*Teacher Education Programs IDENTIFIERS Ecological Perspective; *Field Based Programs

This qualitative study used an ecological approach to explore teacher education students ' experiences in elementary learning environments and the meaning placed upon those experiences by the students. Participating in the study were 24 university students in their first quarter of a field-based teacher preparation program. Data were obtained from 11 of the students ' focused journal entries. Journal entry texts were analyzed and categorized as illustrating one of six characteristics of classrooms: immediacy, publicness, history, multidimensionality, unpredictability, and simultaneity. Further analysis focused on finding patterns that emerged from the classroom characteristics. Findings suggested that many classroom experiences reflected elements of more than one characteristic and that the characteristics were not independent of one another. Stories from students' journals highlighted the ways students encountered and experienced the elementary classroom environments. Discussion of the findings focused o