Learning to Teach: A Critical Approach to Field Experiences

This text is designed to assist preservice and inservice teachers in creating a critical and reflective dialogue with themselves, their assigned classroom cultures, and the larger school environment. It engages readers in a series of classroom and school-based activities, observations, and exercises that can be used in any teacher education course with a field component.

Different from other field experience guides, this text aims to disrupt traditional conceptions of teacher education and field experiences-by emphasizing the problematic nature and dynamics of public schooling, and encouraging readers to seek a greater awareness of their own attitudes toward and connections with these educational processes.

Learning to Teach: A Critical Approach to the Field Experience, Second Edition: *dramatically reconceptualizes the field experience by asking preservice and inservice teachers to be active and critical researchers of classroom practices and processes; *provides a coherent framework for analyzing both structural and cultural aspects of schooling; *provides specific exercises to help preservice and inservice teachers evaluate and understand the intersections of race, class, gender, and culture in"real life" school settings; and *grounds the observations of everyday school life within critical, feminist, and poststructuralist discourses.

New in the Second Edition: A new section,"No Child Left Untested," has been added to help preservice teachers explore the implications of a very changed post-September 11world in which xenophobia, violence, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy have taken on new meanings. The introduction to the book as a whole, the section introductions, the retained activities in existing sections, and the references have been throughly updated.

Book Details

• Authors: Natalie G. Adams, Christine Mary Shea, Delores D. Liston, Bryan Deever
• Publisher: Routledge
• eBook ISBN: 9781135602574, 1135602573
• Print ISBN: 9781138136205, 1138136204
• Other ISBNs: 9780805854701, 9781410617323, 9781135602536, 9781135602581