Inside Teacher Education is now available!

I am pleased to announce the publication on my new book, Inside teacher Education: Challenging prior views of teaching and learning published by Sense.

The back matter follows:

Learning to teach is complex. Teacher candidates begin a preservice program with powerful tacit assumptions about how teachers teach based on lengthy apprenticeships of observation over many years as students. Virtually all teacher education programs provide a mixture of coursework and classroom experience. Much has been written about the theory-into-practice approach in teacher education, an approach that assumes teacher candidates who have been provided with instructions about how to teach will be able to recall and apply them in a school setting.  In reality, teacher candidates report considerable difficulty enacting theory in practice, to the point that many question the value of coursework.

This book takes an in-depth look at five future teachers in one teacher education program, analyzing and interpreting how they and their teacher educators learn from experience during both coursework and practicum experiences. Many assumptions about the complex challenges of teaching teachers are called into question. Is the role of a teacher educator to synthesize research-based best practices for candidates to take to their field placements? Does the preservice practicum experience challenge or reinforce a lifetime of socialized experiences in schools? Must methods courses always be seen by most teacher candidates as little more than sites for collecting resources? Where and how do candidates construct professional knowledge of teaching? The data illustrate clearly that methods courses can be sites for powerful learning that challenges tacit assumptions about how and why we teach.

Click here to download a free preview chapter from Sense.

Use the following links to order the book:

• From Amazon (Canada), click here.
• From Amazon (USA), click here.
• From Sense Publishers, click here.

About Dr. Shawn Bullock:

I am currently an asssistant professor of science education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). My research interests focus on the epistemological problem of how we learn from experience, with particular attention to how pre-service and early career teachers learn from the problems and tensions they encounter in personal practice. Lortie’s (1975) concept of the “apprenticeship of observation,” which called attention to the socializing effects of mass schooling for perspective teachers, is an important perspective through which I am examining the role that prior assumptions about teaching and learning play in both learning to teach and learning to teach teachers. I am particularly interested in how problems of learning science, problems of learning to teach science, and problems of learning to teach using digital technologies interact with each other. I am also interested in the ways in which adults learn from experiences with digital technologies, particularly those technologies that might support the development of collective intelligence.

Some of my interests outside academia include photography, hiking, a lifelong involvement in martial arts, and reading (particularly geopolitics, history of science and technology, and science fiction). My academic qualifications are summarized here. If you are interested in reading a lengthier biography, please click here.

I maintain my online presence in the following ways:

• I am available via shawn(at)shawnbullock(dot)ca (email) and @shawnmbullock (twitter). 
• I maintain a blog. I do not use facebook.
• Unless otherwise stated (e.g., in the case of a journal article where copyright rests with that journal), my work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Canada License