Teachers and Teaching: On Teaching, Knowledge, and "Middle Ground"

Abstract

Teachers often feel poised between dynamic forces in the classroom as they struggle to meet the needs of both individual students and the group, to promote children's self-knowledge as well as their knowledge of the curriculum. Here Jessica Howard, a teacher at the Prospect School,a private elementary school in rural Vermont, re-examines this dialectic. She describes how she,as a teacher, creates the "middle ground," a time and place that pulls together the disparate elements of classroom life, where children can make new and richer sense of themselves and the world.