Learning to teach

Learning to Teach: A Critical Approach to Field Experiences offers a collection of classroom and school-based activities, observations, and exercises that instructors can slot into any course that includes fieldwork. Its aim is to help preservice and in-service teachers reflect critically on themselves, on the cultures of the classrooms they are assigned to, and on the wider school around them.

The book stands apart from other field experience guides in several ways. Its observations of everyday school life are framed through critical, feminist, and poststructuralist thought. Rather than treating students as passive recorders, it asks them to become active, critical researchers of classroom practices and processes. It also supplies a coherent framework for examining the structural and cultural dimensions of schooling, along with exercises for looking at how race, class, gender, and culture intersect in real school settings.

Central to the text is a rethinking of the field experience itself. Traditionally, students are asked to act as objective, neutral observers, on the assumption that immersion in classroom life will reveal the truth about teachers, learners, knowledge, and school routines. This book questions that assumption. It encourages readers to examine schools and the politics of schooling with a critical eye, and to become more aware of their own attitudes toward education and their place within its processes.