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Contemporary U.S. schools and professional reforms call for teachers to have greater disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge for teaching school subjects. Reform efforts leave unexamined the rules and standards of 'reason' that historically order school subjects. The notion of alchemy provides an analytic 'tool' to consider the processes of translation from disciplinary knowledge to teaching practices. It is argued that the intellectual tools of school pedagogies have little to do with the disciplinary fields. The psychological strategies for defining school subjects historically are strategies of governing who the child is and should be. There is an ironic quality to this alchemy of schooling subjects. Efforts to increase student participation may narrow the possibilities of reflection and action. An alternative style for thinking about the translation of disciplinary fields into the curriculum and 'methods' of school subjects is discussed, drawing on studies of science, technology, and mathematics. Keywords reforms of teacher education, school subject teaching, the politics of teacher education, Central to contemporary U.S. school and professional reforms are calls for teachers to have greater disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge for teaching school subjects such as physics, mathematics, history, and literacy [...]

In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when the learning of teaching is supposed to happen. In this article, four different conceptions of practice are investigated, and their implications for how learning teaching might be organized are explored. Rather than a comprehensive review of the literature, what is presented here is a set of ideas that draw on both past and present efforts at reform. The purpose of this essay is to provoke clarification of what we mean when we talk about practice in relation to learning teaching. The author draws on her own research on the work of teaching from the perspective of practice to represent the nature of the work and to speculate from various perspectives on how that work might be learned. Keywords teaching, practice, teacher education, professional development, In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when learning the work of teaching is supposed to happen. Listening [...]