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.

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.

Storytelling--or narrative--is gaining acceptance as an important tool for professional development, research, and teaching. This book shows how teachers and educators can use stories of their professional experiences to reflect on their own practice, articulate values and beliefs, give shape and form to teaching theory, and better understand decision-making processes. The book offers strategies for generating, sharing, and using narrativeand illustrates its points with many rich classroom stories.Individual chapters built around specific themes show how teachers use narrative to forge connections, learn from students, reflect upon experience, resolve conflict, develop as professionals, and enter the educational dialogue. A wealth of examples and specific suggestions show teachers at all levels, preschool through high school, how to compose and give voice to their own stories, forcing them to dig beneath the surface, think more deeply about teaching and learning, and become truly reflective practitioners.

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 aims to explore and make visible the intersection of subject matter knowledge and teacher knowledge in the narratives of teachers. This complicated interaction between these two bodies of knowledge is often studied and little understood.

This book brings in an international perspective on a much debated area, namely teacher education. Through narrative research, the chapters in this collection provide a wide variety of stories of discovery, transformation and hope in teaching and learning to teach.

In this groundbreaking work, the authors and their contributors offer a deep, probing look at the multilayered professional lives of teachers, where moral, historical, personal, epistemological worlds merge. Using the language of metaphor, the authors explore the realm of teachers' knowledge, and how it applies to their lives. Each part of the book focuses on a different aspect or "landscape." Personal stories contributed by real teachers, both beginning and experienced, are interwoven with stories of teacher development, growth, and even failure. This book is essential reading for all teachers, teacher educators, principals, superintendents, staff developers, and those who work in teacher research, professional development, and the philosophy of education.