April 2, 2018 | UHCL Staff
For teachers looking to expand their career path in education in culturally diverse school districts, University of Houston-Clear Lake’s Multicultural Studies in Education M.S. with Bilingual or ESL and Special Education Specializations fills an ever-widening gap in area school districts.
“There is no other university in the region offering this degree including the specialization in special education,” said Professor of Bilingual and Multicultural Education and Program Coordinator Laurie Weaver. “With this degree, a teacher has his or her choice from all of the specializations.”
The degree, Weaver explained, is a master of science in multicultural studies. Within the degree, there are options to specialize in bilingual education, ESL, or bilingual special education. “Districts are asking for this more and more,” Weaver said. “Teachers with expertise in bilingual education and special education are in high need. The combination of both is in exceptionally high need, making an educator with this degree extremely marketable across school districts.”
Another highly marketable component of the degree is the ESL specialization. “Many districts are requiring teachers to get certified in ESL within their first year,” Weaver said. “This pertains to any teacher working with an English language learner. Nowadays, that’s nearly every teacher.”
She added that districts are in need of specialists who can work with children with special needs while working in the child’s first language, which tends to be Spanish. “UH-Clear Lake stands alone in offering a bilingual special education specialization among colleges in this region,” she said.
Weaver said that students in the bilingual or ESL program benefited greatly from receiving personalized attention from professors in small classes. “This degree plan was designed at an individual level,” she said. “I look at each student’s background and determine which classes they’ve done already, and direct them toward classes where they’ll gain necessary new information. Classes are chosen to match classes a student may have already taken that they do not need to take again, and to match their career aspirations.”
Classes also count for those seeking supplemental certification in bilingual, ESL, and special education. The summer course selections for this degree are as follows:
Job opportunities abound across school districts, particularly those with a high percentage of cultural diverse students. The Texas Education Agency reported that in 2015-16, Texas schools only had one ESL or bilingual teacher for every 46 students struggling with English. Nearly 1 million children across the United States are struggling with at least one learning disability and also need bilingual education services.
“With this master’s degree, an educator could be prepared to offer additional expertise to a bilingual, ESL or special education teacher, or become an academic coach or instructional specialist who implements the district’s curriculum and instruction,” Weaver said. “An educator could model lessons for classroom teachers, co-teach, or support teachers with their planning. Perhaps they wouldn’t be as much in the classroom as before, but they’d still be impacting students at all levels – mainly by strengthening teachers’ skills.”
For more information about registering and enrolling at UHCL, visit www.uhcl.edu/registrar/enrollment.
