G. HARVARD and P. HODKINSON (eds.). 1994.

Action and Reflection in TeacherEducation . Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

This book examines teacher education in England and Wales from different perspec-tives. This is done in the context of what the editors describe as a crisis of confi-dence within teacher education in Britain, which had resulted in the generation of newideas and practice, as well as the reconsideration of ideas and practice previously takenfor granted. This is reflected in the various chapters.

The book consists of 14 chapters that represent divers ways of approaching theissue of British teacher education; all, either explicitly or implicitly, examine, addressor use, ideas of reflective practice. Harvard and Hodkinson, the editors of this volume,highlight three key questions and themes that recur throughout the book. One is thequestion of balance between teacher education done in higher education institutes,which usually focuses on academic and theoretical aspects, and teacher education donein school, which usually focuses on practice. Another is a view of teacher educationas a partnership activity that involves, for example, student-teacher, class teacher,external tutor and peers. Still another theme is the notion of professional teacher andteaching, which implies that teacher education focuses on more than just classroomperformance.

The first five chapters are theoretical in nature. In the first chapter, Hodkinsonand Harvard provide information about the cultural context of teacher education inBritain and explain some of the pressures on it. Still, being foreign to the Britishcontext, I sometimes found it hard to understand the historical, cultural and politicalconditions that gave rise to some of the problems, dilemmas, and explorationsdescribed in the book. There is one exception to this local British context. In Chapter2, Zeichner examines conceptions of reflective practice in teaching and teacher edu-cation in the United States (and elsewhere). Zeihner warns the reader that some culturalsensitivity is needed when examining reflective practices in teacher education in othercountries. Jamison, in Chapter 3, analyses experiential learning in the context ofteacher education from many directions. Experiential learning seems to be a centralissue of debate in Britain as quite a few of the contributors to this book touch uponit (e.g., Dunne in Chapter 7, Ackland in Chapter 10). Hodkinson and Harvard, inChapter 4, examine competence-based learning in teacher education. They empha-size that its meaning varies enormously and depends on the ideology adopted. Eraut,in Chapter 5, analyses the acquisition and use of educational theory by beginningteachers. He nicely defines public theories, private theories and the notion of theo-rizing as a link between theory and practice.

While the issues discussed in the first five chapters of the book are important forteacher education, I felt, sometimes, that the writing is too general and that there isnot enough attention to the specific nature of complex educational settings. This pointis taken care of in some of the rest of the chapters, where specific research studiesare outlined. One of them is Chapter 6, in which Brown describes an experimentalstudy aimed at examining the possibilities of helping student-teachers to have accessto the practical classroom knowledge of experienced teachers. She and her colleaguesdeveloped a procedure of observing a lesson and then asking the teacher questionsabout what had happened in that lesson. Emphasis was put on the strengths of theobserved teaching, on the events of the particular observed lesson, and on the teacher’sown perspectives on these events.

Dunne’s Chapter 7 is again more theoretical in nature. He illustrates how Soviet’sactivity theory formed the base for the “design of a scheme for a deliberate approachto learning to teach.” He feels that this scheme helps to focus on student-teachers’cognitive processes related to school-based work. Harvard, in Chapter 8, elaborates

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on some of the techniques mentioned in Chapter 7, focusing on the nature and purposeof the supervisory conference. He provides several clearly presented examples whichenable the reader to understand the details of the model and ways of using it.

The context for Thomas and Bowden’s Chapter 9 is a program which aims topromote economic awareness as a cross-curricular theme. They examine the teachereducation approaches adopted in this program and describe two case studies to illus-trate successes and difficulties. Worth noting is their theoretical framework concerningteachers’ conceptual changes: “to change the ways in which they see their teachingrole is as much a learning task for teachers as learning subject matter is for theirstudents.”

Ackland, in Chapter 10, describes an interesting project which approaches teachereducation through collaborative, school-based curriculum evaluation. The relation-ships between student-teachers and teachers are viewed in this project not as appren-ticeship, but rather as genuine collaboration. Several anecdotes are provided but amore systematic description of findings is missing. Bloomer and Jolly, in Chapter11, describe their experiences of designing and teaching an innovative course forteachers in post-compulsory education. This course builds from participants’ experi-ences, while viewing the teacher as “critical professional practitioner”. This chapteris very well written and it provides quite a clear picture of the theoretical frameworkas well as the actual experiences. The authors also critically examine the adequacyof this type of course for different people.

Williams’ Chapter 12 is the first to deal with specific subject matter characteris-tics. The author highlights the uniqueness of the English-language teaching contextwhich needs to be taken into account when designing teacher training programs.Williams discusses the distinction between equipping the teacher with knowledgeand skills for immediate use, and enabling the teacher to meet future varied and unpre-dictable demands. The author presents a methodology of teacher training illustratedwith examples of materials. Subject matter is also the focus of McNamara’s Chapter13, which addresses the issue of teachers’ subject matter knowledge, focusing onteachers’ personal knowledge of the subject matter, as well as its application toteaching.

In Chapter 14, the final chapter of the book, Harvard and Hodkinson, the editors,return to the tree key issues they identified as recurring throughout the book. Onlythis time they focus on them in light of the notion of a reflective teacher educatorinstead of a reflective teacher, as they did in the introduction.

Looking at the collection of the chapters as a whole, I felt that not enough atten-tion is given to the specifics of teacher education. Is elementary-school teacher edu-cation the same as secondary-school teacher education? Is mathematics teachereducation the same as history teacher education (only Williams mentions this issue),etc.? It is surprising that subject matter is ignored in almost all the chapters, as subjectmatter has become a central issue of concern for the community, both in terms ofteacher subject-matter knowledge, and the teaching of specific subject matters. I thinkthat McNamara’s criticism of school effectiveness research: “those studies . . . havepaid scant regard to teachers’ knowledge of what they teach when pronouncing uponthe effectiveness of schooling in different areas of the curriculum,” as well as hisremark that “[i]t is doubtful whether information and findings generated by studiesin one substantive area of the curriculum are transferable to others, since subject matteritself seems to be primary determinant of the way in which teachers teach,” are indeedalso relevant to most of the writings in this book.

The chapters in this book do not have an apparent common thread. However, Iagree with the editors that “[t]his book explored in different ways how to develop acritically reflective and empowered teaching profession (emphasis added).”

Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel RUHAMA EVAN

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