Chapter 1: History of the Faculty Technology Mentoring Program

As schools and colleges of education work to meaningfully integrate technology into their curricula, the major challenge is clearly the need to educate faculty in the area of technology use. Even the challenge of acquiring equipment appears smaller than the challenge of working with faculty. In the early 1990s, members of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Iowa State University began to develop approaches to working with faculty to assist in their use of technology throughout the teacher education program. The stories related in this book all come from work in the early years of the 21st century; yet they are grounded in the early history of the department’s efforts to integrate technology throughout the program. In this chapter, I will tell the story of the early years in order to set the context for the cases described in later chapters. The context described is an essential piece in understanding the mentoring program. Part of this context is the fact that the stories related in this book come out of a mentoring program that has been in existence for fourteen years. The long history and the lessons learned from this program will be useful to other programs in the early and middle stages of developing faculty mentoring programs.