Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach (SUNY Series, Teacher Empowerment and School Reform) - Softcover

Deborah P. Britzman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791405699 ISBN 13: 9780791405697

Publisher: State University of New York P, 1991

Synopsis

“Centering on the lived experiences of student teachers, this book sends out rays of surprising light towards the enterprise of teacher education today. Doing so, it transfigures what is often conceived of as a nesting of commonplaces.

“This book will make the life of the educator harder and more tonic; it will urge the reader to confront the contradictory and the tension. But it will also disclose the unexpected. Education will be viewed as if, after all, it can be otherwise.” ― From the Foreword by Maxine Greene

Practice Makes Practice explores the contradictory realities of secondary teaching and how these realities are interpreted and acted upon by its central actors: student teachers, teachers, school administrators, and university educators. Drawing on the traditions of critical theory, Practice Makes Practice is distinguished by its ethnographic account of teaching as a struggle for voice and identity amidst a cacophony of past practices, lived experiences, cultural myths, and normative discourses. The struggles of particular student teachers and their professional network are richly portrayed in case studies that trace how individual participants come to make sense of learning to teach, the problems of pedagogy, and structural constraints. For those learning to teach, this text can provide insight into their own struggles. Experienced teachers may gain insight into their own socialization. And researchers and teacher educators may reconsider the structure of their work and how the process of socialization can be studied and interpreted.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"While the research on teacher education continues to proliferate, Practice Makes Practice remains the discipline's indispensable classic text. Drawing upon critical ethnography, this new edition of this best-selling book asks the question, what does learning to teach do and mean to newcomers and to those who surround them? Deborah P. Britzman writes poignantly of the struggle for significance and the contradictory realities of secondary teaching. She offers a theory of difficulty in learning and explores why the blaming of individuals is so prevalent in education. The completely revised introduction presents a refined and further developed theoretical framework and analysis that Britzman provided in the original edition, discussing why we might return to a study of teaching and learning. Also included in this updated edition, is an insightful "hidden chapter" that comments on the methodology of the study and some of the dilemmas the author continues to face as her own thinking develops around the issues of representing teaching and learning for those just entering the profession."

About the Author

Deborah P. Britzman is Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York P
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0791405699
• ISBN 13: 9780791405697
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 310