Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination

"Through the use of, and sustained conversations about autobiographical texts, Florio-Ruane introduces teacher education students and experienced teachers to the complex nature of culture...[she] has written an important and insightful book."
—Anthropology & Education Quarterly

"The book includes an excellent list of readings and references that can be used in courses dealing with cross-cultural issues. Recommended for advanced students, teacher educators, and researchers."
—CHOICE

"Florio-Ruane's prose is elegant and the book is exceptionally readable, a welcome respite from texts that we educational researchers label social science 'literature.' ...Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination will assist teachers educators who seek methods to help traditional preservice candidates discover their own cultural assumptions and with them, social realities of inequality."
—Educational Researcher

"It's never easy for teachers to develop a good understanding of multicultural issues; it's even harder to support them in actually changing their practice so that classrooms become more welcoming to the country's rainbow of children. Susan Florio-Ruane's wonderful book shows that passionate dialogue in small groups about multicultural literature and autobiography can transform teachers' lives and practice, whether they are brand-new apprentices in a teacher ed program, or veteran teachers enrolled in a university course, or teachers in schools taking part in a voluntary book club. She offers a way to promote multicultural understanding and teaching not based on a kit of techniques or a particular body of information, but rather on a humane vision of learning as a process of critical engagement with texts, ideas, other people, and oneself. She argues convincingly for a broad and deeply intellectual, yet practical and concrete, vision of teacher development in which teachers not only begin to explore 'hot lava' issues of race and class, gender and culture, but also themselves as thinkers and articulate voices. This book is an outstanding example of how to do the two most difficult things at once: to understand and to help."
—Jay Featherstone
Michigan State University

"Florio-Ruane has written and important and insightful book. She has taken up the challenge to educate her students about the role culture plays in the lives of teachers."
—James O'Donnell
New Mexico State University

"Susan argues for the importance of addressing the role of culture in our own lives, as teachers and teacher educators, as a way of gaining insights about the role of culture in the lives of our students. Few steps can be more vital to improving education for the many students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who already constitute the majority in every urban school district in the United States."
—Kathryn Au
University of Hawai'i, From the Foreword

"As a reader, I felt quite privileged in seeing Susan Florio-Ruane's thinking as she wove together the text of her own life, the texts of the lived experiences of the participants in the Future Teachers' Autobiography Club, literature that the club read, and a broad collection of sociolinguistic and sociocultural literature. She wove the various texts together to create a context for the reader that is inspirational and encouraging in light of the many 'guilts' we feel within the present complexity of facing what multicultural means. This book is an important contribution to the field....It pushes our understanding of how teachers and future teachers study and learn together....THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for including me as a reader."
—Richard J. Meyer
University of New Mexico