A Teacher Educator Reflects on the Impact of Context on Teaching Practice: Seeking Voice in Teacher and Teacher Educator Research on Practice.

An educator who teaches physics to grade 12 students and a physics curriculum and methods course to preservice teachers analyzes the impact of context on teaching practice. A paper by A. Richert titled "Voice and Power in Teaching and Learning To Teach" is used as the foundation for interpreting the author's experience of teaching physics in grade 12 at the same time he was teaching others to teach physics. The paper outlines some personal values, contrasts the contexts of school and university, compares the second year of experience to the first, bridges the worlds of theory and practice, notes the importance of teacher research, and examines differences between transmission teachers and interpretation teachers. The paper concludes that learning how to connect the two parallel tracks of experiences and thinking about "teaching and learning" is central to personal development as a teacher but is ignored by both schools and universities. The paper also concludes that, as university-based researchers in education have worked to study teaching from the "outside-in" perspective, they seem to have overlooked the golden opportunity to do research on their own teaching within teacher education programs. (Contains 14 references.) (JDD)