To Become a Teacher, edited by William Ayers, is filled with practical, concrete advice for new teachers (and experienced teachers who are rethinking their practices). Ayers has gathered an impressive array of educators, teachers, reformers, and philosophers, including Nancy Balaban, Lisa Delpit, Hubert Dyasi, Helen Featherstone and colleagues, Joseph Featherstone, Maxine Greene, Mary Anne Raywid, Rita Tenorio, and Lillian Weber, among others, to write about teaching as a profession, the state of our schools, and their visions of the future. Part I, “Becoming a Teacher,” offers insight into teaching as a calling, as an intellectual challenge, and as a profoundly human enterprise. Part II, “Thinking and Teaching,” draws our attention to the power of teaching, its responsibility, and the kind of consciousness demanded and expected. Part III, “Reinventing Schools,” locates teaching in the real world. This is a book for those who want to stop swimming uncomfortably in a sea of habit and routine, of behaviorism and instrumentalism, who want to create something better.


The volume will be an important primary text in undergraduate and graduate courses on foundations of education, teacher education, curriculum, and methods and a course reading in American studies, comparative education, and philosophy of education, as well as watershed reading for classroom teachers.