Learning to Teach: Critical Approach to Field Experiences

Learning to Teach: A Critical Approach to Field Experiences engages readers in a series of classroom and school-based activities, observations, and exercises which can be used in any course with a field component. It is designed to assist preservice and in-service teachers in creating a critical and reflective dialogue with themselves, their assigned classroom cultures, and the larger school environment. Different from other books on the topic of field experiences, this text:
* grounds the observations of everyday school life within critical, feminist, and poststructuralist discourses;
* dramatically reconceptualizes the field experience by asking preservice and in-service 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; and
* presents specific exercises to help preservice and in-service teachers evaluate and understand the intersections of race, class, gender, and culture in "real life" school settings.

At the heart of this book is a reassessment of the notion of the field experience--which, typically, asks the student to take the position of an "objective" and "neutral" observer of classroom practices. The underlying assumption is that this kind of immersion in "what goes on in the field" will provide some form of truth about the reality of teachers, learners, the nature of knowledge and the subject matter, and classroom life. This text disrupts this conception of teacher education and field experiences by helping preservice and in-service teachers to take a critical look at, and reflect on, schools and the politics of schooling. As the problematic nature and dynamics of public schooling are emphasized, readers can seek a greater awareness of their own attitudes toward, and connections with, these educational processes.