Vicki Ross - Böcker

"Narrative Inquirers in the Midst of Meaning-making: Interpretive Acts of Teacher Educators" illustrates interim narrative field texts of identity as "teacher educator stories" and demonstrates how researchers utilize common places of temporality, sociality, and place in analyzing narratives. It describes conceptualizations of narrative research processes, bringing forward narrative tools and methods of layering narratives from experienced narrative researchers. Through the metaphor of braided rivers, the chapters are woven together through unique chapter interim dialogues which spotlight the insights discovered within the three-dimensional inquiry space. From chapters on the temporal dimension of narrative inquiry, on burrowing and broadening through narrative, on openness and inconclusivity in interpretation, on plotlines discovered through the interpretive tool of chronotypes, and on the cross-cultural interpretation of field texts, researchers and teacher educators can reach new conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of narrative research, in the midst of meaning-making.

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 uses narrative to examine the complexities of teaching and learning. The authors of the chapters, as well as the editors, use innovative approaches to narrative methodology for research on teaching and teacher education in areas of education critical to teachers’ lives. Particularly through this book, they continue to advance the work of researchers to display narratives of educator lives and ways of knowing while opening the space for a community of narrative scholars.

Teachers must consider what it means to work with students in an increasingly diverse global community. Classrooms increasingly comprise of students and teachers of different social, cultural, language, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, needing to adapt in order to accommodate for differences, both expected and unanticipated, that each individual brings to shared classroom contexts.Smudging Composition Lines of Identity and Teacher Knowledge uses a comparative narrative inquiry approach grounded in long-term research to learn about experiences and complexities of cross-cultural teaching. The chapter authors identify and explore differences in the structure of schooling, student experiences, teacher education, school partnerships, parents, and members of the community, and the ways in which diversity is addressed in school practices and curriculum. Gaining insight into complexities of teacher identity formation and development in cross-cultural teaching contexts, they explore ways in which teaching goals might be achieved using practices commonly used in the host country not often used in one’s home country.The dilemmas and tensions uncovered directly from the perspective of teachers and teacher educators develop narrative inquiry as a methodological approach to examining teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching, providing invaluable findings for teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers internationally.