ABSTRACT
Chapter Two, The Foundations of Practice: Where We Come from and Where We Are Now presents you with the background of where our curriculum currently comes from. I’ll take you from Dewey through the changes in the ways of thinking about how students learn in the last century, up to current approaches or “ways in” to teaching reading and writing today. The chapter differentiates between the commonsense and uncommonsense traditions (Mayher, 1991) the first stressing the passing on of information, and the second conceiving of the learner as an active construer of knowledge. The chapter demonstrates how this has impact in particular about how teachers go about teaching literature, reading, and writing.
