The authors of this article investigated a middle school in the United States, named Kousanar, and documented how Mexicans, Bosnians, and other immigrants were caught in institutional practices that simultaneously welcomed and "unwelcomed" them. To explain this contradiction, their data suggest that particular discourses and forms of materiality, in part, motivated and encouraged individuals and groups to make certain decisions and act in certain ways. Specifically, the authors found that teachers, students, and the local White community surrounding the school often were motivated by employment issues, the concerns of local businesses, fear of potential violence, and the wish to maintain an academic advantage. Conversely, immigrant students attending Kousanar and their parents often were motivated by family cohesion, a "good parent" discourse, safety concerns, and the wish for economic and academic opportunities. The authors conclude that discursive and contextual influences limit many opportunities for immigrant students and place them on the margins of school life.

AbstractThe global movement of people has increased the number of immigrant students in countries such as the United States and Canada. The number of immigrant teachers working with these students has also risen, especially those in English as a Second Language programs (ESL). Scholars have argued that the increase in immigrant teachers, and teachers of color more generally, along with pedagogies that draw from the personal and collective experiences of marginalized students is a needed corrective to the overly white, Eurocentric orientation to teaching and content found in schools. This article examines these assumptions by documenting the struggle of one Senegalese-American middle school ESL teacher who was attempting to utilize the culture of his students as a dominant part of his pedagogy. The findings indicate that this teacher found himself in a school context where his political desires for immigrant students were modified by institutional structures and disenabling discourses about immigrants. What he enacted was a borderland pedagogy that had elements of the culturally relevant pedagogy that he sought and the assimilationist pedagogy that was pervasive within the school. The implications suggest that placing responsibility on these immigrant teachers to challenge assimilationist and marginalizing tendencies in the schools may end up blaming these practitioners for influential factors that reside largely outside their control. Consequently, to meet the needs of those marginalized by society requires work with and on the possibilities and limits embedded in these borderland spaces of schools, teacher desires, and communities.

In this article, the authors challenge historical relations of power, which have valued academic knowledge over the experiential knowledge of teachers and claim that such knowledge is valuable and should be seen as legitimate. At the same time, though, they argue that there is a need to assess the knowledge produced by teachers and academics and offer a conceptual apparatus for conducting such assessments. According to the authors, assessment needs to be an ongoing process that occurs within a collaborative setting where differences in perspective are used as strengths to aid researchers (both teachers and academics) in critically examining their perceptions. More specifically, the authors suggest that by incorporating both insider and outsider knowledge (i.e., experiential and traditional forms of academic knowledge) into teacher research reports, a relational type of assessment can occur where both types of knowledge forms can be scrutinized.

One common limitation in most reform efforts is an understanding of the relation among teachers' work, decision making, and the construction of school knowledge. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining how critical theories of teachers' work both inform and are informed by an analysis of two case study middle schools. Findings from this study suggest that many of the decisions that teachers make are based on their attempt to contain the threat of intensification. Such a self-regulatory process shaped decisions in the areas of planning, grading, and classroom management and fostered a defensive form of school knowledge that is fact oriented, routinized, and mundane. Particularly troubling is the finding that this defensive form of knowledge was most pronounced in classes with large numbers of students of color

For many educational scholars collaboration holds the key to school reform. This seeming agreement about the benefits of collaboration, however; obscures some significant differences about the meaning, form, and purpose of this process. This uncertainty about collaboration suggests the need to look carefully at the relation between specific forms of collaboration and the articulated purposes for this reform process. By looking at collaboration in this way, the author found that "robust "forms of collaboration can achieve broadly defined progressive ends when the effects of collaboration on the intensification of teachers' work are limited, when teachers play a significant role in setting the agenda for the collaborative process, and when the issues raised as part of the collaborative process emerge from the contextual realities of a particular school. The key to progressive reform, in this regard, is developing forms of teacher collaboration that reflect progressive values and purposes thereby setting the stage for some teachers to develop similar relationships with students.

Many teacher educators are championing inquiry oriented approaches that ask pre-service teachers to engage in a variety of activities including becoming critical consumers of research and participating in action research. What is largely missing from the literature is a sense of how preservice teachers think about research. This study attempts to fill in this gap, and by doing so considers how pre-service teachers’ thinking on research might inform approaches to inquiry teacher education. Our findings indicate that it may be helpful to investigate with preservice teachers what is research, to provide student teaching placements that support research as a form of inquiry, and to utilize action research as a bridge to more traditional forms of research.

The central thesis of this article is that professionalization projects, such as those endorsed by normal schools and schools of education, contributed to vertical and horizontal divisions of labor by constructing differing views of professionalization, which became associated with and gave institutional support to gendered assumptions about women and teaching in general. Local unions, such as the Chicago Federation of Teachers, provided a counterforce to these divisions of labor, by skirting concerns about certification and instead working directly with practicing teachers on issues of authority and autonomy. Unfortunately, these efforts by local unions often occurred within the shadow of national associations that tried to balance the interests of educational administrators and teachers. This balance limited the influence of local proposals that challenged men's advantage relative to women in the educational community.

Abstract This paper argues that in order to develop a more informed understanding and debate about the reasons for the current demands by governments of all political persuasions for more stringent forms of teacher evaluation and appraisal, it is first necessary to have a comprehensive historical understanding of how teacher evaluation came about in the first place. Drawing upon portrayals of the USA, the UK and Australia, it is argued that there are sobering lessons to be learned from past attempts to exert social control over teachers through evaluation and appraisal schemes. Behind attempts to reassert social control over teachers lies a mainstream ideology that is based upon technocratic rationality, impoverished epistemologi‐cal assumptions about the nature of teaching and restricted and authoritarian view of pedagogy.

Regular education and special education supervisors were studied to determine: (1) what supervisors believe to be important aims for education; (2) what types of issues supervisors focus on in practice; (3) how beliefs are related to issues identified in practice; and (4) how socialization influences the selection of particular supervisory issues. The findings of this study indicate that supervisors hold a wide range of beliefs about the aims of education with an emphasis on meeting societal needs and developing cognitive skills. This contrasts sharply with supervisors’ practice which focuses, for the most part, on managerial issues. Socialization and assumptions about teaching seem to most strongly influence practice.

During the last decade increasing numbers of professors and graduate students of education have engaged in ethnographic research. At best, undergraduate students in teacher education programs have been assigned to read a selection of the results of this research. This paper argues that undergraduates themselves should be given an opportunity to conduct ethnographic research as part of their teacher training experience. The rationale for this suggestion, as well as several potential benefits associated with it, are discussed. The authors also provide specific etail of their own still‐evolving adoption of this strategy.