Pergamon Teaching & Teacher Education, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp, 519-530, 1995 Copyright @ 1995 Else&x Science Lfd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0742~51X(95)00007~ 0742451X/95 $9.50+0.00 zyxwvutsrqpon EDUCATIONAL RENEWAL IN AN ALTERNATIVE TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM: EVOLUTION OF A SCHOOL-UNIVERSITY PA RTNERSHIP MARTHA ALLEXSAHT-SNIDER, JAMES G. DEEGAN, and C. STEPHEN WHITE The University of Georgia, U.S.A. Abstract-Can the discontinuities inherent in school-university partnerships become generative sources of educational change? The purpose of this study was to analyze how participants viewed an evolving collaboration and the ways in which discontinuities between school and university agendas were negotiated. Findings over the 3-year period from interview, questionnaire, and journal data indicate patterns of changing roles and relationships between and among university faculty, cooperating teachers, and student interns. The findings indicate that as participants negotiated a common agenda for teaching and curricular improvement, a spiralling process of educational renewal in schools and university emerged The reform of teaching and teacher education is a pervasive theme in American education today. Rooted in the legacies of the major reports and special commissions of the 1980s (Adler, 1982; Boyer, 1983; Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986; Goodlad, 1984; Sizer, 1984; The Holmes Group, 1986; The National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), reform initiatives have proven diffusive and generative agencies of change in teaching and teacher education. One sustaining legacy of the critical reports of teaching and teacher education in the 1980s is the emergence of local school- university partnerships committed to education- al renewal throughout the U.S.A. Contrasting with some current reform initiat- ives, school-university partnerships generally do not focus on scapegoating teachers and teacher education as sources of declining achievement in American education. Similarly, school-univer- sity partnerships do not advocate raising admis- sion standards to teacher education programs, extending program length, and differentiating jobs as a panacea for the ills in teaching and teacher education (Bullough & Gitlin, 1989; The Holmes Group, 1990). School-university part- nerships take as their touchstone the concept of collaboration. Carriuolo (1991) defined collabor- ation as an enabling opportunity for “a wide range of activities honoring the skills, knowledge, and talents of individuals from both institutions in collaborative, complementary ways” (p. 20). Herein lies the kernel of school-university part- nerships; they share a belief in the mutually reinforcing and irreducible dynamics of teaching and teacher education (Carriulo, 1991; Cochran- Smith, 1991a, 1991b; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, 1992, 1993; Fullan and Hargreaves, 1992; Gitlin, 1990; Gross, 1988; Lytle & Cochran- Smith, 1991, 1992; Sirotnik & Goodlad, 1988). A proliferation of teacher education reform efforts have resulted in a diversity of approaches to what Cochran-Smith (1991a, 1991b) describes as the process of “teaching against the grain.” Cochran-Smith provides a useful heuristic ex- planatory framework for all those wrestling with the diffusive characteristics of teacher education reform efforts. She argues that three contrasting relationships-consonance, critical dissonance, and collaborative resonance-characterize the Portions of this paper were presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco. The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation. 519