Question:
I think that besides an appropriate degree, employers are probably going to be interested in your ability to handle yourself in front of a classroom. So they will be looking for previous teaching experience.
That's probably an area where distance education is at a real disadvantage. Many residential graduate programs provide their students with graduate teaching assistantships and other teaching practice.
So, do any of you educators out there have suggestions about how this experience may be obtained by a DE student? Here's an idea that I had:
I've noticed that some local adult education programs are open to individuals volunteering to teach classes in areas where they have knowledge. So a CS graduate student could probably teach a layman's intro to computers at a high school district's adult ed program, or an MBA student could do something on investments, or a humanities student like me could teach an art history class for senior citizens or something.
It would be something to put in a resume and could be a source of recommendations. Do any of you out there think that a community college district would buy that? If not, what do you suggest?
Answer:
Teaching an adult evening course is an excellent idea, although if one is seeking, say, a professional or college-level teaching position, most schools will want to see college-level teaching experience.
You'd be surprised, however - many colleges are willing to allow a distance education student to teach a course as an internship, especially if the price is right (like *free*).
This won't work for everyone, but here's what I did for my own internship . . . When I did my M.A. program at Vermont College of Norwich University, I began to utilize local academic libraries in the Philadelphia area as a resource. Since my field was interdisciplinary, I would regularly use different legal, medical, and theological libraries, one of which was at Biblical Theological Seminary, a regionally accredited school in Hatfield, PA (which has since become accredited by ATS, the DoEd/CHEA-approved accreditor for graduate programs in theology, as well).
By the time I entered my Ph.D. program at The Union Institute, I had gotten to know the library staff pretty well, and I put out a feeler to teach a course at BTS for my doctoral internship. I offered my services free, as I was getting academic credit from The Union Institute. I wrote a syllabus and outline for "First Amendment Religious Issues," a course in constitutional and liability law for pastoral and counseling students, and it was presented to and approved by the academic dean as an evening graduate credit course. The upshot was that I remained at BTS as an adjunct professor for the next six years, and the only negative was that I was told, at the beginning, that I would not be invited on as a full-time faculty member - not because I held a nontraditional degree, but because I did not have a Master of Divinity degree. Professional schools tend to be constipated that way. If you want to teach in a seminary full time you need an M.Div., if you want to teach at an ABA-approved law school you need a J.D., etc. As it was, I was able to respond that I had no desire to teach there full time, and was able to impress them as a bourgeois academic snob that had something to offer that they didn't have already and that would set *them* apart from the crowd.
