According to conventional wisdom, there is little to celebrate and much to lament about the current state of teacher education. Lanier and Little (1986) succinctly made the "unequivocal" point: Teacher education coursework "remains casual at best and affords a poorly conceived collage of courses,. . .an assembly of disparate content fragments, [lacking] curricular articulation, [with] depth of study notice ably and consistently absent". Teacher education does not have a corner on this sorry state of fragmented learning; the National Education Association (1989) noted that most students "have no opportunity to grasp the interrelationship of knowledge from different fields, or to synthesize information and ideas" due to the "disjointed" nature of their studies.