Stories Out of School: Memories and Reflections on Care and Cruelty in the Classroom

The changes in how we understand and study teaching and learning are uneven. Strongly held beliefs support the changes and equally strongly held beliefs challenge them. However, the discourse about teaching and learning and our understandings of the nature of educational research have changed rather dramatically in the last two decades. These changes form the context for the work described in this book on stories out of school-adult memories of their teachers. The authors have been guided by the work of Jackson (1992), Noddings (1992), Eisner (1998), Palmer (1998), Coles (1989), and Lindley (1993), among others, who have focused on the qualities of life experienced by children, particularly in the classroom. Interests have centered on memory, meaning, and the self in relationship. Using a database of letters written by adults (most of whom are teachers or are preparing to be teachers) to their former teachers, the authors examine the interpersonal spaces shared by teachers and students and the kinds of unacknowledged pedagogies created in those spaces. They are interested in the ethics of experienced pedagogies and the implications of those pedagogies for educating teachers.