Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, Revised Edition

Front Cover
SUNY Press, 2012 M02 16 - 303 pages
This revised edition of the classic text explores the complexity of what learning to teach means.

While the research on teacher education continues to proliferate, Practice Makes Practice remains the discipline’s indispensable classic text. Drawing upon critical ethnography, this new edition of this best-selling book asks the question, what does learning to teach do and mean to newcomers and to those who surround them? Deborah P. Britzman writes poignantly of the struggle for significance and the contradictory realities of secondary teaching. She offers a theory of difficulty in learning and explores why the blaming of individuals is so prevalent in education.

The completely revised introduction presents a refined and further developed theoretical framework and analysis, discussing why we might return to a study of teaching and learning. Also included in this updated edition is an insightful “hidden chapter” that comments on the methodology of the study and some of the dilemmas the author continues to face as her own thinking develops around the issues of representing teaching and learning for those just entering the profession.

Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is the author of many books, including The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning; and Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning, all published by SUNY Press.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction to Revised Edition
1
1 Contradictory Realities in Learning to Teach
25
2 The Structure of Experience and the Experience of Structure in Teacher Education
45
The Jamie Owl Stories
75
The Jack August Stories
125
Stories from Significant Others
175
The Given and the Possible in Teacher Education
221
The Hidden Chapter of Practice Makes Practice
243
Notes
255
Bibliography
275
Index
287
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About the author (2012)

Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is the author of many books, including The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning; and Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning, all published by SUNY Press.

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