This book is adapted from Jefferson professor Leah Deasy’s adoption of Carol Billing’s 2016 OER available at http://carolbilling.weebly.com/.

I renamed the book Practical Foundations and Principles for Teaching.  My intention is to counter some of the major textbook companies’ sanitized treatments of ongoing, genuine areas of debate.  As an English professor, I’m attuned to topics which yield provable, arguable, and substantial approaches.  Practical Foundations and Principles for Teaching serves as a core text for SUNY Jefferson’s EDU 210: Principles of Education course, an introductory class geared toward Childhood Education majors and Teaching Assistant Certificate students.  The course is currently under revision (April 2021) to reflect its catch-all status as a blend of introduction to teaching, principles of education, and foundation courses.

My experience with education includes five years of substitute teaching (2003-08),  three years (1998-2001) teaching at Lowville Academy, a National Blue Ribbon School; and over twenty years teaching English at Jefferson Community College, where I am an Associate Professor of English, EDGE (concurrent enrollment) English Liaison, and OER Mentor.  I earned the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service (2013) and am an active OER creator.  Practical Foundations and Principles for Teaching will be my thirteenth OER.  I am also working on My Music at Work: Using Music to Teach Writing and Literature.  I have been teaching EDU 210 since 2011.  I have taught online since 2002, taught hybrid, flipped, gamified, and themed courses, and have taught the following wide range of classes–each of which has an OER: composition (lower and upper division), the novel, native American literature, African American literature, American Literature 1 & 2, world literature, science fiction & fantasy, mythology, introduction to literature, children’s literature, research strategies, and technical writing.  I have served as Jefferson’s Affirmative Action Compliance Officer, allowing insight into diversity issues from a perspective outside the classroom. I also oversee my college’s concurrent enrollment offerings for composition and literature, taking me to nearly twenty BOCES and high school sites. Lastly, I have recently participated in a year-long, intensive Faculty Guild (Lumen Circles) circle examining teaching practices, as well as a Title III Summer Institute aimed at deep course revision for coherence and accessibility.   In sum, I have tried to stay engaged with the field of education through these wide-ranging activities.  For a college lacking an education department, this is what I have managed to bring to this OER’s making.

OERs work well when paired with other texts.  I will use this OER with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire’s great work on teaching in Brazil (50th Anniversary ed., 2018), as well as Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 (2007).  Past instances of the course have worked well with texts such as Alfie Kohn’s What Does it Mean to be Well Educated (2004) or Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession.  Obviously, a course such as this relies heavily on the activities one creates to accompany the readings.  I have included some basic assignments such as classroom rules, teaching platform, teacher interview, and an analysis essay.  Our course uses a portfolio without being able to get students in for teaching or even observation, so this capstone is more a starter portfolio than anything.

I made the following changes to Carol Billing’s text:

• Deleted Study Guides, Assessments, ABE, and Assignments from the original.
• Omitted “Topic” from the chapter titles.
• Added s to the Gardner Intelligence section.
• Renumbered Chapter 9 to become Chapter 7; I swapped Chapter 12 and 13, reordering them.
• In “Teaching Movies” lecture, I italicized and fixed spelling errors on some titles.
• Added lecture material and moved it within chapter containing it.  These include “Who Decides Matters?”, “Posting Tips,” “Imagine Using the Hornbook,” “Helicopter Parents can be Hindrances to Learning,” “Teachers Should be Well Educated,” “Tips for Improving Online Discussions,” “How Chronically Disruptive Might a Student Become?”, “Students Benefit from Diversity of Gender,” “Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay Interview,” “Caitlin Flanagan, Private Schools are Indefensible,” “Extra Credit: Why Some Educators Hate it,” “If Families Have Culture, so do Classrooms: What did I Miss?”, “Who Decides Matters: The Case of Cultural Literacy Texts,” “Diversity can get Subverted,” “Anna Deavere Smith Teaches What Students Wouldn’t get Otherwise,” “15 Learning Theories in Education,” “If the Best Teachers Draw the Toughest Students, What Then?”, “Rafe Esquith’s Advice About Shaking up the World may Actually be Reversed,” “Far too Many Novice Teachers are Looking for the Cookbook Modules,” “The Memory Room Technique,” “Bertrand Russell’s Views of Plato and Socrates are Enlightening,” “Plato’s Dialogues: Crito and Meno,” “Insults Even had a Pattern: Check out Vituperation!”, “Avoid the Trap of Essentialist Thinking,” “John Taylor Gatto: Use His Ideas,” “Many Social Studies Teachers are not History Majors. . . This Matters,” “NYSED Educator Resources Pages,” “Freire Institute,” “The Growing Role of Federal Government in Education can be Problematic,” “Unions Matter,” “Scholastic has a Site on Creating a Professional Portfolio,” “Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom,” and “With Analysis, Focus on Functions or Effects.”
• Added assignments appearing in Front Matter.
• Added Teaching Presentations and Skills for Navigating the Course Successfully chapters.
• Updated the Noteworthy Blogs & Useful Links lecture.
• Deleted the original OER Resources, replacing it with “Other OERs We Will Use”

The original Introduction section follows: This collection of OER resources was created to support the Foundations of Education course taught at the College of Western Idaho and the College of Southern Idaho. It is a survey course designed to introduce students to the world of teaching.