19: Putting Theory to Work: Philosophy and its Applications to Issues in Classrooms and Curricula

JCI~>CI, volume 3, issue 1, features a collection of articles written by in-service teachers who are master’s degree students in curriculum and teaching at Michigan State University. More specifically, each of these writers teaches in Detroit or its suburbs and participates in the outreach program for teacher education. The education courses in which these teacher/authors are enrolled meet almost exclusively in a suburban high school in Birmingham, Michigan. The setting itself reflects programmatic goals that encourage teachers’ professional development through practice of sustained, critical educational inquiry in its many legitimate and varied forms, but with particular attention to opportunities for field based, collaborative action research. I believe that by meeting in school classrooms, we are more likely to focus our attention on daily lives in schools and to turn our attention to practice-based problems of classrooms and curricula. Each of these authors has also participated in the Writers’ Workshop project that I organize with my Master’s students to encourage the publication and presentation of teachers’ research in professional journals and other public forums.