Disturbing Practice: Reading Teacher Education as Text(v. 8 Higher Ed)

Disturbing Practice: Reading Teacher Education as Text is a critical study of learning to teach. Following six prospective teachers through their twelve-month university- and practicum-based experiences, Avner Segall explores how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible in preservice education and what they, in turn, make possible for those learning to teach. Using critical lenses to disturb current practices of teacher education, this book extends traditional explorations of how prospective teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in teacher education classrooms to an examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. In doing so, this book highlights and critically engages a variety of issues in teacher education to bring more of what is (and what is not) done in preservice education into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education. What and how is it that prospective teachers learn, do not learn, and learn not to learn in preservice education? How do the structures, discourses, and practices of teacher education operate to invite prospective teachers to learn some things rather than others? What implications do the above have for prospective teachers' own learning in institutions of higher education and for the kind of learning they provide when they become teachers of others?

About the Author :
The Author: Avner Segall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His scholarship combines critical theory and pedagogy, teacher education, and social/cultural studies.

Review :
Avner Segall's critical ethnography, Disturbing Practice, not only offers an important and provocative challenge to taken-for-granted practices within teacher education programs, but also refocuses the debate over teacher education reform. Segall makes a convincing case for developing a pedagogy of theorizing as opposed to a pedagogy of theory. It sharpens the way we think about the theory/practice relationship. (Peter McLaren, Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles) If, as Segall argues, there is no official story of teacher education, reading its conflictive narratives and arguments made from this world offers occasions to interpret its dreams. Segall suggests something urgent about those dreams: those who live and work in this world lose and find relevance from a strange combination of program design, a sea of details that may or may not be helpful, misconceptions over the uses of theory and practice, and the desires on the part of everyone to be seen as competent, even as they experience the 'disruptions' called learning. Indeed, readers will meet surprising disruptions made from learning to teach and from its study: arguments over the nature of knowledge, perspective, and identity; contradictions made from the work of tying critical pedagogy and worrying about its consequences; and confrontations with what comes to count as multiculturalism, justice, and history in social studies education. Readers are offered new ways to conceptualize what theorizing research in critical pedagogy can mean. Somewhere between the insistences of theory and practice and between knowledge and desire, dreams of critical pedagogy for those learning to teach are lost and found. (Deborah P. Britzman, Professor of Education and Socialand Political Thought, York University, Toronto)