This book presents information from a study of Teach for America, an alternative teacher education program that recruits and trains people with degrees in fields other than education to work in urban and rural schools with chronic teacher shortages, poverty, and minority students. The book is an effort to understand how different discourses of pedagogy come together to generate principles for participation and action. It is an ethnography about the classification of the "urbanness" and "ruralness" of children as a space in which they can never be "of the average." This book challenges certain notions about policy research, evaluation, and teaching. The six chapters are as follows: (1) "The Spatial Politics of Urban and Rural Education: Constructing a Critical Ethnography"; (2)"The Soul as the Achievement of Teaching: The Social Space of the Urban and Rural Child"; (3) "The Alchemies of Pedagogy: From Ethical Registers to Psychological Registers"; (4) "The Wisdom of Teacher Practice as a Normalizing Technology"; (5) "Alchemy, Imaginary School Subjects, and the Governing of Space"; and (6) "The Spatial Politics of Knowledge and the Racialization of Teaching." The book contains an appendix and references. (SM)