Interdisciplinary teacher preparation programs that blend personnel standards from early childhood special education and early childhood education are being developed across the country. States are designing stand-alone blended teacher licensure programs in early education. This article describes a national study that explored and described characteristics of these newly conceptualized approaches to teacher preparation. Methods included quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis procedures. Findings indicate that there are many concerns and issues among faculty who are members of interdisciplinary teams in these new programs. The authors describe prominent issues in this emerging field of teacher preparation and provide a set of recommendations based on the literature and the findings from this study.

Early intervention and preschool special education coordinators in the 50 states and territories were interviewed about the current status of professional development in-service systems in their state. A definition consisting of 8 components of an in-service professional development system was used to analyze the state systems. Twenty Part C early intervention systems had professional development in-service training models that met the definition, and 23 preschool special education in-service systems met the definition. Results on selected findings are presented and discussed within the context of developing effective in-service professional development systems for the early intervention and preschool special education workforce.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has provided the impetus to educate all children in more inclusive settings. With the move toward inclusion has come the recognition that changes must occur in the manner in which teachers are prepared. Since the 1970s, efforts have been made to ensure that general educators have some content in their preservice preparation programs related to disabilities either through modifying existing courses or by adding special education courses to the curriculum. However, research suggests that such practices have not resulted in adequately prepared general educators for inclusive settings. A more recent early childhood education trend in preparing preservice students for inclusive settings is to unify general and special education curricula in universities/colleges. An overview of efforts toward unification and a summary of the limited research in this area are provided. The remaining articles in this topical section are introduced with a discussion of the need for further research related to unification.

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