New Adult Degree program offers aspiring teachers night classes and field placements

Janel Shoun | 

  • If you would like to request more information on the K-6 Program, Click Here, to submit an on-line request.

With schools all over the nation scurrying to find qualified teachers, Lipscomb University has come up with an innovative way to provide an education degree to a new, largely untapped audience: adults working full-time but desiring to complete their bachelor’s degree.

By partnering with community non-profits to provide urban and diverse field placements in the nighttime hours, Lipscomb plans to reach out to an entirely new audience of potential teachers, said Candice McQueen, chair of the education department, which has worked with Lipscomb’s Adult Degree Program to develop the new degree completion program.

For individuals already working full-time, many in hourly jobs, education has traditionally been a very difficult major because it requires so many hours of field placement, usually in a classroom during daytime, working hours. Lipscomb’s traditional education program requires up to 35 hours of day-time field work in just one of its courses.

But the Adult Degree K-6 education major, to begin enrollment this fall, has been specifically designed to allow a student to fulfill a majority of the field placement requirements at night. Student teachers would practice tutoring, lesson planning or classroom management at a variety of local non-profit organizations such as Youth Encouragement Services, a youth mentoring program, or local Hispanic churches.

“Both of those organizations provide diverse settings and a variety of educational experiences at night,” said McQueen. “For our traditional students, we try to always place them in an urban setting and an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) setting. So these organizations will provide basically the same settings but at a time that is convenient for working adults.”

Adult Degree students would still have to perform a full-semester of student teaching that will be timed immediately before graduation. They will also still have to schedule some field experience during the day, but professors will help the students work it around their job schedule, McQueen said. “The majority of what they do can be done at night,” she said.

The new Adult Degree K-6 education program was developed as a way to reach a third audience of potential teachers that has not been addressed so far in Middle Tennessee, said Mike Hammond, dean of the education department. Lipscomb already offers an education bachelor’s program designed for traditional students and an accelerated master’s program designed for mid-career professionals who already have one degree but desire to become certified and earn a master’s degree at the same time.

The Adult Studies K-6 program will be ideal for people who would like to complete their bachelor’s degree and become certified to teach grades K-6. In fact, the program is designed to match the requirements for an associate’s degree in Tennessee’s community colleges to ease the transfer of credits, said Chuck Capps, assistant provost for adult learning.

A marketing study conducted this past spring revealed that the selection of majors in degree completion programs in Nashville is very limited – primarily business and generic liberal arts programs, Capps said. When students in degree completion programs were asked what other majors they would have liked to earn, education appeared as the top choice, according to the study.

“We quickly saw that making an education bachelor’s program available to working adults is a great opportunity for Lipscomb, which is always looking for new ways to serve. Our nation is in desperate need of teachers, and offering a new avenue to train teachers in Nashville is a truly valuable service,” Capps said.

Courses in the K-6 education program will be offered at night and on weekends. Adult Degree students must have 66 hours of college credit (a rising junior) to enter the K-6 program, although additional hours can be earned at Lipscomb prior to enrolling in the program. Students will proceed through the program in cohorts and complete the accelerated, 66-hour program in a little more than a year.

An information session on the program will be held at 6 p.m., Monday, Aug. 27, at the Ezell Center chapel, on the Lipscomb campus at One University Park Drive. To learn more about the program and the information session, call 615.966.5948 or log on to http://adultdegree.lipscomb.edu.

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