Presenter: Isabelle Furgeson
Authors: Isabelle Furgeson, Beth Cutrer-Párraga, Erica Miller, Stefinee Pinnegar, Kendra Hall-Kenyon, Barbra Smith, Jasmine Boyle, Heidi Bussey
Faculty Advisor: Beth Cutrer-Párraga
Institution: Brigham Young University
Compared to other education professions, special education (SPED) has the highest rate of teacher attrition (Billingsley & Bettini 2019). Annually 13% of special educators leave teaching, twice that of general educators (Wong et al., 2017). Among other issues, high rates of SPED teacher attrition negatively impact students with disabilities when teachers carry heavier caseloads (Hagaman and Casey, 2018). When teachers are overloaded with responsibility due to consequences of attrition, students are not given the attention needed from their SPED teacher. With the drastic shortage of special education professionals, research has explored factors contributing to teachers leaving the field, including teacher preparation programs (Billingsley & Bettini 2019). Consequently, this study explores how top universities’ online program descriptions represent their SPED program in an attempt to entice prospective students to attend their school and enroll in that university’s SPED preservice teacher program. This study incorporated positioning theory (e.g. position, storyline, and illocutionary force) as a methodology to better understand how top university SPED teacher education programs position both themselves and students. Eight top university special education program descriptions were selected for the study. Using positioning theory, program descriptions were analyzed by a team of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate researchers. The positions, storylines, and illocutionary forces represented in the discourse of the program descriptions invited prospective special education students to invoke ways of being and understandings about themselves (Davies & Harre,1999). Findings suggest top university special educations programs typically invoke prestige as a primary storyline. Top university special education programs that invoked prestige as a primary storyline positioned future students as researchers, and advocates for individuals with disabilities, rather than teachers. These findings indicate a mismatch between recruitment of special education teachers to teacher education programs and special education teacher attrition. Implications for practice will be discussed.