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populations began to change in two of the schools, as social class, race, and ethnicity became even further complicated with the development of desegrega- tion efforts in the schools.

As previously stated, the book is a good, solid piece of qualitative research on schooling, teachers, teacher unions, and the schooling process. Indeed, it exem- plifies the greatest value of qualitative research and studies of this nature as this book and other qualitative research allow those who read the book to create their own meaning out of Bascia’s work and their own research and experience; thus we can accept Bascia‘s findings and add our own. This book is well worth reading for its rich qualitative contribution to the understanding of the major issues in fundamentally changing schools so the focus of schooling will be on student learning and not, as it continues to be, on teacher work.

In Broken Images: Feminist Tales for a Different Teacher Education. Erica McWilliam. New York Teachers College Press, 1994.179 pp.

CHRISTINE Fox University of Wollongong

It is not everyday that you pick up a book and discover a new way of telling a story you thought you were thoroughly familiar with. With Broken lniages Erica McWilliam does just that. In unfolding her tale of teacher preservice socializa- tion, McWilliam has devised a strategy for reconstructing the debate around teacher education. She has amplified the voices of her students so that their different and multiple interpretations of their preservice education experiences rise above the clamor of those whose discourse revolves around binaries of theory/practice, teacher/student, and idealism/realism, and around the lan- guage of social pathology and managerial efficiency (p. 74).

Yet the story is not only about teacher education. It is about a different way of doing research, and a different way of collecting data. There are no pre- and post-questionnaires, no autobiographies, no tests, no hypothesis testing, and no straightforward outcomes in her research data. McWilliam has chosen to take what she calls a linguistic turn, a reflexive turn, and a postmodern turn to research. McWilliam has labeled her work as “advocacy research”: her purpose is not to demonstrate the face validity of her data (that is, to ensure the trust- worthiness of data through checking back with her students), but to look for ”catalytic validity,” or the degree to which participants are refocused and energized to new ways of knowing (p. 43).

By re-presenting both teacher education and research approaches, McWilliam offers a double challenge to her readers. In Broken Zrnages is a useful book for those interested in how to “do“ research using participants to theorize talk as action. It is also a useful way of critiquing the ”folkloric discourses of teacher education,” much of which, she claims, are created by poorly conceptualized research, and badly designed data collection methods. This discussion alone, of the way certain kinds of research methodology distort meaning and legitimate discourses of positivist ”regimes of truth,” makes for interesting reading.

McWilliam uses a comparative approach to place teacher education policies and practices in the context of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia,

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and New Zealand. She characterizes research reports about teacher education over the last 20 or 30 years as demonstrating a strong preference for a romantic humanist approach to preservice education-discourses focused around con- cepts of therapy (quasimedical) and romantic constructions of self, of self-esteem raising, and individual needs satisfaction.

In Broken lmages advocates the telling of feminist tales for a different teacher education. Nancy Fraseis work on oppositional needs talk (Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theo y, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) has been used as a framework to look at ”real engagement” of preservice trainees with their educative experiences, using an analysis informed by feminist theorizing. McWilliam’s research participants were 14 of her stu- dents with whom she worked closely over three years to explore their ways of experiencing and describing their preservice teacher education. Rather than submerge the data through pre- and post-questionnaires, she explored the voices of her students through their written reflections in each of the three years, through extensive interviews, through a progressive interrogation of their own work as time went on, and through an “advocacy” action research project in the last semester of their third year. A postscript briefly informs the reader of the subsequent journeys of her participants into (or out of) the school system in Australia.

Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the findings of her work, examining the metaphors consciously or unconsciously employed by her informants. Analysis of their first reflections reveals a variety of images, with some visualizing the teacher as beside and behind the students, not just in front of them. Most did not use much of the therapy talk characterized in so much research. For example, by the second year many of the metaphors had changed in terms of their spatial and interac- tional nature, with the students describing one-way rather than two-way meta- phors. Metaphors of manual control emerged (handling the situation; out of hand; juggling). Yet the tales, as they are told in each year, and particularly as they reflect on the three years, are complex and not easily categorized, highlight- ing the multiple ways that teachers write and rewrite themselves. McWilliam then discusses how students negotiated their last semesteis work, moving from reflection to theorizing talk as action. In this section, McWilliam’s analysis would have benefited from the insights provided by Jurgen Habermas’s social theory of communicative action (Theory of Cominunicutive Action, Volume 1 , Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

The book is a fascinating account of research as action, yet at the same time the author is careful to frame the theoretical positions around which the tale is woven. There are some uneven parts to the book where the language of the more densely constructed original doctoral thesis, from which this book was derived, has not been sufficiently refocused to refer the reader to wider reading rather than try to theorize in a condensed form. Patti Lather’s useful foreword in turn critiques some of the lines taken by McWilliam with regard to poststructuralist theories and feminisms of difference. There is much to be debated as well with regard to her position on critical pedagogy and theories of discourse and power. In all, the book can be usefully read at various levels, as McWilliam herself points out. This is a book to be read not only by teacher educators, but by researchers in many areas of investigation where the voices of the participants as presented, and re-presented, tell different tales.