Contract Staff in Preservice Teacher Education

Staff with a limited-term appointment, whether part-time or full-time, are being used increasingly in teacher education today. This raises the question of how it is possible to offer a balanced preservice program when only a small proportion of the staff are permanent academics with a career commitment to formal theory development. In this paper we first describe a program that has attempted to resolve aspects of this problem by means of a cohort and faculty-team approach. We then report on a study we conducted with contract staff from this program on their experiences in the program and their perceived effectiveness in their role.