Book Reviews: Conversations With Collaborators, Colleagues, and Friends: Representing Others and Presenting Ourselves

In reading your books, I felt as though I was being invited to participate in a conversation about what it means to combine research and teaching within the broad context of professional learning. I wanted (and still want) to be able to talk at length with you and with other teacher education colleagues about the styles, the themes, and the stories you present. I also wanted to share ideas, themes, and stories of my own. Because both books are coauthored yet include contributions by profes sionally related others, they defy easy classification as either edited or coau thored works. I found this intriguing and refreshing as the varied styles of the chapter authors called forth emotions as well as cognitions. Through poems, pictures, stories, sample works by students, careful analyses, and crit ical commentaries, both texts provide information that affirms and calls into question much of what we call knowledge of, in, and for teaching and teacher education. Learning to Teach: Teaching to Learn, written and edited by D. Jean Clandinin, Annie Davies, Pat Hogan, and Barbara Kennard, is composed of indi vidual and combined stories by and about teachers, teacher educators, and students in an experimental elementary teacher education program called the Alternative Program. This program, then at the University of Calgary, was designed to "emphasize teacher education as a collaborative inquiry in which collaboration was essential between student teachers, university teachers, and cooperating teachers" (p. 7). The book chapters are participants' reflective analyses of their experiences during the 1989-1990 school year. These accounts are authored by the participants—their names, their voices. Only students and nonparticipants have pseudonyms. In Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge, Marilyn CochranSmith and Susan Lytle also showcase educators committed to inquiry. Central to their discussion is the belief that "current research on teaching within both process-product paradigms and interpretive paradigms constrains and at times even makes invisible teachers' roles in the generation of knowledge about teaching and learning in classrooms" (p. 7). Participants in Project START (Student Teachers as Researching Teachers), the Philadelphia Writ ing Project (begun by and for class room teachers and university teachers interested in helping themselves and others to become better writers), and the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative (a teacher-initiated study group that has met regularly in private homes for over 10 years) share their empirical research and reflective essays. Again, only nonparticipants are given pseudonyms. Both books allow us to examine teachers' emerging prominence as ac tive participants in constructing knowledge and informing debates over educational improvement. In so doing, they reaffirm that the field of research in and on teaching is in a state of continual evolution. Just as each of the prefaces to the three AERA handbooks of research on teaching note that different disciplines and conceptions provide a richer and more complex understanding of teaching, your books include important conceptual and empirical work that will cause many ER readers to question and, perhaps, to broaden their conceptions of research and of researchers. For me, the texts emphasize the importance and practical utility of careful analyses based on empirical data. For example, Rhoda Drucker Kanevesky, in Inside/Outside, provides a step-bystep descriptive review of one child using the documentary reflective process developed by Patricia Carini and others working in the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative. The process includes a rationale for having the group assist with the review, as well as descriptions of the child's appearance, actions, interests, relationships with others, and formal learning. The other teachers ask for