Full Description
Drawing together Smagorinsky's extensive research over a 20-year period, Learning to Teach English and the Language Arts explores how beginning teachers' pedagogical concepts are shaped by a variety of influences. Challenging popular thinking about the binary roles of teacher education programs and school-based experiences in the process of learning to teach, Smagorinsky illustrates, through case studies in the disciplines of English and the Language Arts, that teacher education programs and classroom/school contexts are not discrete contexts for learning about teaching, nor are each of these contexts unified in the messages they offer about teaching. He explores the tensions, not only between these contexts and others, but within them to illustrate the social, cultural, contextual, political and historical complexity of learning to teach. Smagorinsky revisits familiar theoretical understandings, including Vygotsky's concept development and Lortie's apprenticeship of observation, to consider their implications for teachers today and to examine what teacher candidates learn during their teacher education experiences and how that learning shapes their development as teachers.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Vygotsky and Concept Development
2. Methodological Implications of Taking a Vygotskian Approach to Teacher Development
3. An Updated Perspective on the Apprenticeship of Observation
4. Concept Development in Teacher Education Coursework and Practica
5. Cultures of Color and the Deep Structure of Schools
6. Fuzzy Concepts in Teacher Education and their Consequences in the Classroom
7. Policy, Practice, and Disruptions in Concept Development
8. School Settings and Course Assignments in Shaping Conceptions of Curriculum and Instruction
9. Competing Centers of Gravity within Settings of Learning to Teach
10. Learning to Teach Grammar at the Intersection of Formalism and Flexibility
11. Community Contexts and their Societal Settings, and How They Shape Practice
Conclusion
References
Index
