Through Teachers' Eyes

"The questions that guide a teaching life are timeless - the kind teachers ask themselves always, every year, every day: "What does it mean to teach this course and this student? How do I reach those I am instructed to teach" So write Perl and Wilson in the preface to this edition of Through Teachers' Eyes. In this book, based on extensive ethnographic research, the authors show us the texture of teaching in times both good and bad, exciting and despairing; they recount, in a compelling narrative, the unending shifts and changes of teaching lives. Perl and Wilson also recount researchers' stories. Like teaching, research has shifts and questions, doubts and despair and discovery.

Through Teachers' Eyes is a model of ethnographic research and in it, research data is turned into readable, accessible and powerful classroom stories. Those who hunger for an animating view of classroom research will find here what is sorely lacking in so many composition studies: a view of research that welcomes the researcher's voice as narrator and storyteller, as one whose caring can be shown as a natural part of the inquiry. Perl and Wilson write: "A teaching life lived fully is one that includes others. It is a life rooted in the sharing of projects and problems and most of all in the telling of stories." In these stories, readers will discover the richness of teachers' lives and in so doing also discover the richness of their own.