About the Editors

In developing this volume, Thomas Hatch and Ann Lieberman provided overall guidance in the design and development of the collection. Thomas Hatch developed the introduction and oversaw the editing of the selections. Kim Austin conducted the initial searches for works by teachers, and Ruba Ahmed with the help of Deborah Faigenbaum and Melissa Eiler White took responsibility for finding and reviewing numerous possible selections. Desiree Pointer Mace helped to develop the websites and multimedia contributions. Ruba Ahmed also provided the crucial leadership and tireless dedication needed to bring this volume to publication as she tracked down permissions and copyrights, corresponded with authors and publishers, edited the manuscripts, and responded to comments.

About the Authors

Rebecca Akin, a K/1 teacher for 7 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, is now pursuing graduate studies in education. Her narrative was part of a larger study on student language use undertaken while she was a Carnegie Scholar.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball is professor of mathematics education and teacher education at the University of Michigan and an experienced elementary school teacher. Her chapter was written while she was teaching mathematics on a daily basis to third graders while she was also a faculty member at Michigan State University. It was the first article she wrote based on research using her own teaching.

Cynthia Ballenger has been teaching third and fourth grade in the Boston area and working with teachers of bilingual children through the Chèche Konnen Center at TERC. Her article was published as a part of a book she wrote called Teaching Other People’s Children: Literacy and Learning in a Bilingual Classroom (Teachers College Press, 1999).

Ron Berger has been teaching fifth- and sixth-grade students for 25 years at the Shutesbury Elementary School in Shutesbury, a small rural community in western Massachusetts. He also consults with the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound national school network and with Harvard’s Project Zero; both these organizations have provided a rich professional community that contributed to the ideas embodied in his written piece here.

Timothy Boerst is a National Board–certified fifth-grade teacher at Jane Addams Elementary School in Redford, Michigan, and a Practitioner Scholar with the Center for Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He has been teaching for 12 years. His chapter stems from his early attempts to use ethnographic methods to capture an issue with salience to practitioners that would rarely be the subject of traditional educational scholarship.

Lois Brandts, who has been teaching for 30 years, currently teaches third grade at El Camino School in Goleta, California. As a member of the Santa Barbara Research Group, she and her colleagues investigated issues of equity, access, and respect for all children. Her chapter was a result of her research over a 2-year period concerning the effectiveness of pullout programs in both first and second grades.

Vanessa Brown is a teacher on special assignment at the Philadelphia Writing Project at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She has been a teacher for almost 30 years. Her project is an outgrowth of an inquiry into practice that began shortly after she transferred to a new teaching position in a Philadelphia comprehensive high school.

Gerald Campano’s contribution was the result of his work as a fifth-grade teacher-researcher at a neighborhood elementary school in California, where he investigated the school literacy practices of children from immigrant, migrant, and refugee backgrounds as part of his graduate studies. He is currently an assistant professor of education at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Marlene Carter has been an English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 26 years and is currently teaching English at Dorsey High School. Her article is based on teacher research she conducted with the support of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Joan Kernan Cone is an English teacher at El Cerrito High School in El Cerrito, California, and has been teaching for 40 years. Her chapter was written as a response to her growing concern over the damage of high-stakes testing and her longtime advocacy of untracking and of demanding and exciting curricula for all students.

Larry Copes is an independent consultant in educational mathematics, writing teaching materials for publishers and running workshops for teachers. His chapter is an amalgam of classroom experiences with this problem over 30 years of teaching college mathematics and preparing secondary teachers.

Griselle M. Diaz-Gemmati is a seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and social sciences teacher at Norwood Park School in Chicago. Her article, published as a chapter in Inside City Schools (Freedman et al., 1999), is the realization of her participation in the Multicultural Collaborative for Literacy and Secondary Schools (the M-CLASS Project), which motivated her to explore the underlying issues of race, ethnicity, and social justice in her classroom.

Yvonne Divans Hutchinson, a National Board–certified teacher and 38-year veteran, teaches 9th- and 10th-grade English at King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles. “A Friend of Their Minds” and “Thinking with Text” are part of her classroom research as a Carnegie Scholar.

Magdalene Lampert’s chapter was written in 1984 while she was teaching fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade mathematics at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then taught fifth-grade math for 7 years at Spartan Village School in East Lansing, Michigan. Both these teaching situations involved using her classroom as a site for teacher research and teacher education. She is currently on the faculty of the University of Michigan.

Steven Levy taught fourth grade at the Bowman School in Lexington, Massachusetts. After 28 years in the classroom, he now works as a school designer for Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound. He wrote his article as a chapter in his book, Starting From Scratch, to describe the power of a guiding question to motivate students and shape the scope of inquiry.

Heidi Lyne is one of the founding teachers at the Mission Hill School in Boston, where she now teaches middle school science and humanities. Her chapter was written for her Carnegie project on graduation by portfolio presentation.

A 23-year teaching veteran, Jeffrey Maas is currently teaching in a 2/3 classroom at Sandburg Elementary in Madison, Wisconsin. His ongoing inquiry into chaos theory and teaching began in the mid-1990s with his affiliation with the Wisconsin Alliance for Arts Education.

After teaching first grade in East Los Angeles for 6 years, Ramón Martínez taught English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic and Mexico. He wrote this article while he was actively involved in the Coalition for Educational Justice, a grassroots organization of parents, students, and teachers working to transform public education in Los Angeles.

Renee Moore, National Board–certified teacher and former Mississippi Teacher of the Year, is a 14-year veteran who currently teaches English and journalism at Broad Street High School in Shelby, Mississippi. Her chapter summarizes the action research process used in developing her work on teaching standard English to rural African American students.

Marsha R. Pincus is an English and drama teacher at J.R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. A teacher-scholar with Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and a Teacher Consultant with the Philadelphia Writing Project and the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Program, Marsha has been teaching in the School District of Philadelphia for 29 years.

Emily Wolk is a resource teacher at Pio Pico Elementary School in Santa Ana, California, and has been teaching for 16 years. Her chapter was based on her experience with her students, the Pio Pico Student Researchers, and their work to transform their world through participatory action research.