African-American Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching: Understanding the Influence of Their Remembered Teachers

Many researchers have emphasized the connection between teachers' thinking and their autobiography, noting that much of teachers' knowledge of teaching has been derived from their life experiences. Since teachers have spent many years watching teachers teach, those experiences become part of the process of learning to teach. This article examines the role of former or remembered teachers in the shaping of the beliefs and practices of eleven successful African-American teachers who teach in urban schools in a major metropolitan area. Both the remembered teachers and the teachers in this study used their pedagogy to enable their students to achieve in spite of circumstances that often militated against success.