Exploring Narratives of Women Teacher Trade Union Activists uses life history interviews and narrative analysis to explore women’s stories, showing trade unionism as a vehicle for transformational change and activism as a positive contribution to education.

This book highlights the catalytic role of workers’ education in mobilizing political activism and women’s involvement in labour struggles and politics. Through a comprehensive study of the gendered aspects of workers’ education it explores the intellectual lives of women workers. Drawing on the letters and papers of Fannia Mary Cohn, a prominent figure in the US garment industry’s trade union movement, it discusses and further theorizes the importance of gender as an analytical category in the forceful interaction of labour, education and migration histories. The significance of the visual turn in feminist narrative analytics is considered and the book puts forward a compelling case for the contribution of writing working women in the intellectual and cultural life of the twentieth century.

Drawing on the life histories of three teachers, this book explores their narrative strategies to author themselves as active agents within and against the essentializing discourses of teaching. The complex and contradictory ways in which these women construct themselves as subjects, while simultaneously disrupting the notion of a unitary subject, provide new ways to think about subjectivity, resistance, power and agency.

"The Trade Union Woman" by Alice Henry was written to serve as a brief account of trade unionism in relation to the working women of the United States of America. Though often undervalued, women have always been an important part of trade, the workforce, and economics. This book marked an important shift in the world towards gender equality and is still an important text for men and women to this day.

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.