ABSTRACT
We dedicate this section of the book to exploring the multiple connections of schooling and how they affect teacher-student interactions, curriculum, the relation of schools to the surrounding social-historical-cultural spheres, and linkages between students and the school environment. Each set of exercises is designed to make the familiar strange. Having spent most of your lives in schools, these places are very familiar to you. Although this familiarity with patterns and processes of schooling can be comforting and might make your life as a student somewhat easier, it does lead to a kind of tunnel vision. After a while, policies, practices, and procedures become such a routine part of our lives that we stop asking why things are done and only concentrate on how things are done. For example, consider the following routine aspects of schooling and the accompanying questions that ask you to analyze school experiences often taken for granted:
• If a lively classroom discussion is taking place, does that necessarily mean that all students are participating or that all students are being treated equitably by the teacher? How about the kinds of responses given by teachers? Might there be patterns of bias that are not readily evident?
