you know that your comments helped to clarify my thinking on the matter.
We have been under some pressure, or so it seems to me, to have high school teachers without graduate degrees offer dual enrollment courses, as long as they are properly supervised by someone with the proper qualifications at the college, using the same text book etc... But we really have never had a clear set of standards and my institution's recent effort to put some stronger standards together, in part in order to pursue NACEP accreditation, is what prompted my original query.
Our issue seems to be less about increasing FTE's and more about the states desire to both increase the number of students who graduate with some kind of college certificate or degree, as well as to decrease the overall cost of higher ed. I am under the impression that dual enrollment courses are viewed as extremely cost effective from both the point of view of the student and the participating high school.
The fact that all the responses thus fall, on and off list, have stated that the same standards we would apply to an adjunct faculty member should apply to those teaching dual enrollment has been good for me, and my department, to hear.
I am curious if there are other departments that do not require a masters degree of those who teach dual enrollment courses and whether there are institutions where that seems to work just fine. I realize this might be considered a sensitive subject for some faculty/institutions, so feel free to respond off list. Although, there has been limited discussion on H-World for some time and it is good to see it revived.