Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction / Stefinee Pinnegar, Jere Brophy -- Listening to preservice teachers' perceptions and representations of teacher education programs / Andrea K. Martin, Tom Russell -- Student-led parent conferences / Janet Alleman -- Letters from my grand-students: recommendations for future teachers / Barbara Morgan-Fleming, Aretha Faye Marbley, Janet Jordan White -- Teachers' personal models of instructional design / Susan G. Magliaro, R. Neal Shambaugh -- A representative journey of teachers' perceptions of self: a readers' theater / Sally McMillan, Margaret A. Price -- Building a self-reflective community: teacher development with exemplar teachers / Lynn M. Brice, Lynn Nations Johnson, Katharine E. Cummings, Sarah Summy -- Pre-service teachers' images of teaching / H. Carol Greene, Susan G. Magliaro --The positioning of preservice teacher candidates entering teacher education / Celina Dulude Lay, Stefinee Pinnegar, Meridith Reed, Emily Young Wheeler, Courtney Wilkes -- Learning to teach with theatre of the oppressed / Peggy Placier, Suzanne Burgoyne, Karen Cockrell, Sharon Welch, Helen Neville -- Theatrical representations of teaching as performance / Shifra Schonmann -- Living in tension: negotiating a curriculum of lives on the professional knowledge landscape / Janice Huber, D.Jean Clandinin -- Video ethnography and teachers' cognitive activities / Peter Y.K. Chan, R. Carl Harris -- Looking at ourselves: professional development as self-study / Helen Freidus, Susan Feldman, Charissa M. Sgouros, Marilyn Wiles-Kettenmann -- Discussion / Jere Brophy, Stefinee Pinnegar.

This volume is designed to accomplish three primary purposes: illustrate a variety of qualitative methods that researchers have used to study teaching and teacher education; assess the affordances and constraints of these methods and the ways that they focus and shape explorations of teaching; and, illuminate representative questions and findings associated with each method described. The book is organized around three issues that impact research in qualitative paradigms: perspective, methodology, and representation. The first section, 'Perspective: Whom Should I Ask?' explores what can be learned by assessing teaching from different perspectives (teachers, teacher educators, students, parents), emphasizing that the perspective of the respondent influences what we can learn and shapes both our questions and our potential findings. The second section 'Methodology: How Do I Look?' addresses some of the qualitative research strategies that have been used to study teaching, including historical accounts, photos, drawings, and video. The third section, 'Representation: How Do I Show What I Saw?' explores the affordances and constraints of narratives, practical arguments, video ethnography, portfolios, and theater as methods for representing research findings. Qualitative research paradigms typically do not make claims based in the kinds of foundational criteria for generating knowledge that establish bases for generalizability. The book addresses this dilemma by providing findings, insights, and claims from qualitative research that appear to be useful in settings beyond those that generated the data, and thus inform our thinking about teaching and teacher education. In addition, its explorations of the affordances and constraints of qualitative research methods provide insightful and occasionally controversial contributions to our thinking about research on teaching and teacher education.

Description based on print version record.