Ip 95-1

IP 95-1 Page 1 This is the story of teacher trainees in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) alternative training program during a labor dispute. The individual stories highlight the stress a labor dispute places on prospective teachers who are not yet full-time teachers but also not the traditional transitory student teachers from a university teacher education program. In the dispute the trainees had three logical paths to choose regarding possible actions they could take. I describe the trainees’ postdispute justifications, the trainees’ views on professionalism, and how the trainees perceived the dispute affecting their progress in the program. After these descriptions I speculate on what these trainees learned from the labor dispute experience. Finally, I turn attention to what we might learn from this story. This final step is important because teacher educators claim that prospective teachers should have long-term and sustained exposure in schools if we are to produce better teachers. Teacher preparation programs, which require that trainees 1 have a sustained presence in the schools, raise new issues about the trainee’s status in that school community.