New Campus Offers Chance to Address Teacher Training

For the California State University, our new Channel Islands site represents many exciting developments: what will become the first four-year public university in Ventura County, an unprecedented degree of participation from community members and a unique opportunity to revitalize a significant state resource.

But the main reason we have such high hopes for CSU Channel Islands is that we believe it will be a part of the solution to addressing urgent local needs. In particular, we will be targeting Ventura County’s need for more teacher training opportunities with a strong emphasis on teacher education in our emerging curriculum.

We know the need is there. For instance, California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing issued a total of 386 emergency permits in Ventura County for 1996-’97, and roughly 500 in 1997-’98. The fact that this number is large--and growing--causes alarm for many educators in the county.

At CSU Channel Islands, we believe we can offer a solution by providing greater access and convenience to people who want to become teachers or must finish their formal teacher training.

One of our most significant efforts on this front is the Transition from the Military to the Teaching Profession program (TMTP), which will begin this fall. This program will offer secondary teaching credential courses to civilians and military employees at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme. The courses will primarily be taught through distance learning technologies such as the Internet and interactive television broadcasts. Students will come to a studio classroom at the Channel Islands site to attend courses broadcast from Cal State Northridge.

This effort represents a significant development because the Cal State Northridge Off-Campus Center currently offers credential programs for K-6 education and for education administration, but not for secondary education. So through this program we will address a local need for secondary teaching credentials.

Of course, those programs will all come together as the CSUN Off-Campus Center transitions to become CSU Channel Islands.

In another important effort, CSU Channel Islands is participating in a consortium of CSU campuses to develop a distance-learning curriculum for teacher education adapted from materials originally created by the British Open University. Through this program, known as CalStateTeach, we hope to increase access while maintaining the high standards of quality established by the British model.

In addition, our Channel Islands leadership has been working in close cooperation with a consortium of K-14 educators who advise our team on local needs. We have listened closely to local educators as we continue to draw up plans for the university, and we plan to keep working together. In fact, we are working with the Ventura County superintendent’s office to host a teacher recruitment fair at our site in March.

This university owes its very existence to the long-caring concern of local community members, and for that reason, I believe that we should respond to local needs wherever they fit in with the university’s mission.

I received a very personal reminder of those needs in October, when I came to the campus site for the conveyance ceremony. A local farm worker came up to me afterward and told me that he had never had the chance to attend college, but that he dreamed that someday his children would attend CSU Channel Islands.

That conversation symbolized for me all that I had hoped our new campus could be. It should be a place where needs are met, doors are opened, and dreams are realized.

Our victory will occur in the classroom, and all of Ventura County will reap the rewards.