Deborah P. Britzman

• Distinguished Research Professor at York University

There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher edu...

This article explores the idea that the future of a profession resides in the questions it might ask of itself and how such questions affect its thinking. We consider how current conditions in teacher education-its crisis-driven orientation, its manic pace, its focus on control and stable knowledge-foreclose the capacity to think creatively from th...

This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes P...

Those who enter secondary teacher education as graduate students have already spent years in both the academy and the school. As students, they have been relatively "successful" in these institutional settings and hence bring to their secondary teacher education very specific expectations about what it takes to teach and to learn. Their expectation...

This article presents an ethnographic inquiry into the problems of theorizing about teaching and learning within a social context organized to suppress the subjective experiences and meanings of classroom actors. Three questions are explored: 1) What is the nature of curriculum practice in secondary education, and how does it shape the voices of st...

A qualitative research methodology was employed to examine the social-communicative interactions of young handicapped children in a public school-based preschool program and discem the utility of participant observation as an assessment strategy. Six students (with mild to severe handicaps) were observed during free play and semistructured (lunch,...

Deborah Britzman believes that recent theoretical discussions of the role of education in the reproduction of the social system, while illuminative, need to be grounded in descriptions of particular aspects of the educative process. The author addresses this need by drawing on her experiences as a teacher/educator to offer an analysis of the reprod...

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Massachusetts, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 537-551). Microfiche.