Books found at the Unitec library

Over the course of the last two months, I have put half a day a week to refresh my 'apprentices research' bibliography. The libraries both at work and at the university are still quiet as the students have only just started. Despite prevalence of on-line journals, google books & epublications, I still love browsing the stacks. Each trip always ends with a satisfying stack of books relevant to various projects, many of which would have escaped my attention by just relying on catalogue and database searches. Maybe I am not searching them correctly :( but I think not, as some gems are buried - say 123 out of 1000 hits! & I seldom get down beyond scanning the first 100.

While in Auckland last week, I managed to find a couple of hours to browse the 3 shelves of books on education in the library at Unitec as I was interview boating apprentices at Unitec. These include the following pertinent ones:

Understanding pedagogy and its impact on learning (1999) edited by P. Mortimore had a good chapter by Watkins, C & Mortimore, P. Pedagogy, what do we know, Young, M. & Lucas, N. on Pedagogies in further ed. New context, new theories and new possibilities and Griffiths, T. & Guile, D. on pedagogy in workplace contexts. First chapter on google books.

Also browsed through Classroom discourses by Cazden, C.B. (2001), a seminal book on studying class room discourse which provided many examples of discourse analysis techniques undertaken with data collected during class sessions.

Atkinson, T & Claxton. G. (2000) The intuitive practitioner: on the value of not always knowing what one is doing. A fascinating read which I will have to find another copy of.

Lastly, but by no means least, a book that provides inspiration for a longitudinal study. Levin, B. B. (2003) case studies of teacher development: an in-depth look at how thinking about pedagogy develops over time. Which is a 15 year project following 4 graduates of a pre-service teacher training programme and their development as teachers. The understanding of pedagogy was studied using Ammon & Hutchinson’s (1989) model of pedagogical thinking.  I will follow this one through in the next year or so as the CPIT DTLT programme beds down.  It will be good to be able to follow a group of new vocational educators over number of years as they move from professional / trades practioners to becoming teachers.