Learning to teach: A critical approach to field experiences: Second edition

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.