In Search of Wonderful Ideas: Critical Exploration in Teacher Education

Drawing on the work of Eleanor Duckworth, this volume examines Critical Exploration in the Classroom (CEC)--a learning-teaching research practice that positions teachers as researchers of their students' sense-making and learners as theorizers and investigators. By integrating CEC into their teacher education classrooms, chapter authors have found that they can reliably unsettle their teacher candidates' understandings about the nature of teaching and learning and recenter their attention on the intellectual originality and creativity of all young people. In this way, CEC provides valuable tools in the work of creating more equitable and democratic classrooms. Such tools are needed in a broader environment that overvalues instrumental approaches to achieving specified learning outcomes. Readers will find practices that empower and sustain the deep intellectual engagement of all learners. Integrating classroom narratives and other forms of documentation, this resource illustrates the kinds of profound changes in understanding that have occurred for teacher candidates as a result of working with CEC.

Book Features:

• Opens both the teacher educator and teacher candidates to new ways of teaching, learning, and being in classrooms.
• Demonstrates how the practice works to counter deficit thinking by revealing students' brilliance.
• Uses narratives and other forms of documentation to characterize the potential of CEC within a diverse array of teacher education classrooms.
• Portrays the many ways in which CEC has been integrated into different disciplinary and institutional settings, illustrating the common intellectual and interpersonal dynamics at work.
• Chapter authors all studied Critical Exploration in the Classroom (CEC) with its originator, Eleanor Duckworth.