Both teachers and teacher educators will sympathize with Dudley-Marling's concerns in this thoughtful and provocative text.
—Reading Teacher
Living with Uncertainty contributes to our understanding of what it means to teach, offering new insights into the issues of teaching and teacher identity. Unlike the idealized models of teaching that dominate research, this candid account illustrates the complicated realities of classroom practice. It is not an attempt to attain truth once and for all. It is a systematic, theoretically informed, deliberate reflection of the author's experiences as he acknowledges uncertainty in his own teaching and seeks improvement.
When Curt Dudley-Marling took a one-year leave from his university duties to return to the classroom, his plan was to document and reflect on his experiences as an elementary school teacher. What emerged from this "quest for certainty" was a complicated notion of teaching, marked by uncertainties, ambiguities, and contradictions. The chapters in this book provide a complex, often critical look at some of the issues that dominated the author's attention:
promoting student ownership
administering student discipline
negotiating gender relations
teaching struggling students
building community
using "multicultural literature"
teaching spelling in a student-centered environment
creating language-rich classroom experiences.
Living with Uncertainty will interest anyone concerned about the current state of education, especially preservice and inservice teachers, teacher educators, and teacher-researchers.
NCTE James Britton Research Award