Teaching What They Learn, Learning What They Live: How Teachers' Personal Histories Shape Their Professional Development

"Teaching What They Learn, Learning What They Live" explores the multiple social, political, and epistemological domains that comprise learning-to-teach. Based on a study of eight beginning English teachers at four different university teacher preparation programs, this book examines how beginning teachers' personal dispositions and conceptions combine with their preparation programs' professional knowledge and contexts to form their subsequent understandings of, and approaches toward, teaching. Brad Olsen recasts teacher learning as a continuous, situated, identity process in which prior experiences produce deeply embedded ways of viewing the world that go on to organize current/future experience into meaning. Since experience shapes learning and everyone acquires different sets of experience, no individual teacher's knowledge is exactly like another's. Yet Olsen also shows that the process by which teachers construct professional knowledge is common: the "what" of teacher knowledge varies, but the "how" remains the same.