At the Elbow of Another

At the Elbow of Another is about teaching and learning to teach, written from the perspectives and experiences of two educators who teach and, in so doing, learn to teach. Teaching and learning to teach at the elbows of other teachers (including ourselves) provide us with new and different understandings and allow us to describe a different epistemology of teaching. We adopt a first-person perspective on teaching, sometimes our own and at other times that of peers but through the eyes of coparticipants engaged in an activity with the same primary intention of assisting students to learn. Throughout this book, we focus on teaching and learning to teach at different stages of the career ladder and explore different ways of conceiving the roles of researchers, supervisors, evaluators, cooperating teachers, and «new teachers.»

Wolff-Michael Roth is Lansdowne (endowed) Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Victoria. His interests are broad and concern science and science learning in formal (elementary school to university) and informal settings (community activists and research labs). He is the author of Authentic School Science and Designing Communities, and with K. Tobin and S. Ritchie, Re/constructing Elementary Science (Peter Lang, 2001). Kenneth Tobin is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His main research is concerned with the improvement of teaching and learning in urban schools. Committed to «walking the walk,» he coteaches with resident teachers in inner city schools of Philadelphia. He has published numerous research articles and is co-author of Windows into Science (with J. B. Kahle & B. J. Fraser) and Re/constructing Elementary Science (Peter Lang, 2001).