ABSTRACT
Th e courses we teach in methods and curriculum are off ered to undergraduate social studies education majors in the fi nal year of their coursework at the University of Georgia. Each student in the program completes the sequence in methods and curriculum simultaneously with a schoolbased practicum designed to provide valuable classroom experience before formal student teaching begins the following semester. As we planned our respective courses we wanted to maintain the integrity of each course while connecting the two courses through the core themes of our program: rationale-based practice and refl ective teaching. We also wanted to create courses that balanced the theoretical and the practical. To do this we searched for a common theme that would address these many goals, and aft er some deliberation we chose to focus on Cochran-Smith’s (2004) vision of “teaching against the grain.” As she puts it, “to teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school systems and communities” (emphasis in original, p. 28). She suggests that student teachers should fi nd ways to channel their criticism of “the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable questions” that push against practices that undermine transformative teaching in public schools (p. 28). “Perhaps most importantly,” she adds, “teachers who work against the grain must wrestle with their own doubts, fend off the fatigue of reform, and depend on the strength of their
individual collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a diff erence in the fabric of social responsibility” (p. 28).
