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.