Introduction

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 11 world 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 thoroughly updated.