Dirck Roosevelt

professor, education, Brandeis

Professor Roosevelt seeks to educate prospective teachers to teach in ways that elicit, honor and strengthen childrens capacities for inquiry and the fundamental human impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art, in the words of John Dewey. He is particularly focused, in the current climate, on the challenges of preparing teachers for active commitment to public education, understood as a democratic project. He currently teaches courses in philosophical, social, and cultural foundations of education; principles, practices, and analysis of teaching; Child Study; elementary school social studies; and teacher research. His own research, typically conceptual-analytic work with empirical grounding, includes study of public school classrooms as sites for creation of democratic culture (taking childrens imaginative writing as an illustrative case), and work on conceptualizations of teaching and the improvement of teacher education. He is author, most recently, of *What Gives You the Right?: Earning Moral and Intellectual Authority to Teach* and *Keeping Real Children at the Center of Teacher Education: Child Study and the Local Construction of Knowledge in Teaching*, both in a volume co-authored by him, *Transforming Teacher Education: Reflections from the Field *(Harvard Education Press, 2007).