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

“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.