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The Jossey-Bass Reader on Teachingreviewed by Kelvin L. Seifert - 2004 ![]() Author(s): Jossey-Bass Publishers Publisher: Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco ISBN: 0787962406, Pages: 288, Year: 2003 Search for book at Amazon.com The Jossey-Bass Reader on Teaching is one of a series of
readers put together by an unnamed committee of staff and/or
consultants to the Jossey-Bass publishing company. (Other
Readers, in case you are curious, focus on school leadership,
technology, school reform, and gender.) All nineteen of the
articles have been published elsewhere previously. Most were
published in the 1990s, though a few date back to earlier decades
(e.g. Herb Kohl’s dates from 1984, and Sylvia
Ashton-Warner’s on literacy instruction goes back to
1964.). Although the volume has a brief (2 ½-page) foreword by Ann
Lieberman, there is little introductory guidance about the purposes
of the volume, nor about relationships among the various
readings. This is not necessarily bad; the articles generally
are of high quality, and their relative independence from each
other will allow reading them selectively, and allow students to do
the same. If used in a university course, instructors will
presumably make thoughtful choices in assigning chapters and in
justifying the choices to students. Nonetheless, the overall
rationale of the book is more implied than stated. It has to
be inferred from the layout of the book combined with any general
knowledge you might have about current issues in education.
The most obvious clues come from the three major named parts of the
book: “What Does It Mean To Teach?”,
“Becoming a Teacher,” and “Developing Your
Skills.” To oversimplify things a bit, I tag the three
sections as respectively inspirational, experiential, and
instrumental in focus. Part 1, “What Does It Mean To Teach?”, contains five
articles that are indeed somewhat philosophical and
inspirational. The article by Parker Palmer, for example,
sets the tone. In “The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and
Integrity in Teaching,” he urges us to be authentic about
teaching: to treat it as a calling, to do it only in ways
consistent with your deepest beliefs and predilections, to ignore
educational fads and issues about teaching in politically correct
ways. Later articles in this section speak in the same
general ballpark, though in different tones. In the last of
the five essays, for example, Maxine Greene acknowledges the
“dark” forces that make it difficult to realize deeply
meaningful, authentic teaching; but she encourages us to seek it
anyway. Part 2, “Becoming a Teacher,” describes experiences
of initial teaching. The implied reader for this section is not so
much the experienced reflective practitioner, as in Part 1, but the
future or new teacher seeking validation and support by hearing
others tell about what happened to them. Seven educators present
their experiences, which vary in many ways at once. Patrick
McWilliams, in “Learning to Read,” describes his
initial harshness at grading student essays, and the negative
effects of his harshness on one student’s motivation.
Herb Kohl, on the other hand, describes his involuntary transfer
from one school to another during his initial student teaching, a
transfer triggered by his criticizing a fellow teacher in front of
a student. Robert Fried, for still another example, offers
no-nonsense advice to newcomers from the perspective of a veteran
teacher—complete with a numbered list of “tips for
passionate teaching.” In Part 3, “Developing Your Skills,” the focus
becomes more instrumental. Here, seven experienced teachers
describe activities, strategies, or events that were successful, or
at least educative, in their development as professionals.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner describes her approach to literacy education,
which she calls “organic reading.” Vito Perrone
describes a program of professional development for teachers that
stimulated mutual reflection on practice as well as the development
of teaching portfolios. Martin Haberman describes strategies
for good teaching which he believes tend to be missing in schools
serving low-income communities, but which teachers have special
responsibility to use anyway. The great strength of this volume is that it has something for
everyone—from philosophical imperatives, to vivid stories, to
advice for teachers. In true post-modernist fashion, it
literally speaks in many voices (nineteen of them, to be precise),
allowing readers potentially to witness the range and power of
educational issues and their always-partial solutions.
Whether readers in fact will experience the potential is another
question. In spite of its multi-vocal organization, the book
is “merely” modernist in another way: it simply
presents the authors’ own words as if they need no
interpretation. In her foreword, Ann Lieberman confines herself to
brief and general comments about the challenges of teaching, and
does not attempt to make connections among the chapters. These are
left entirely for the reader to make. In fact, even choosing which
chapters to read appears to be entirely in the reader’s
hands. No explicit case is made for reading essays that might
at first seem irrelevant or alien to particular readers’
experiences or expectations. If I happen to live and work
where there is no Hispanic population, for example, should I bother
reading Mike Rose’s chapter describing his experience
teaching in Calexico, California? Probably I should, probably
I would enjoy doing so, and probably I would feel wiser as a
result; but the book itself does not build a case for making this
choice. Such silence reflects the decision by the publishers not to
recruit or name one or more official editors, who would ordinarily
be held responsible for the selection of chapters. Instead the
publishers confine the naming of responsibility to the
acknowledgement page (where they imply that the selection committee
was Ann Lieberman, Karen Kent, Caryl Hurtig Casbon, and Robert
Fried). “Real” editor(s), however, would normally also
add connective tissue to the volume: they would write transitional
material to tie together authors’ contributions.
Placing disparate authors in a common framework can of course be a
difficult job, but it is helpful nonetheless even for senior,
experienced readers. The Jossey-Bass Reader on Teaching, then, provides an
unintended test case for reader response theory: much will depend
on what readers bring to this text, beyond what the text itself
contains. The title—Reader—even suggests that the
selection committee deliberately intended reader response, rather
than textual meaning, to be essential for understanding the
book. Since in all likelihood the book will be marketed for
adoption in university education courses, giving the university
student-readers complete responsibility for responding may turn out
to be appropriate. In that case, though, much will depend not
only on the unwritten connections that students see within and
among the essays, but also on the connections that their
instructors see.
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