Center for the Scholarship of Teaching < Events < 2006 < Desiree Pointer Mace: Learning in (and from) Practice, Teaching in (and from) the Classroom: New Visions for Teacher Learning

Center Events: Speaker Series

Desiree Pointer Mace (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)
Learning in (and from) Practice, Teaching in (and from) the Classroom:
New Visions for Teacher Learning
October 17, 2006

In this presentation, Desiree Pointer Mace will describe recent initiatives at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to create multimedia online records of teaching practice. The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and the Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education have both been involved in unveiling the complexity of teaching practice in multiple domains -- accomplished K-12 teaching, teacher education, professional development, and pre-service student teaching. Pointer Mace will describe how different practitioners have chosen to "go public" with their teaching, what they and others learn from the process, and how such records might be used as alternative "texts" for teacher learning and development. The work of Pointer Mace and her colleagues has recently been made public in a "living archive" of teaching practice, www.InsideTeaching.org . This presentation will complement the presentation by Pam Grossman and Anna Richert in September.

Désirée Pointer Mace is a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. Her work focuses on envisioning and inventing ways of representing teaching and learning using new media and online technologies. She has developed multimedia Web sites of exemplary practitioner inquiry for many years, beginning with her work with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Pointer Mace and Ann Lieberman co-direct the Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education, an initiative jointly funded by the Carnegie Foundation and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund that focuses on expanding these efforts to more teachers, schools of education, and professional development organizations.

Previously, Pointer Mace taught elementary school for many years as a Spanish bilingual teacher and bilingual resource specialist in Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. She has worked with students from kindergarten through doctoral level in the United States, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador, and has consulted in the development of Spanish language videos for Children's Television Workshop. Pointer Mace holds a B.A. in cognitive science from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in education with a concentration in language, literacy and culture from UC Berkeley.