Practice Makes Practice

Book excerpt: This revised edition of the classic text explores the complexity of what learning to teach means. While the research on teacher education continues to proliferate, Practice Makes Practice remains the discipline’s indispensable classic text. Drawing upon critical ethnography, this new edition of this best-selling book asks the question, what does learning to teach do and mean to newcomers and to those who surround them? Deborah P. Britzman writes poignantly of the struggle for significance and the contradictory realities of secondary teaching. She offers a theory of difficulty in learning and explores why the blaming of individuals is so prevalent in education. The completely revised introduction presents a refined and further developed theoretical framework and analysis, discussing why we might return to a study of teaching and learning. Also included in this updated edition is an insightful “hidden chapter” that comments on the methodology of the study and some of the dilemmas the author continues to face as her own thinking develops around the issues of representing teaching and learning for those just entering the profession. Deborah P. Britzman is Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is the author of many books, including The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions; After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning; and Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning, all published by SUNY Press.