Innovating in the Margins of Teacher Education: Developing a Bridging Program for Internationally Educated Teachers

This paper discusses our recent and current work efforts to offer a unique form of ongoing teacher education and development designed explicitly for Internationally Educated Teachers (IETs), what might be considered a type of in-service education. We will share our research involving experiences of IETs as they tried to find a program for teacher certification in Alberta. We go on to describe aspects of the program’s curriculum such as its framework and development including the organization of field experiences/practicum. We intend to share what we learned from the IETs who have volunteered to be a part of a research project being conducting alongside program development. Here, we provide a review of the limited but valuable research from other Canadian bridging programs and integrate that with our own work. We conclude with a discussion of the most significant changes we’ve made to practices at the University of Alberta and share our hopes for continued development of the program and its research. Finally, we raise the provocative issue of sustainability and outline tensions with what we call  working in the margins of teacher education.