There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.…

A central concern of teacher education research should be the quality of life it articulates. (JD)

Modern teaching and teacher education "magically" transform sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The alchemy of school subjects provides a way to think about frames of reference organizing inquiry and constitutes evidence in teacher education, also obscuring the normalizing and dividing practices of teaching (including…

Explores some features of controversies about the production of knowledge by considering assumptions that have guided social theory at least since the 19th century. When systems of reasoning in educational studies are examined as social practices, it becomes apparent that the stakes of educational research are social and political as well as…

Focuses on the social and cultural implications of research. Underlying social research are assumptions about the nature of social control, the order and responsibility of society. Theory and methods give legitimacy to educational and cultural patterns, and function politically and ideologically. The author stresses the responsibilities of…

Efforts to reform teacher education should include careful reconsideration of what teachers learn about curriculum design and instructional methodology. The selection and organization of school knowledge have significant social, political, and ethical implications that are ignored by traditional, rationalistic assumptions about educational…

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…

This monograph, part of a series that attempts to bring a particular intellectual perspective to bear on the practical problems of administering education, points out that educational administration as a field of study is of limited use in coming to terms with the complexity and value-laden nature of educational practice. Language and cultural…