This article explores how secondary English preservice teachers reason about their future students and the consequences these systems of reasoning have for their thinking about pedagogy and their roles as teachers. By examining these systems of reasoning, this article helps to denaturalize normalized discourses about adolescence--discourses that…

Examines the relationship between preservice student teachers and their cooperating teachers. Considers "lived experience" and expectations of both parties and how they played themselves out in this important formative relationship. Finds that effective mentoring is crucial to the professional development of a preservice teacher. (TB)

Describes the field experience component of a course for preservice English teachers called "Language in the Secondary Classroom," in which preservice teachers collaborate as equals with high school students, experiencing for themselves the real potential of adolescent learners and the contexts which allow for that potential to emerge.…

Describes the complicated balancing act supervisors must perform as they try to remain true to their graduate departments, their student teachers, their supervising teachers, the teaching profession, and themselves. Stresses such problems as finding compatible supervising teachers, suitable classes, and workable schedules for student teachers.…

Focuses on the effect of working with a teacher-as-researcher model on the preparation of preservice teachers. Examines their development from unconfident answer-knowers to more confident question-askers, who come to integrate both informal and formal strategies of data-gathering and hypothesis-testing into a way of knowing. (PRA)

Argues that more is needed than a generic, Euro-centric, or culture specific set of teaching strategies to address the issue of equity in schools. Offers a critical perspective on the working principles articulated in the report of a special commission on how best to prepare English teachers to work effectively with increasingly diverse students.…

Argues that it is important for beginning teachers to receive part of their training in a small school like Latino Youth Alternative High School at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Relates how the program functions; gives Latino students' and tutors' reasons for appreciating it. Includes responses about teacher-student relationships as key to a…

In this article, the author, as a teacher educator, wants to provide a space for her students to talk about the role they and their students' bodies play in the classroom--a safe place for them to share, reflect on, and begin to theorize the sexual dimension of their teaching. Her space-creating intentions have been predicated on the assumption…