The Overwhelmed Generation and Foreign Language Teacher Preparation: Developing Strategies to Work with the Mental Health Challenges of Preservice Teachers

Abstract: For the last two decades the foreign language education profession has spent considerable energy establishing professional guidelines for foreign language teacher preparation. This article discusses research that suggests that the profession should now direct its energies toward developing protocols to assist preservice teachers whose mental health challenges place them at risk in their quest to become foreign language teachers. Further, the article discusses why teacher educators are ill prepared to cope with the substantial mental health issues undergraduates currently face. Examples are presented from a teacher education program that modified its supervision process to facilitate the development of strategies for coping with the Stressors related to foreign language teaching in particular. Suggestions are made for research and policy changes to meet the mental health needs of current and future novice foreign language teachers. Key words: mental health, student teaching, supervision of instruction, teacher education, teacher stress Language: Relevant to all languages Introduction A few weeks before the end of spring semester 2006, a series of tornados struck the campus and downtown area where I teach. After a week of controlled chaos and purposeful clean up, we all marveled at the power and grace of Mother Nature, and we celebrated our luck in escaping what might have been a tremendous tragedy. As a result of the storms and deferred maintenance, 1 faced the reality of having to move out of my office so refurbishing and repairs could be done. In packing more than 50 boxes of files, books, realia, and the clutter of years of research and teaching, I discovered I had collected reams of student teacher observations, program evaluations, and journals. The genesis of this article came from the personal and professional need to synthesize the changes found in the artifacts collected on foreign language student teaching experiences. During this process it became clear to me that over the years there were tangible differences in the quantity and quality of descriptors used in illustrating the student teaching experience. The modifications in the reports were not as transparent as noting what national standards the lessons were addressing or what level of language proficiency the student teachers possessed; the changes were the addition of categories describing the status of preservice teachers' mental health. This article, therefore, was born of the need to open dialogue and inspire the research that is necessary if we are to develop specific strategies to work with preservice foreign language teachers whose mental health issues place them at risk. In general, these college students are academically competent and have experienced sound teacher preparation, but they lack the strategies necessary for coping with the Stressors found in teaching. The profession should be concerned about this issue because the ongoing shortage of competent language teachers has forced some secondary language programs to close (Byrnes, 2005). We need competent, enthusiastic foreign language teachers to staff our programs, and adjusting our programs to the changing mental health of our students is necessary to accomplish this goal.1 For the latter half of the 20th century and in the beginning of this century, we have been working under the common assumptions that teachers are developed and not born, and that it is the charge of higher education-and specifically departments, schools, and colleges of education-to develop teachers (Labaree, 2004). Additionally, it is understood that teaching languages, or for that matter any other discipline, involves mastering knowledge about a discipline and developing pedagogical content knowledge. Further assumptions are that preservice teachers gain knowledge about teaching from their experiences as students, through teacher preparation programs, and in their first three years of practice; this is called teacher learning (Fullan, 2001). …