Beyond the Classroom Walls

Book excerpt: Written for practicing teachers and administrators, teacher candidates, and scholars who work in the fields of pre-service and in-service teacher education, Beyond the Classroom Walls: Teaching in Challenging Social Contextsprovides a richly descriptive, research-based inside-look at formal education in some challenging international socio-political and ethno-cultural settings. Based on data from three ethnographic studies conducted over a three-year period, this book illustrates the daily challenges and complexities that educators face in trying to meet the needs of their students in some the world’s more challenging contexts. In an era of increased forced migration and refugee resettlement, supporting teachers’ and school-based administrators’ global understandings of the teaching profession and what constitutes teaching is a vital first step in being able to relate with a diverse school population whose experiences of schooling are quite different from the majority of their teachers.