Issues in Curriculum Theory, Policy, and Research – serie

The heart of this study is a detailed narrative account of a teacher in an inner-city school. For two years, the author collaborated with an immigrant teacher from the Caribbean, studying her practice from three perspectives: place—the community and school landscape; temporality—the history of the school and current programs; and interaction—the teacher's relationship with the school, parents, and students. Current ways of examining multicultural issues focus on the analysis of broad factors affecting large groups of people. In the process, the individual is subsumed within catagories and the subtle nuances of experiences are lost. The narrative approach outlined in the book offers a new perspective on multiculturalism and research into multicultural education, one the author terms narrative multiculturalism.Narrative multiculturalism begins with experience as it is shaped by the contexts in which people live and work. It is also shaped by broader societal and global forces. In this approach, multiculturalism is viewed as a fluid process, continually evolving, changing, and transforming. Narrative multiculturalism develops an in-depth understanding of individual experiences and thereby creates an alternate perspective on multiculturalism.

Highlights the current chasm between teacher education theories (praxeologies) and the actual experience of teaching (praxis). Many traditional teacher education programs emphasize teaching based on reflection and deliberation; yet, when a new teacher is in a unique situation, there is not always time to step back and look at it objectively. Through Roth's extensive experience as a teacher, he has learned that a teacher must live in the heat of the moment, but also develop room to maneuver in the moment. These skills come only by actually being in the classroom, working at the elbow of experienced teachers and discussing the events of the day with other teachers.Roth develops his theory by introducing the previously ignored element of temporality in teaching. When there is no time out for reflection, a teacher must develop on-the-spot decision-making skills. In part one, he presents the ideas of being-in the classroom with students and being-with other teachers. Other concepts that emerge are habitus (perceptions and expectations that lead to action), Spielraum (room to maneuver in situations), and relationality (knowing how to act without reflection, based on student-teacher rapport). In part two, Roth asserts that when novice teachers coteach and engage in subsequent cogenerative dialoguing with seasoned professionals, they are in the process of becoming in the classroom. Teachers, college students majoring in education, and professors will all benefit immensely from this book.

Through examining the meanings and experiences of the six young men in this study, we can expand our understanding of the complexities of the lives of African-American men and simultaneously challenge seemingly unidimensional images of black men.

In Germany, as distinct from the countries influenced by the Anglo-American curriculum tradition, the curriculum is seen as a framework by for assisting individual, autonomous teachers' plan for their classrooms. As the body of knowledge within teacher education didactics supports such planning and teaching. As a research tradition, didactics seeks models of teacher thinking and an understandings of the rationales which teachers develop to justify their teaching. Looking into Classrooms: Papers on Didactics, which is written from within the German Didaktik tradition, outlines a view of classroom work as the medium within which the educational formation of students takes place. The book explores some of the ways in which this medium can be understood from the point of view of education - Bildung - rather than from a point of view that sees teaching solely as effective instruction. Looking into Classrooms throws fresh light on what is done in classrooms by asking how the curriculum that is embedded in classroom work contributes to the educational formation of students. Looking into Classrooms offers English-speaking readers a view of a kind of curriculum thinking that is very different from approaches of the Anglo-American tradition. A new world of questions about classrooms, textbooks, and the history of schooling is opened up in ways that throws new light on the questions around English-language curriculum and pedagogical theorizing and research.