UCA and Hendrix College announced a partnership within the Bears’ Master of Arts in Teaching program on June 20, allowing Hendrix students to begin the program online while still working toward their undergraduate degree.
Department Chair of the Master of Arts in Teaching and Associate Professor, Debbie Dailey, said, “Our MAT program is a teacher licensure program, and it’s usually for someone that, say they got a degree in biology but they didn’t get a license to teach, they can come back and get in our MAT program, and they can earn their licensure to teach, and also while getting a master’s degree.”
Dailey said that Hendrix does not have a college of education, so many students are left without a way to earn their licensure in teaching.
“We are just so excited about the partnership,” Rynnett R. Clark, instructor of education and coordinator of career connections at Hendrix, said, “Hendrix had an education program for many years where we did teacher licensure, and we’ve always just been so excited to be able to send students with a good liberal arts background out into the teaching world. But it’s for a smaller institution. It is hard to have all those pieces in place that are involved for licensure. So with UCA being, you know, a leading teaching college, we were so happy to be able to partner with them and have an opportunity for our students to be able to do licensure again.”
Hendrix first met with UCA about the partnership in spring of 2023.
Dailey said, “The provost of their university [Teresa A. Garrett] reached out to our dean, Vicky Grove Scott, and they started the meetings, the collaboration and then they brought me in to kind of do the details. They just recognized the need, and they reached out to us, and we were able to figure it out.”
While Clark hopes to see the partnership up and running by spring 2025, Hendrix currently has a senior running a test trial of the program.
Clark said, “This student said, ‘Hey, I’d be willing to be your test pilot.’ And so UCA was great and said, ‘Let’s give it a try. Let’s see if we can do this.’ And so anyway, he is testing things this semester too, and hopefully will give us some good feedback on how things are going, what we can do to make things run more smoothly.”
Senior Derian Robbins, the single student in the program this fall, said that the experience has been “a great one.”
“I am finding great support from both campus professors. It is something that is building character as I prepare for the future and very exciting,” Robbins said.
Although the time management and stress of being in the program have been a challenge, Robbins has already begun experiencing the benefits of the program.
The biggest benefit has been the number of connections it has provided to both campuses,” Robbins said. “I am finding new resources at Hendrix that I never knew about and of course, built new bridges with professors at UCA. Being at both campuses gives double the resources I can reach out to and rely on.”
UCA President Houston Davis said he isn’t sure what’s next. However, he is open to more partnerships.
“I can see Morrilton, Hendrix, CBC [Central Baptist College], and UCA doing a lot more things in partnership as well. It only makes sense,” Davis said.
Davis said that UCA is also currently in communication with the University of Arkansas School of Law in Little Rock about a possible partnership.
“The state of Arkansas is in need of more K-12 teachers,” Davis said. “I mean, that’s something that the state of Arkansas is looking to the entirety of post-secondary education in universities, public and private, to be able to help with that, and community colleges, too, to get people into the pipeline.”