This study explores and makes meaning of personal experience to understand how it shapes and informs teacher knowledge or personal practical knowledge. Guided by Dewey's (1938) thinking that to study education and life is to study experience, I begin the inquiry of my personal practical knowledge by exploring my experiences of identity, culture, and sense of belonging. My experiences are rooted in China, the place of my birth, and shaped by the experience of my family's immigration to "Gold Mountain" or the United States. Growing up, I was criticized by my mother as a juk sing or a hollow bamboo who has the exterior appearance of being Chinese or Asian but is empty inside. To her I was devoid of the traditional and honored Chinese values and beliefs. My mother's characterization of me as a juk sing formed an indelible impression that serves as an originating and seminal question for this inquiry. This inquiry is a journey of self-awareness and discovery that contributes to exploring how personal experiential histories shape and inform teacher knowledge. The study is an invitation to all educators and policy makers to expand our understanding of cross-cultural complexities for an increasingly diversified and global community, and to develop culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teachers. Voices of participants integral to understanding my teacher knowledge include my parents, my village clan in China, my Chinese extended family in America, activists in the Asian American movement, my students, and my colleagues in teacher education in Hong Kong. My inquiry is a quest for understanding who I had become, how I became the person I am, and the person I am becoming that takes me to the soils of three landscapes: China, United States, and Hong Kong. I discover that my identity, culture, and sense of belonging are situated in what He (2003) has termed the "in-betweenness" of cross-cultural lives. I find that I am not a Chinese, nor an American, but a rich and complex blend of multiple identities that is evolving, improvised, and contested. "In-betweenness," I learn, is a place for tensions, challenges, discoveries, and transformations.

This book illustrates how the experiential histories of teachers shape and inform the knowledge of teachers as professionals. Situating personal experiences into the context of social, political, and economic events gives clarity to the intercultural dynamics of being Chinese and Western. What can we learn from each other to transform our teaching and learning? The book engages in a cross-cultural perspective that is highly relevant for teachers, teacher education, curriculum making and policy planning for a global community. The book is also an invitation to internationalize the classroom for teaching and learning in a diverse and global world, and to educators and policy makers to expand our understanding of cross-cultural complexities for an increasingly diversified and global community. By viewing the classroom through the multiple lens of different cultures, educators have an opportunity to cross over to see, experience, and understand how others live.

Making culture a more central concept in the texts and contexts of teacher education is the focus of this book. It is a rich account of the author's investigation of teacher book club discussions of ethnic literature, specifically ethnic autobiography--as a genre from which teachers might learn about culture, literacy, and education in their own and others' lives, and as a form of conversation and literature-based work that might be sustainable and foster teachers' comprehension and critical thinking. Dr. Florio-Ruane's role in the book clubs merged participation and inquiry. For this reason, she blends personal narrative with analysis and description of ways she and the book club participants explored culture in the stories they told one another and in their responses to published autobiographies. She posits that autobiography and conversation may be useful for teachers not only in constructing their own learning about culture, but also, by doing so, in participating in the transformation of learning within the teaching profession.

Teacher identity is shaped by recognition or its absence, often by misrecognition of others. Recognition as a teacher, or the strong and complex identification with one’s professional culture and community, is necessary for a positive sense of self. Increasingly, teachers are entering educational settings where difference connotes not equal, better/worse, or having more/less power over resources. Differences between discourses of identity are braided at many points with a discourse of racism, both interpersonal and structural. Teacher Identity and the Struggle for Recognition examines the nature of identity and recognition as social, cultural, and political constructs. In particular, the contributing authors to the book present discussions of the professional work necessary in teacher preparation programs concerned with preparing teachers for the complexities of teaching in schools that mirror an increasingly diverse society. Importantly, the authors illuminate many of the often problematic structures of schooling and the cultural politics that work to define one’s identity – drawing into specific relief the nature of the struggle for recognition that all face who choose to entering teaching as a profession.

This book provides an invaluable resource for researchers who wish to improve education by bridging students, school, family, and community resources. Based in connecting experiences in and out of school, it suggests a strategy to put students' practices, cultures, and identities in the center of a twenty-first-century education.

Research on teacher learning has too often excluded personal development in considering professional development. This timely book argues that the development of a professional identity is inextricable from personal identity. It suggests that when teachers are given the opportunity to compose their own stories of learning within a supportive community, they can then begin to compose new narratives of identity and practice. This book is a critical tool for educators seeking to refine their teaching practice and author their own development.