‘Kind of degrading’
As word of the program pause spread, School of Education students launched a public plea for the university to reverse course.
Macwana and his cohort have launched a social media campaign and online petition, while also spending their days in Philadelphia classrooms.
Macwana is currently a student teacher at Science Leadership Academy. He said he hadn’t initially planned to pursue teaching, but after one elective course, he “fell in love with the program and the content.”
He compared teacher preparation at Drexel to a medical residency, beginning with observation and reflection in the field and building up practical experience over months of work in schools during junior and senior year.
Macwana said he was caught by surprise by the plan to pause the major and said the decision illustrates a disparity in academic fields at Drexel. He said the humanities fields see less attention than science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, and though his chosen field combines both, the teaching side is now losing out.
Throughout the years, Macwana has taken some School of Education courses through the online option, which he said is robust but should not be the only choice.
One significant difference is that online students are part-time and do not complete a co-op experience, although they do complete the student teaching requirement. Most Drexel undergraduates of all majors are required to complete a co-op, and the in-person elementary education majors spend several months working full-time in schools.
“Online is a way to learn. It shouldn’t be the only way to learn. Especially since we value our hands-on experience so much,” Macwana said.
As he nears graduation, he said his in-person Drexel education puts him at an advantage compared to most.
“I feel like the reason why this shortage exists … is because we’ve haven’t given teachers or pre-teachers, student teachers, the experience that they need for their job,” Macwana said.
His colleague, Sam Ramos, a junior who is currently working her co-op, is also campaigning to save the in-person elementary education major.
She works full days assisting in a classroom at Samuel Powell School on Drexel’s campus and heard about the program pause from a professor over the summer.
“We never received an official message from the university that the major is closing,” Ramos said.
She also described the decision as abrupt.
“It’s just kind of degrading in a bit, because it just seems like they didn’t even fight for it, and it seems like they didn’t get student opinion,” Ramos said. “It just seems like they made the decision and they’re like, ‘Okay, it’s done.’”
She and her cohort have started a social media campaign in protest. One video on their Instagram account includes testimony from three School of Education alumni who are now working teachers in Philadelphia. They said Drexel got them into classrooms “almost immediately” and provided support for them to be successful in their local schools.
Another video features testimony from parents and kids in K-Bridge, a five-week summer program that employs School of Education majors to help preschoolers adjust to kindergarten.
Programs like K-Bridge connect prospective teachers to Philadelphia schools and families, and Ramos said the community can’t afford to lose even a small number of well-trained professionals who are eager to teach.
“I feel like Drexel is really producing high-quality teachers, and the fact that they’re trying to pause it is just not going to help the community at all,” Ramos said.