Smudging Composition Lines of Identity and Teacher Knowledge: Volume 46

Chapter 1 overviews the purposes, organization, and various contributions in the volume, “Smudging composition lines of identity and teacher knowledge: Cross-cultural narrative inquiries into teaching and learning.” Through these inquiries, we unpack the complexities of teachers and students engaging in cross-cultural classroom contexts. We present narrative inquiry as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts. Such a methodological approach reveals details of the kinds of cross-cultural perspectives that might unfold in the implementation of curriculum, and explores ways in which teachers' sense of teacher knowledge are shaped by experiences of teaching and learning. We recognize complexities revealed through a comparative cross-cultural narrative approach as a way of highlighting the educational significance of this work. We organized chapters of this volume into sections, using Schwab's (1973) curriculum commonplaces as a framework for examining some of these complexities. The four section headings are: Section I: “Becoming a cross-cultural teacher: Developing teacher knowledge from cross-cultural experiences;” Section II: “Learner experience informing teacher knowledge;” Section III: “Subject matter/curriculum informing teacher knowledge;” and Section IV: “Milieu informing teacher knowledge.”

The endpoint and hallmark of the success of intercultural teaching is often seen as the attainment of intercultural competence. Yet, there is a need for a detailed examination of some of the enduring personal and professional identity and culture aspects of cross-cultural teaching. In this chapter, I deliberate over the application of narrative inquiry tools for unpacking teachers' experiences of immersion in a foreign country and culture of schooling. I reflect on my own experiences as a teacher in Japan and draw on an inquiry into the experiences of novice Canadian teachers in Hong Kong or Japan to shed light on fluid conceptions of culture shock and reverse culture shock in terms of cultural identity transformations. I also raise to the forefront inquiry puzzles about the phenomenon of intercultural competence acquisition.

In this chapter, we analyze and reflect on how our cultural identities and educational experiences as international students who pursued a doctoral degree in the United States affected and influenced our teaching philosophy and praxis as professors and educators. In this sense, we examine how our cultural identities and experiences help us define and shape our teaching praxis in the contexts in which we teach. We both are professors of color – Latino and Latino-Japanese – who graduated from doctoral programs in the United States. Currently, we work and serve culturally and linguistically diverse students, including first-generation students, in public higher education settings in Chile and the United States. We used a collection of narratives to delve into the significance of these events in our praxis. As theoretical lenses, we analyze these narratives using cultural identity and the reflecting teacher to examine our practices and identities as educators. We both conclude that our reflections, experiences, and cultural identities have been instrumental in the process of developing a professional identity that guides our teaching praxis in ways that are critical and social justice oriented.

This chapter traces one student teacher's (Joan) experiences of learning to teach English as a second language in a cross-cultural context during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The school-based practicum is a core component of many initial teacher education programmes. During this induction period, usually an 8-week block, student teachers are placed in local schools to learn how to integrate theories into practice in real teaching situations. Specifically, I uncover how Joan grappled with the tensions and complexities of teaching young learners from a different cultural and linguistic background, in a small elementary school situated in the borderland between Hong Kong (an autonomous region of China) and Shenzhen (a province of Mainland China).

Critical incidents from Joan's practicum experiences were analysed to uncover how she dealt with the tensions and dilemmas in confronting difference and marginalising practices while learning to teach English as a second language (ESL) in the practicum school. Implications on how to develop initial teacher education programmes so that student teachers learning to teach across cultural contexts can be encouraged to explore, confront and ‘deal with the emotional terrain of understanding difference’ will be discussed (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p. 123; Zembylas, 2010).

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.

A narrative inquiry was conducted to explore the complexities of learning English and Korean as subject matter in cross-cultural contexts in contributing to teacher identity, with possible tensions of identity teachers experience as ethnic Koreans teaching at an international school in Korea that promotes non-Korean, international education in English as a “language of inclusion” and instruction. With expansions of international schools in South Korea, also growing are numbers of Korean teachers teaching at such schools as returnees, individuals with cross-cultural experience. Stories of one Korean language and literature teacher with international schooling experience were examined.

While identifying the practical benefits of acquiring English, she expresses her concern for the presumed loss of Korean as a product of the prioritized use of English on campus. Equally recognized are the diverse opportunities not commonly available at Korean public schools that the participant upholds from her own experience. She acknowledged that her opportunities for the development of English language skills to a high level of proficiency through international education is not commonly accessible to all students in the Korean public school system. She also considered possible impacts associated with prioritizing the use of English over Korean in her international education experience, including their influence on: her sense of identity as a teacher and as Korean; her cultural knowledge as Korean; and her teacher knowledge as she supports her students' learning of English as subject matter in ways that might, in turn, also impact their sense of identity as Korean.

My research is a personal effort to understand the experiences that have shaped my work, practice, and living of teaching mathematics. From the boy storied as being smart in mathematics to the man who was tasked in finding ways to Indigenize school mathematics, I have composed stories to live by that share the tensions, conflicting stories, and mis-educative experiences that have shaped who I am as a White Euro-Western mathematician in a Canadian prairie province. My research wonder serves a practical justification as I “attend to the importance of considering the possibility of shifting, or changing practice” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 36) in the context of cross-cultural teaching and learning. Much of the research around Indigenous mathematics education is shaped by misconceptions of Indigenization and inconsistent practices of how this is taken up by practitioners – topics that I analyzed during my doctoral studies. Through my inquiry described in the chapter, I hoped to achieve a nuanced understanding of how the experiences of diverse lives shape the learning of school mathematics.

The purpose of this study was to explore how my gradually growing teacher knowledge has changed and shaped a new interpretation of the same interview data through those years of learning and teaching in different cultural contexts, and furthermore, to deeply understand how the shift of teacher identity impacts the comprehension of Schwab's (1973) commonplaces theories. Through the interview data, I shared students' and teachers' experiences in a new culture and lay alongside my own stories as an international student, a teacher, and a researcher. This research reveals the perceived future needs consist of teachers' higher English proficiency, more classes on professional communication skills courses, more opportunities for professional instructors' professional development, more ESL teacher assistance, scaffolded instruction within mainstream classes, and a better educational atmosphere. The investigation process itself was important but more important was whether or not the discussions and results provided useful information to the community. Having an overall outlook of commonplaces is as essential as the curriculum design. This dialectical shift caused me to investigate the balance among Schwab's commonplaces and the findings will contribute to the future developments in curriculum design as a researcher. Upon reflection, I utilized this research by investigating the equilibrium between the four common places and the current curriculum as well as comparing all the stakeholders' perspectives to the common places identified within the target curriculum.

The author examines the experiences of learning about Japanese elementary education from the perspective of a Canadian teacher. She suggests through a year-long study in a Japanese third grade classroom that the teaching practices and philosophies underlying curricular and pedagogical decisions made by teachers are shaped by the culture and society of which schools are part, such that learning about Japanese schooling highlights the influence of social, societal, cultural, linguistic factors outside, as well as inside, school. In line with narrative inquiry research practices, the author also acknowledges her own stance as a certified elementary level teacher who was educated and certified in Canada, in contributing to shaping her analysis of teacher knowledge of her teacher participants. She argues that the process of learning about schooling in a country or culture different from the one in which an individual was educated and learned to teach, involves immersing oneself into the research context to learn about the experience from the perspective an insider. Realization of the extent to which this expansive interweaving of school and society is apparent in many aspects of schooling in Japan, in turn, reinforces the idea that this interconnection may also underlie schooling in other societies as well, such that one's experiences in one's own culture may form the foundation for understanding and interpreting knowledge gained about schooling in another culture or community. The notion of cross-cultural teacher knowledge, then, may be grounded in personal and professional experience of teaching and being taught in one's own culture.

In this chapter, we outline the research presented by each of the contributors, who used narrative inquiry approaches that were grounded in long-term research, to examine teacher experiences of cross-cultural teaching. The authors write about cross-cultural experiences that cross temporal, spatial, and social-personal dimensions. Woven into teaching and learning experiences set across time and context were interactions with colleagues, peers, and community members that offered insight into rationale for pedagogical decisions about ways in which practices and curricular materials may be mismatched or well aligned, or unfolded with tension in their current professional contexts. This crossing of time, context, and across social-personal interactions added complexity in ways that highlight the need for research methodologies that support examination of experience that unfolded across time, space, and social-personal dimensions. The authors elaborate upon ways in which a narrative inquiry approached provided a theoretical foundation to highlight complexities and reveal nuances of cross-cultural teacher experiences. The cross-cultural features in these chapters, whereby teachers cross cultural boundaries when they assumed teaching positions in communities culturally different from those in which they themselves were educated and certified. We argue for the need for cross-cultural comparative narrative inquiry approach, that help to reveal complexities of these cross-cultural teaching and learning as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts.