Extensively updated and revised, this new edition urges teachers to engage in the debate about educational research by undertaking meaningful research themselves. Kincheloe argues that only by engaging in complex, critical research will teachers rediscover their professional status, empower their practice in the classroom and improve the quality of education for their pupils.
This book addresses a number of salient issues related to foreign language (FL) teaching, learning, and acquisition. Its ultimate goal is to help prospective FL teachers understand the theories and practices in FL education while making such connection more accessible. The selection of topics has been made considering primarily their relevance in the learning-acquisition process of second language (L2) learners and the challenge they pose to beginning FL teachers and interns (student-teachers).
This book is the result of a year-long research project conducted during 1999–2000 at East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, in collaboration with four experienced FL high school teachers from the same region. This project was funded by the Schools’ Partnership Grant and the BellSouth Foundation. The main contribution of this book to the FL profession is the integration of the theoretical and practical planes. Both the knowledge of researchers and the voices of experienced FL teachers are brought together. This link aims at helping ease the tension that beginning teachers and interns experience when they move from the FL methods course into the real FL classroom. This connection, in turn, will provide FL interns with a realistic view of FL education.
This book shares with prospective and in-service teachers information about learning and teaching reading, writing, and thinking in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms and communities. The underlying and recurrent thread throughout the book is the necessity for teachers to examine every instructional practice from the perspective of the culturally and linguistically diverse learner. This is a difficult task because prospective teachers and in-service teachers must "let go" of many concepts and practices they themselves experienced as students. Thus, the goal of this book is to inform and challenge English-speaking teachers who will be teaching English literacy to linguistically and culturally diverse students.
However, the focus on English literacy development does not imply advocacy for "English only" or even English as a second language (ESL) as the primary mode of literacy instruction. I have written elsewhere about the importance and benefits of first or native literacy development. In this book, I and the contributing authors assume a position that learners need to develop literacy in their native language and that the concepts and skills learned in developing the native language create a foundation of strength from which students can develop English literacy.
The first part of this book charts and analyzes the working days of 326 primary school teachers. It shows how they spent their working lives, the nature of the curriculum they taught, and analyzes their work into five main categories: Teaching, Preparation, Administration, Professional Development and Other Activities. The second part comments on the findings by relating them to issues of school management and curriculum manageability and looks at how the idea of "conscientiousness" among primary school teachers may have led to their exploitation.
There is an increasing pressure on teachers in further and higher education to provide assessment systems that are fair, valid, reliable, efficient and effective. Funding bodies demand higher quality, students themselves have sharpening expectations. Traditionally, assessment of students’ work has caused teachers more difficulties than any other area, yet the growing number of students and severe financial restraints mean that even existing standards are difficult to maintain.
