Learning To Teach Inclusively

This book--co-authored by a teacher educator, a diverse group of five pre-service student teachers, and their student teaching supervisor--takes a look at the experience of student teaching from the perspective of student teachers. It is premised on learning to teach as an inquiry process enriched by collaborative conversations. Readers are invited into student teachers' dilemmas and decisions as they negotiate between their public school placements and their university-based coursework. Throughout the year of student teaching, the authors document their discussions and reflections about teaching in inclusive classrooms that shed light on the complex process of learning to teach and also offer insights into issues of teaching for equity. A new perspective on what can be learned from student teaching is provided by the student teachers' supervisor. In the concluding chapter, the teacher educators address the connections among the student teachers' inquiries and offer an analysis from a disability studies/disability rights perspective on how inclusion fits into a social (rather than a medical) model of disability. All of the authors of this book seek to contribute to conversations that place advocacy, inquiry, contestation, and challenge at the center of the teacher's role. This volume is their invitation to readers to join in a larger conversation about the challenges of, and necessity for, becoming inclusive teachers.