Ann Berlak, Harold Berlak Dilemmas of Schooling (RLE Edu L)

Annotation

This study illuminates how the everyday activity of teachers raises profound economic, cultural, ethical, political and research issues, and provides a new and fruitful way of examining the practice of teaching. The first part of the book offers a detailed description of sensitively recorded school situations, arising from work carried out in a number of British primary schools. From the analysis of their research the authors constructed a theoretical perspective for looking at schooling in the form of sixteen 'dilemmas'; the second half of the book is concerned with this perspective, and shows how the dilemmas constitute a language for looking at everyday schooling and relating it to more general political, social and cultural issues. The book thus spans the gap in educational thinking between work with a firm empirical base and specifically theoretical studies.