A language arts teacher, grades 6-8, reflects on her experiences implementing the Foxfire approach in a small tribal school and focuses on the successes of one American Indian student--development of interview skills and improvement of her standardized test scores. (SV)

An English teacher in a rural junior high school reflects on her experiences using the Foxfire approach; describes student projects and problems related to lack of support, overwork, and scarce materials; and discusses the Foxfire approach's value in encouraging students to explore their own inner resources and discover themselves. (SV)

Teacher education programs should be based on a developmental process that individualizes professional learning and continues long enough to produce well-qualified professionals. This process could enable a carefully selected individual to become initially qualified enough to survive the early pressures and to serve for many years as a truly…

Six brief articles by elementary school teachers in Foxfire's East Tennessee Teachers' Network focus on applying Foxfire core practices in a developmentally appropriate manner in grades K-3, and describe kindergarten journals, student decision making, and projects involving local history and garbage recycling. (SV)

Israeli researchers collected stories from secondary teachers in their staff room, examining form and function of storytelling. The stories described situations where the teachers had terrible classes or students but succeeded in improving things. The teachers' stories created images of the ideal teacher and socialized teachers to those images.…

An elementary teacher reflects upon 18 years of experience teaching in Hawaii, moving from understanding her own culture to awareness of and sensitivity to her students' heritage. She considers her best teaching experiences the bridge building between herself and her culture and her students and their culture. (SM)

After 18 years of using a traditional approach to teaching, a middle-school teacher turned her classroom into a shared learning experience by giving students the responsibility to make choices about their education. To reassure parents who were skeptical of the Foxfire approach, she continued to interject traditional learning activities. (LP)

A college English teacher describes the anxiety and resentment of students during in-class writing assignments and the successful classroom use of meditation and body movement. Movement seemed to relax the students, change their attitudes, and release their creative impulses to write. Implications related to the body-mind connection are pondered.…

Used data from class observations, interviews, and stimulus recall reports to examine how two inservice English-as-a-Second-Language teachers' personal practical knowledge informed their practice. Descriptions of tensions they faced in the classroom showed that their personal practical knowledge was embodied in people, fluid in response to…

Examines methods for recording personal accounts, personal narratives, teachers' stories, and narrative interviews for the purpose of understanding how teachers make sense of problems in their lives and work. Reflects on how the ethics of caring helps resolve concerns for the presence of teacher's voices in the interpreting and writing of…

A teacher of a special education class of 7- to 10-year-olds took her students outdoors to stimulate their interest in learning. Schoolyard nature study and environmental field trips led to schoolwide presentations and television performances about recycling and conservation. Peer teaching was an important learning strategy. These students…

States that teaching is a practice that aims to develop relationships between the mature and immature where the good teacher can balance the personal and impersonal dimensions of contact with students. Considers different experiences with students that concern the opportunities and dangers of conversation in a school. (CMK)

''Stories do not simply contain knowledge, they are themselves the knowledge'' (Jackson (In: K. Eagan, H. McEwan (Eds.), Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research, Teacher College Press, New York, 1995, p. 5)). How can we teach well? Perhaps we can find answers through our stories from the classroom. It is through our stories that we make sense…

This paper examines two types of discourse in which teachers engage when discussing case studies based on classroom episodes, and the ways in which the availability of video data of these episodes may motivate a shift in the mode of discourse used. We interviewed two pairs of secondary school mathematics teachers after they had read a case study…

This article describes an experience I had as a new professor the first year after receiving my Ph.D. An experiment with an innovative teaching method quickly deteriorated into a disaster. This article describes the emotional toll exacted on me, why my experiment failed, and how it prompted me to develop a personal philosophy of principle-based…