title: A Study of a Portion of the Distributive Education Teacher Preparation Program at Utah State University
Creators: name: Dixon, Darrel Q.
Publisher: name: Utah State University
Year: 1972

description: The major purpose of distributive education is to prepare the student for entry-level employment in distributive occupations. This preparation should help workers become successful and advance in their chosen field of distributive occupations.
No matter how instruction is organized, when it is identified as vocational distributive education, there are no differences in the results desired. Students are to be able to meet employment qualifications with the confidence and the competencies necessary to begin marketing and management careers.
To meet this goal, the student should qualify himself to receive satisfaction and contentment in his work. Sidney P. Marland's deep expression in our educational process was expressed as follows:
We cannot risk longer this bitter experience of perhaps 50 percent of our young people--black and white--completing school with a euphemistic "general " education that has no relevance to college, little relevance to job entry, and no relevance whatever to the young person in school. The emergence of the comprehensive high school, properly defined and implemented, carries the ultimate solution to this problem. Among the radical changes that may derive, if we truly mean to take the problem seriously, is the feasibility of having every high school student engage for at least a semester in a genuine work-study program giving dignity and worth to work in its largest sense. Somewhere down this road the term "relevance" may find its place in the high school program.
Relevance in the distributive education program can best be assured when the distributive teacher-coordinator is competent in the critical areas of instruction and in the professional and technical objectives. The distributive teacher-coordinator is the key factor in the student's success in achieving career preparation. Haines mentions among other qualifications that the teacher-coordinator must be "a successful employee who knows a trade and the language of the trade . "
Only when the teacher-coordinator is competent in the general areas of distributive occupations will he be qualified to counsel and teach the student with success and understanding. Since the teacher-coordinator must be well qualified to achieve success, educators have been giving consideration to the curriculum taken by the prospective teacher-coordinator to see if the institutions charged with the responsibility of training future educators are fulfilling the suggested needs in this preparation.
"' Relevant ' Teaching regardless of the subject matter , also depends on clearly specified instructional goals .. Curricular revision, especially in a society as fast paced as ours, must be constant; it will never be completed. " The necessity is to evaluate the curriculum being offered in the universities to determine if the course content being taught to the future teacher-coordinator meets their job requirements. According to Wallace, there is need to review and evaluate the requirements for undergraduate distributive education majors at Utah State University.