Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self [1st ed.] 9783030601003, 9783030601010

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Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self Cheryl J. Craig

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education

Series Editors Michael Connelly University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada Shijing Xu Faculty of Education University of Windsor Windsor, ON, Canada

This book series grows out of the current global interest and turmoil over comparative education and its role in international competition. The specific series grows out of two ongoing educational programs which are integrated in the partnership, the University of Windsor-Southwest University Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister School Network. These programs provide a comprehensive educational approach ranging from preschool to teacher education programs. This framework provides a structure for a set of ongoing Canada-China research teams in school curriculum and teacher education areas. The overall aim of the Partnership program, and therefore of the proposed book series, is to draw on school and university educational programs to create a comprehensive cross-cultural knowledge base and understanding of school education, teacher education and the cultural contexts for education in China and the West.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15114

Cheryl J. Craig

Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self

Cheryl J. Craig Department of Teaching, Learning & Culture Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education ISBN 978-3-030-60100-3 ISBN 978-3-030-60101-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Imogen

Foreword

Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-loved self invites us to enter into a personal journey, walking along with Cheryl Craig as she reflects on her three lines of inquiry. This book is at the same time an individual’s story—the author’s experiences as a scholar of teaching and as a scholarly teacher—and a call for rethinking teaching and the study of it. Craig begins her book reflecting on personal challenges that affect her deeply as she begins writing. She is also publishing this volume at a timely moment, one that speaks to the heightened need to understand teaching and to benefit from the fresh insights offered by “looking across” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 13) not only research studies but cultural contexts. This book is powerfully a story of stories. Readers are invited to hear and see Cheryl think out loud as she revisits stories from a range of teachers—from different school and national contexts and at different stages of their teaching careers. Using what Schwab (1983) called “serial interpretation,” Cheryl Craig thinks across these individual stories, as well as visits the stories of individual teachers over time, to develop new understandings of curriculum and the powerful, albeit vulnerable, work of teachers. Along the way, Cheryl chooses Schwab, Dewey, and Confucius, among others, as thinking companions who spark her inquiry as she tells her own story, naming some of what she discovers about teaching, learning, and her commitments and insights as a scholar. This book persuasively helps us see how stories matter.

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Metaphors matter too. Here, metaphors offer sparkling windows onto the intricate lives of teacher and their practices. In the multilayered approach Cheryl creates, we see the ways she weaves metaphors together, allowing us to see patterns while never forcing one story to be subsumed by some larger frame. The result is a chance for readers to recognize the significance of different images of teachers—for example, as curriculum maker or curriculum implementer. Through the forceful reminder of the need for balance between images, the book emphasizes the human dimension of teaching and its contextual nature. Metaphors are powerful ways of shaping what we see: they allow us a vivid and concrete window into complex phenomena. For those of us who appreciate the power of words, stories and images, watching Cheryl explore what lies beneath a metaphor, or how she comes to name an ineffable but compelling experience, this book’s richness will be a great delight. The richness of the rethinking about teaching is deepened by Craig’s openness to her own learning as a scholar. As she examines curriculum, teaching and teachers, she explores these questions by making full use, and even seeking out, what she sees as reciprocal learning opportunities. Readers catch glimpses of classrooms, conference venues, and even restaurant tables filled with food and conversation not just in the US, but in such seemingly “different” contexts such as China, Korea, or Russia. I am impressed by the humility Cheryl brings to her opportunities to learn from and with her colleagues—teachers, her own students, her research peers—in new settings. She does not pretend to be an “expert” but instead seeks to explore the cultural, social, and historical background to make sense of any one event; at the same time, through her learning with these colleagues, she gains understandings she, and we, might not have reached. As I write this preface, and the global pandemic rages in the US, I am acutely aware that so much of our lives is bound up in the wellbeing, insights, and experiences of those outside our borders. While it may not have been the originating impulse for this book, the reflections woven throughout the pages of this volume provide a compelling argument for the value of reciprocal learning. Craig’s ability to see the many braids that make up the tapestry that is teaching is enriched by the puzzles and surprises as well as recognition (of familiarity) offered by her time in classrooms outside her native and adopted homes of Canada and the US.

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While narrating stories of great variety, Craig also paints a picture that is clear: teachers matter. Indeed, for some time, there has been heightened recognition that teachers are key to education and to students’ learning (Paine, Blömeke, and Aydarova, O., 2016). While international studies and reports now routinely trumpet this fact, this book gives us a generously personal account that will be for many far more persuasive. In recognizing the importance of how teachers, and researchers of teaching, seek to be their “best loved selves,” this book argues for the need to listen empathetically and reflexively to what, how, and why teachers know and do, as well as how (and why) we know what we know about teaching. Cheryl finds resonance in many Confucian aphorisms. As I read, I kept thinking of one of the most famous ones: “…in a party of three people, there must be one from whom I can learn.” This book reflects Cheryl’s journey as she has shared stories with many in many places. Along the way, she is open to learning, and relearning. As we walk alongside her, we in turn benefit as learners. Lynn Paine, Ph.D. Professor, Teacher Education Associate Dean, International Studies College of Education Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA

References Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Developing qualitative inquiry. Engaging in narrative inquiry. Left Coast Press. Paine, L., Blömeke, S., and Aydarova, O. (2016). Teachers and teaching in the context of globalization. In D. Gitomer, & C. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th edition) (pp. 717–786). Washington, DC: AERA. Schwab, J. (1983). The practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do. Curriculum Inquiry, 13(3), 239–265.

Contents

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Curriculum Making 1

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2

Curriculum Making 2

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3

Reciprocal Learning

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The Best-Loved Self

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Afterword

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Commonplaces of curriculum The Shadow of New York mural (Courtesy of Bernadette Lohle) The map of activities on the sports field Tribute to John Dewey on a school wall in Beijing, China John Dewey’s Chinese students (From top left to top right: Hu Shih, Chiang Monlin, Tao, Xingzhi, Zhang Zuoping; From bottom left to bottom right: Shi Liangcai, Alice Dewey, John Dewey) The concept of cooperative and symbiotic teaching research (Bu & Han, 2019) Teacher construction and development model in Chinese schools (Bu et al., unpublished paper) Comparative models: Comparison and interpretation (Connelly & Xu, 2019) Knowing and doing (Connelly & Xu, 2019) Visual representation of process of reciprocal learning over time (Zhu, 2018)

7 29 37 60

61 64 65 107 107 109

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CHAPTER 1

Curriculum Making 1

Abstract Three narrative threads—curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self—seam this book into a cohesive whole. This first chapter—Curriculum Making 1—sets the stage for Curriculum Making 2 and other chapters that follow. I begin by underscoring the importance of teachers as communicated by well-known international researchers and supranational organizations. I then define Schwab’s curriculum commonplaces and introduce two dominant images of teaching: teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and teacher-as-curriculummaker. Next, I spotlight the curriculum making of four teachers who I studied longitudinally in the US. I end with an overview of what I learned about curriculum making from my close work with these teachers and the contexts of their teaching. This prepares me for Curriculum Making 2 where I shine the spotlight exclusively on Chinese teachers-ascurriculum-makers and end with a synopsis of curriculum making that commingles what has been learned in both countries. Keywords Curriculum making · Teacher-as-curriculum-maker · Teacher-as-curriculum-implementer · Teacher growth · Contexts of teaching · Commonplaces of curriculum

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0_1

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Curriculum Making When I was asked to write this Palgrave Pivot book in the Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series, I was delighted and honored by the invitation. Curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self is a topic dear to my heart. The Palgrave Pivot invitation and my research niche complemented one another; they fit together like hand-in-glove. The opportunity was one I would not want to miss. However, despite my high interest, best intentions, and past publishing record, this volume has not been easy to get off the ground. My mother died shortly after I signed the contract to publish this book. While I was able to resume the majority of my myriad of activities after her funeral, I could not bring myself to this writing task. It presented a formidable challenge. Rather than remaining stuck in a “hardened story” (Conle, 1996) that determined what I could and could not do, I decided to plunge the depths and write toward the pain as others have suggested (i.e., Waldman, 2016; Ward, 2016). I will not burden readers with the breadth and depth of what I personally uncovered in my reflective analysis. However, I do want to underscore three critically important points as to why my mother’s passing and the authoring of this book became inexorably linked. The first is this. My mother had two children—my deceased brother, who was her hometown success—and me. I was a daughter born over a decade after her son. Massive changes had happened in the interim. My mother needed a different plotline for me. Her father, a British immigrant to Canada, had fought in World War I and two of her brothers, one who went on to be a leader in the Canadian Armed Forces, served in World War II. All of this preceded me becoming my mother’s child for the world. Consequently, I attended university, something my immediate family members had not done. I furthermore left the “breadbasket of the world” (a prairie province) and lived my adult life near the Rocky Mountains in Canada and in the Gulf Coast region of the US. I also have traveled extensively and delivered plenary addresses on all but one of the world’s continents. Not once did my mother ever suggest that I preempt an international engagement to spend more time with her. In short, I was doing—am doing—what she had in mind for me. Engaging in deep reflection, I discovered a synergy between the international backdrop of the reciprocal learning book series and the parental story my mother bestowed on me at birth. A correspondence as “invisible as air”

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and as “weightless as dreams” (Stone, 1988, p. 244) became perceptible after her death. The second commonplace of experience (Lane, 1988) connecting this book project to my mother is the fact that she was a proud Canadian. Among the possessions she left me were a Canadian flag and her treasured maple leaf pin. Clearly, she did not want me to forget the Canadian part of my dual citizenship (Canadian + American). Thinking backward into my life, I recall her asking more questions about the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project than she did about my other US-based research initiatives. I always attributed her special interest in the reciprocal learning project to her being a staunch Canadian. However, my look back revealed something I probably intuitively knew but had not said out-loud. When I attended the Canadian conferences biennially, I always went to see my mother before or after the meetings. This meant that every second year she was assured of an extra visit from me. Hence, I have a special connection to the Canada-China project because of my mother’s ongoing reminders that I am Canadian and because of my own bred-in-the-bone allegiance to my family, my home country, and my birth identity. I also visit China twice annually because of a long-term collaboration there, along with a bevy of former doctoral students and former visiting scholars who I visit regularly. For these multiple interconnected reasons, I would not want this endeavor to receive anything less than my fullest attention in the aftermath of my mother’s death. The third major point my soul-searching brought to light has to do with heart. My mother was the lifeblood of my family just as curriculum is the lifeblood of schools. Without her, neither my brother nor I would have had breath or life. Without curriculum, teachers, students, and schools are rudderless and lacking in purpose. For a time following my mother’s death, I, too, drifted aimlessly. My beacon of support was gone. No longer did I have her anchoring me. Also, as long as she lived, I would not be the sole surviving member of my nuclear family. However, my father died in 2000 and my brother passed away the year before my mother. Their individual and collective deaths irrevocably changed my life. A piece of me departed with them. Unavoidably, my identity shifted. My attempt to un-know what I already knew (Vinz, 1997) about being the lone family survivor likewise drove a wedge between the writing of this book and me.

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The Curriculum-Teaching Puzzle When I acknowledged these painful connections, I dislodged my stuck story. I stripped it of its ruling power. I was free to focus full attention on Curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self . I begin now with curriculum making, the first of two curriculum chapters contributing to my tripartite agenda. Because curriculum making cannot happen without teachers, let me begin by asserting teachers’ primacy in the educational enterprise, which is much like my mother’s primacy in my family and in my life…

The Primacy of Teachers “Teachers matter….” That is what OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded more than a decade and a half ago based on a 25-country study reported in the official policy statement, Teachers Matters: Attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers (OECD, 2005). “Teachers matter…” OECD reconfirmed in 2018 in Valuing our teachers and raising their status (Schleicher, 2018). “Teachers matter…” the Varkey Foundation (2016), sponsor of the Global Teacher Prize, proclaimed. “Teachers matter” was a recent feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jenkins, 2016). “Teacher education matters…” asserted leading US researcher, Linda Darling Hammond (2000), in her article, “How teacher education matters.” “Teacher education matters…” stated William Schmidt and his colleagues (2011) in Teacher education matters: A study of middle school mathematics teacher preparation in six countries. “Teacher education matters…,” wrote Frances Rust (2017, p. 383) in a recent Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice editorial. “Preparing teachers to teach matters,” stressed Suzanne Wilson (2014, p. 190). “Making teacher education matter” headlined Jean Clandinin and Jukka Husu in the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (Husu & Clandinin, 2017, p. 1169) “Teacher quality matters,” added Christopher Day (2017) in Teachers’ worlds and work. “Teacher quality matters,” noted Gregory Ramsey in the Australia Department of Education document, Quality matters, Revitalising teaching: Critical times, Critical choices (Ramsey, 2000, p. 1). “Teaching quality matters most,” declared Dan Goldhaber (2016) in his half-century celebration of the Coleman Report, the most influential American policy document following the Brown vs. Board of Education court ruling. The quality of a nation’s education cannot supersede “the quality of its teachers,” wrote Barber and Mourshed (2007, p. 13) in the McKinsey Report. Even

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actor, Matt Damon, whose mother is a teacher, has widely claimed that he and presumably others would not be where they are today without creative teachers. Educational researchers, supranational organizations, and popular opinion affirm the age-old maxim that “the influence of a good teacher can never be erased.” However, despite widespread agreement about the importance of teachers, research largely focuses on stakeholders, and what they think preservice and practicing teachers should know and do. What preservice and practicing teachers need to flourish in their teaching careers has received comparatively little attention. Also, most of what has been written has been of an abstract bent. A scarcity of research addresses what is fundamentally important to growing, nurturing, and sustaining quality teachers in their own terms. If I distilled my 25 years of researching teaching and teacher education into a handful of topics, one recurrent theme would certainly be teachers’ desires to be curriculum makers. A topic not far behind would be teachers’ riling against others casting them as implementers. This raises the question of how I connect teaching and curriculum making and how the image of a teacher-as-a-curriculum-maker compares and contrasts with the image of teacher-as-implementer, among others. Let me begin by discussing curriculum making generally and then I will unpack the root images of teaching as I have come to know them. Curriculum I start interculturally with the Mandarin word for curriculum, kèchéng ( 课程). As my Chinese students, visiting Asian scholars, collaborators, and the literature (i.e., Zhang & Gao, 2014) have informed me, kèchéng means people discussing the teaching and learning journey. I imagine these talks would take place at a table. From a Confucian perspective, the unfolding conversations would be filled with possibilities. The overall purpose would be to unite heaven and humanity so that they, along with earth, can interact harmoniously (Li, 2008). To my way of thinking, the curriculum making table at which these dialogues would take place would be similar to the table Native American poet, Byrd Baylor (1994), had in mind. It would be one “where [experientially] rich people sit.” For me, as a Western scholar, the Eastern origin of the word, curriculum, not as a stale, flaccid, archaic document, but as something dynamic, interactional, aspirational, and breathing, organically connects with Schwab’s

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curriculum commonplaces and the notion of curriculum as a lived experience. These near-universal considerations (Goodson, 2007) are the ones that I picture all international educators would deliberate in their own contextualized ways. After all, “[curriculum-making rests] not on ideal or abstract representation, but on the real thing, on the concrete case, in all its completeness and with all its differences from other concrete cases…” (Schwab, 1969, p. 11). The real thing—the concrete case— is what Ted Aoki1 (1989/1990) termed the “full-life of curriculum” (which stands in stark contrast to the “half-life”) and what Jean Clandinin2 and Michael Connelly3 called the lived curriculum. It would embed “a story of action within a theory of context” in real-time ways (Stenhouse, 1976, p. 7). Through this process, “teachers and students live out a curriculum… An account of teachers’ and students’ lives over time is the curriculum, although intentionality, objectives [abstractions], and curriculum materials do play a part…” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992, p. 365). From this perspective, boundaries separating teaching, learning, and curriculum would fade as Schwab’s “practical, a language for curriculum” (Schwab, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1983) would take hold and “more satisfying lives” (Schwab, 1975), education’s ultimate aim, would be instantiated. Curriculum known “by the people it produces, as well as by other signs and standards” would be realized (Schwab, 1983, p. 247). Curriculum Commonplaces Schwab (1973) believed that all curriculum making discussions involve four desiderata or commonplaces, terms Schwab used interchangeably (see Fig. 1.1). Where these curriculum making considerations are concerned, there would never be a “perennially right ordering of the desiderata or a perennially right curriculum” because the commonplaces—the building blocks—are always in flux (Schwab, 1974, p. 315).

1 I had the good fortune of personally knowing Ted Aoki who is now deceased. I helped facilitate his work with teachers and attended his local conference presentations when I lived in Alberta, Canada. 2 D. Jean Clandinin was my doctoral supervisor and my post-doctoral co-supervisor. I am grateful for her rich contributions to my education and life. 3 F. Michael Connelly was my post-doctoral co-supervisor who also greatly influenced me. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project, along with Shi Jing Xu, who is the Principal Investigator. They are co-editors of this Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education book series.

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Teacher

Milieu

Curriculum Making

Learner

Subject Matter

Fig. 1.1 Commonplaces of curriculum

At the same time, equal contributions from the teacher commonplace, the learner commonplace, the subject matter commonplace, and the milieu commonplace would be needed for balanced (harmonious) classroom curriculum making. This is because students as learners are “one skin-full” with subject matter being another consideration—another “fragment of the whole” (Schwab, 1953, p. 210). However, when all four commonplaces are combined, they...bound ...“statements identified as...curricular” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, p. 84). Also, if we enter into curriculum deliberations through one curriculum commonplace, we produce different synergies with the three other curriculum considerations and arrive at different understandings. The fact that I typically conduct research from the teacher perspective means that my curriculum making entry point is through the teacher commonplace. This makes sense, given that my research program— whether about school reform (Craig, 2001, 2004), the contexts of

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teaching (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2017; Craig, 2007; Craig & Huber, 2007), subject matter (Oh, You, Kim, & Craig, 2013; Olson & Craig, 2009a), teachers (Craig, 2012a; Olson & Craig, 2001), or students (Craig, 1998; Craig, Li, Rios, Lee, & Verma, under review)—is approached from a teacher point of view, that is, through the teacher lens (Craig, 2012b). Hence, my scholarship unfolds at the intersection where the teaching and curriculum fields meet (Craig & Ross, 2008). At this point of convergence, I typically focus on a teacher or a group of teachers and specifically refer to students and subject matter. My scholarship also pays significant attention to milieu. This is because my ongoing research puzzles have to do with how teaching contexts influence what it is that preservice and practicing teachers know and do in addition to who they are and how they share knowledge in community. For example, where Ashley Thomas (Craig, 2019), a recent American teacher participant, was concerned, she (teacher) taught students (learners) (Li Lan, Anna Pedrana, Illich Mauro, Alejandro Rodríguez) English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) (subject matter) at T. P. Yaeger Middle School (milieu). But the context Ashley chose to describe was much more expansive than the campus where she worked. She included the Panhandle region of Texas where she spent her childhood and spoke of de facto segregation policies (parental choice that was in effect when her older brother went to school) which were replaced by racial desegregation laws when she later attended the same campus. She additionally talked about her private high school experience in Dallas, Texas, her Wellesley College education in Massachusetts, and her higher education experiences at Oxford University in England and l’Université de Besançon in France. Ashley also spoke of her short-term work in Mexico. This included her coming out as a lesbian and her subsequent two-year estrangement from her parents. She additionally painted the ideological landscape of Texas and told of how opposing political views created acrimony in her family unit that has since echoed through the generations. Ashley further outlined how state and national policies and politics have shaped ESL instruction and the services made available to immigrant youth. Taken together, milieu in my teacher attrition study with Ashley Thomas extended far past T. P. Yaeger Middle School and way beyond the primarily underserved students of color she championed on her Greater Houston campus. Having provided this real-world example of the commonplaces of curriculum, it makes sense for me to shine the

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spotlight on what each commonplace takes into account before pressing on. As foreshadowed, Schwab had profound respect for teachers and the pivotal role they play in the educational enterprise. He knew that teachers “exhibit powers and deficiencies, likes and dislikes, which must be considered if a curriculum is to be well-chosen” (Schwab, 1974, p. 315). Therefore, the teacher is the first commonplace I will elaborate. For Schwab, teachers are the “fountainhead[s] of the curriculum decision” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245). They are “agents of education, not [of] subject matter” (Schwab, 1954/1978, p. 128). They open up worlds and opportunities for learners instead of chaining them to the governmentauthorized knowledge they are required to teach (Schwab, 1969). Also, because “the public and the private cannot be separated in teaching, the person who the teacher is surfaces in the act of teaching” (Bullough, 1989, pp. 20–21). Who teachers are as people inevitably becomes interwoven with what they teach (Kelchtermans, 2009). Hence, teachers work deftly with “a lightness of touch” (Hansen, 2011, p. 4) to ensure that the curriculum they teach is inspired by them but not about them. The second commonplace requiring explanation is the learner. Learners are also exceedingly important because teaching and learning mutually inform one another. Confucius’s students affirmed this point in the essay, “Of Education,” in the Book of Rites (Li, personal conversation, 2020). Two Mandarin characters capture teaching and learning: jiào (教) for teaching and xué (学) for learning. However, when one speaks about teaching, one automatically includes learning and uses the word, jiàoxué (教学), which resonates with kèchéng (课程) being a teachinglearning journey having more to do with life than the mastery of skills (Wu, 2004). When I visited New Zealand for my first time, I learned something quite similar. The Maori, New Zealand’s original inhabitants (like Canada’s First Nations people), have a single word for teaching and learning: ako. Ako is also steeped in natural reciprocity; it too recognizes that the teacher and the learner cannot be separated from one another in the curriculum making act. For Schwab, learners are always particular learners. They enter teaching-learning situations with “different personal histories which confer on [them] widely varying wants and capacities for satisfaction” (Schwab, 1959/1978, p. 172). Individual students are “more…than the percentile ranks, social class, and personality type into which [they] fall”

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(Schwab, 1973, p. 496). The learners doing the learning are different from the teacher covering the material (Rodgers, 2020). Learners are not only learners; they are also “personalities” (Schwab, 1974, p. 314). Further to this, “what [learners] are, what [learners] know, how [learners] have been bent, and what [learners] remember, determine what [learners] experience” (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 272) in curriculum making situations. Hence, they focus on “self-realization of one kind or another, developed capacities whose use s/he enjoys, identity, capacity for economic self-sufficiency, and so on” (Schwab, 1974, p. 315). This means that children—like newborns, adults, and senior citizens—are always in a state of being and becoming (Van der Wal & Van der Bie, 2015, p. 3). As Maxine Greene (1995) put it, we are “in the making,” but “never made.” We are “unending…promise and project” (Gadotti, 1996, p. 7). According to Schwab (1964), subject matter, the third commonplace, should never be considered “familiar, fixed and at hand when needed” (p. 2) as so often is the case. It also is not “ready-made in itself” (Dewey, 1990, p. 189). Thus, we need to approach subject matter “as fluent, embryonic, vital” (Dewey, 2020, p. 9). One issue has to do with “pigeonholed” content coming to the child in ways that “fractionizes the world for him/[her]” and rips facts away from their “original place in experience and rearranges them with reference to some principle” (Dewey, 2020, p. 5). Another problem is that the disciplines themselves have “no fixed catalogue” of structure (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 251). Hence, no one knows the structure of the disciplines (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 243; italics in original) because there are no “natural joints” of content that occur in nature (Schwab, 1980, p. 365). An associated challenge is that subject areas like science are complex and ever changing. Part of the reason stems from the “unclosed character of science” (Schwab, 1949, p. 263); the other part has to do with “nature [being] so rich in matters to be learned and scientists so apt in finding ways to learn them” (Schwab, 1960/1978, p. 228). The same is true for history. It also is not a fixed entity because “history …never stands still” (Wulf, 1619 Project Live Forum, 2020). Because Schwab was aware of these and other complexities, he rebelled against certainty—“the rhetoric of conclusions”—that stable inquirers attribute to science and, by extrapolation, any other content area. He believed that subject matter “facts” contained in textbooks and other documents should be presented as “tentative formulations – not facts, but interpretations of facts” (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 242; italics in original). Texts would be filled with “…uncertainties, differences in interpretation, and issues of principle which characterize the disciplines” in Schwab’s

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(1961/1978, p. 242) words. “Likely stories” (Schwab, 1976, pp. 14–15) would result, each of which would communicate contingent “truths”— not “gospel truth” (Jackson, 1990, p. xii)—until new discoveries are made and “ideas that were once thought to be true…discarded” (Schwab, 1956, p. 133). This is how he envisioned content keeping up with the times. “What is true today may not be true tomorrow” (Alexander, 2015, p. 72) clearly underpinned Schwab’s understanding of curriculum making. Schwab’s (1956/1978) linking of subject matter with the process of inquiry sheds light on the fourth curriculum commonplace, milieu. In Schwab’s view, “knowledge of a context of discourses [note: multiple discourses; not one discourse] gives … a fuller knowledge of the scope and meaning of the conclusions…” He declared that “if there [was] a time when problems special to teaching science [for example] justified the omission of social studies and humanities, that time is past” (Schwab, 1974, p. 316). Additionally, the sources of what Schwab (1973) termed “the eclectic” are available in the milieu. Teachers draw on a wide range of theories, standards, and traditions at their disposal. They subsequently employ “arts of the eclectic” to create “amalgam [s]” that aid them in understanding educational phenomena. These “eclectic integration[s]” arise from diverse discourses (Alexander, 2015, p. 63) that range from the historical, the political, and the meta-physical to the theoretical, the conceptual, the practical, and the technical. Successfully merging “knowing that” (understanding) with “knowing how” (making a difference) presents teachers and teaching with perpetual challenges (Ryles, 1949). Multiple, across-the-board complexities led Schwab to declare that “To the question, how big a context? There is no clear answer. There is yet more to know or more to know about…” (p. 153). The phrases, to know and to know about, imply that there would be infinitely more to do and of which to make sense. Schwab concluded, “The problems of education arise from exceedingly complex actions, reactions, and transactions… these doings constitute a skein of myriad threads which know no boundaries…” (Schwab, 1971, p. 329). They are located one within another, he explained, like “a nest of ‘Chinese boxes’” ranging from the small community of home and classroom, through the larger neighborhood and school, the town and region, to the nation and the world” (Schwab, 1974, p. 314). Clearly, Schwab’s notion of milieu was like that of Dewey who also saw the “bigger world” as a major shaping force (Schwab, 1953, p. 113). For both, milieu was a very big tent.

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Being a narrative inquirer, I would like to slip in my own reading of the curriculum commonplaces, which further reflects the influence that Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly have had on me as advisors. I believe the commonplaces are inherently storied places. The teacher and the learner do not come to curriculum making situations emptyheaded; they unavoidably bring their autobiographical narratives—their narratives of experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990)—with them as I demonstrated in my introduction to this book. Also, subject matter, when reduced to its essence, is the most plausible narratives binding a discipline together, particularistic stories that distinguish it from other disciplines sitting on its boundaries. The same goes for milieu. All of our schools, communities, regions, countries, and so forth are storied places. Any person in a community can share their lived narrative of a particular campus they have attended. The same goes for communities, states, countries, and belief systems. Rich social narrative histories abound in society and necessarily inform our personal readings of how countries and international relationships work. This brief summary of the curriculum commonplaces readies us for a discussion of the images of teaching, specifically the image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and the image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker, which follow. Teacher Images Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly introduced the images of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and teacher-as-curriculum-maker to the educational enterprise in 1992 (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). The seeds for the images, though, appeared earlier in their Teachers as curriculum planners book (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988), which targeted a teacher audience. The roots of both images pull on (1) educational history—work involving stability and change and educational philosophy, (2) Dewey’s theory about the ends and means of education, and (3) educational leadership, which, like other facets of the literature, positions teachers as mediators between curriculum documents and student outcomes. Additionally, the agency Tyler afforded teachers played a role, as did Schwab’s “practical” (most especially his curriculum commonplaces), which upheld the centrality of the teacher in curriculum deliberations and provided the underpinning for the teacher-as-curriculummaker image. Connelly and Clandinin’s programmatic research, which has comprehensively aimed to understand teachers’ knowledge in their own terms and in context, further informed the image’s creation. Both images will now be unpacked.

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Teacher-as-Curriculum-Implementer & Teacher-as-Curriculum-Maker The dominant image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992) characterizes teachers as a “construct of public interest” (Grunder, 2016)—“agents of the state, paid to do its bidding” (Lent & Pipkin, 2003). In this widespread view, shifts in teachers’ practices occur because policymakers or even academicians at various levels of educational organizations mandate changes that teachers—due to legal requirements, subordinated positions, and/or lack of power—dutifully must follow. Situated near the bottom of education’s food chain, the teacher is a “technician…receiver, transmitter, and implementer of other people’s knowledge” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 276) and “instructions” (Goodson, 2017, p. 5). She/he is “excluded from active participation in development of new solutions to fundamental problems” (McPherson, 2004, p. 8) due to the short-circuiting of their voices and agency (Rodgers, 2020). This makes teachers the consumer in a topdown producer-consumer framework (Aoki, 1974). Following curriculum like a “manual” (Westbury, 2000, p. 17) or a “cookbook” (Oyoo, 2013, p. 458), teachers-as-curriculum-implementers are more “business manager[s]” than “paradigm[s] of moral life” (Alexander, 2015, p. 27) and “moral stewards” of schooling (Goodlad, 1999, p. 237). Instead, they are “public functionaries” (Alexander, 2015, p. 134) bent to the will of bureaucrats, efficiently carrying out their demands. They seem “to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching” (Dewey, 1904, p. 215). By way of contrast, teachers-as-curriculum-makers “not only…act on their own initiative, [but they are] expected to do so.” “Tak[ing] on situation[s] for themselves” is more important to judging their quality “than their following any particular set method or scheme” (Dewey, 1904, pp. 27–28). Hence, the image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992) acknowledges the teacher as a holder, user, and producer of knowledge who, as a moral agent and personal self, adeptly negotiates government-authorized curriculum in active relationship with the students in his/her care. Thus, when a teacher-as-curriculum-maker teaches youth, the teacher brings forward for deliberation his/her knowledge about himself/herself as a teacher, the course content, the reach of the milieu, and his/her knowing of students, their relationships with one another and their individual uniqueness. According to DeBoer, “teachers inspire…students through accounts of personal experience or allow students to share their own insights and opinions” (DeBoer, 2014,

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p. 2444). In short, teachers with “larger experience and riper wisdom” than the students they teach actively conceive of how “life should come to child[ren]” (Dewey, 1897, p. 79) while engaging in active relationship with them. Here, echoes of Clandinin and Connelly’s Schwab-inspired teacher-as-curriculum-maker image as well as Dewey’s (1916) education as reconstruction without end once again interconnect. However, the near-universal image of teachers being located in an educational conduit (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Craig, 2002) prevails. In their bottom of the pipeline position, they deliver curriculum to students like “passing on a bag of goods” (Hansen, 2011, p. 1). Further to this, the theory of action underlying the conduit goes unchallenged in the policy arena. Sadly, it also reigns supreme in academia due to theory’s long-standing estrangement from practice. Professors also tell teachers what they should be doing in the research articles they disseminate, often with no contact or prior communication with teachers. Clandinin and Connelly (2004) called these top-down approaches to reform, “change by injection,” with each inoculation resulting in new knowledge prescriptions for teachers to impress on students. Unfortunately, externally imposed measures tend to be disconnected from what teachers have come to know and do in the throes of their own practices. This is highly problematic because teachers’ practices reveal their personal practical knowledge in action, not simply what others expect of them, although others’ expectations certainly inform the mix. Reduced to the essence, what teachers know and do is “neither fixed, nor finished.” It has “no changeless cent[er] to which understanding can anchor itself.” Also, there is no “model to be copied or… idea to be realized…” (Oakshott, 1962, pp. 154–156). Teachers’ practices, reflecting their personal practical knowledge, will always be fluid and shape-shifting. Necessarily contoured by their own changing selves, teachers’ practices are contingent on the learners they teach, knowledge advances in the disciplines, innovations in the teaching field, unfurling social issues and crises (i.e., global pandemic), and the educational policies influencing the context in which their practices unfold. The teacher-as-curriculum-maker conceptualization offers a viable alternative to the dominant plotline of teacher-as-curriculumimplementer. In the former conceptualization, the teacher uses other people’s knowledge and, in a technical rationalist way, installs a curriculum/curriculum package designed and required by others. In short, the image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer positions teachers

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as “hand-servants” (Hansen, 2011) whose continuing employment rests on fidelity to others’ (i.e., policymakers, academics, testing companies, etc.) edicts. For example, in France’s normal school tradition, directives dictated by others with more knowledge and/or authority than teachers are explicitly labelled state knowledge and researcher knowledge (Malet, 2017). Contrastingly, the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image requires teachers’ active engagement and takes into account the critical reflectiveness Dewey afforded them. As Schwab (1983) put it, teachers engaged in curriculum making “must be involved in debate, deliberation, and decision about what and how to teach” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245). The image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker fully captures the importance of the teacher in organizing, planning, and orchestrating classroom interactions. The teachers’ “productive impulse” (Grunder, 2016) is vital because it engages students in the search for knowledge and cultivates their zeal to discover it (DeBoer, 2014). The teacher-as-curriculum-maker recognizes that the teacher is the only one at the nexus of the curricular exchange and the only person interacting face-to-face with flesh-and-blood students. Thus, curriculum is what ultimately happens—what becomes animated (lived!) (Ian Westbury’s term [personal communication, 2006])—in the moments when teaching and learning merge. In that fusion, teachers use what is in their students (learner commonplace), their teaching situations (milieu commonplace), and themselves (teacher commonplace) to make curriculum mostly organized around mandated content (subject matter commonplace). Teachers’ productive impulses cannot be captured in a codified knowledge base without ignoring the continuity of experience (Dewey, 1938) underlying the knowing teachers bring to the curriculum making table. Herein lies the perennial rub of curriculum and teaching/teacher education research: the confounding question of “how to integrate theoretically based knowledge that has traditionally been taught in university classrooms with the experience-based knowledge that has traditionally been located in the practice of teachers and the realities of classrooms and schools” (Darling Hammond, 2006, p. 307). The teacher-as-curriculum-maker image assumes that a classroom space exists that is not constantly surveilled by those privileging the measurement and the interpretation of “behavioural data” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 53) over what is important in education and what matters to teachers. In this classroom space, “moments of choice” happen (Schwab, 1983,

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p. 245) where teachers and students can negotiate curriculum unhindered by, though not ignorant of, others’ directives and desires. That place, however, is discretionary (Craig, 2009), which means teachers and students need to intentionally take action to seize its possibilities. Also, opportunities to maneuver within the classroom space are affected by others—fellow teachers, administrators, school district personnel, staff developers, parents, peers, and policymakers—who also have a shaping effect on what is going on in classrooms. In the discretionary space teachers and students jointly carve out, distinctions between the knower and the known (Craig & Curtis, 2020; Dewey & Bentley, 1949; Fenstermacher, 1994) dissipate when the means and ends of education intersect. As active agents, teachers work mindfully, professionally guided by their sensibilities and practical ways of knowing within their given policy environments. Similarly, students participate as knowers of their own experiences and producers of their own knowledge, not simply end users of codified knowledge meted out to them by their teachers. Boiled to the essence, knowledge arising from teachers’ lived experiences cannot be “tested, packaged, imparted and sent like bricks across countr[ies] to build knowledge structures that are said to accumulate” (Eisner, 1997, p. 7) because the teacher, like the student, is integral to the body of knowledge that exists and indispensable to the curriculum making act. Paradoxically, teachers’ embodied knowledge scaffolds students’ embodiments of like knowledge developments (Craig et al., 2018). This shaping and being shaped process takes place through back-and-forth interactions, laying the groundwork for reciprocity whose root word, reciprocus , means give-and-take actions for mutual benefit—with mutual (reciprocal) benefit being the pearl of great price. In the end, the teacher is “the most responsive creator of curriculum” because he/she “negotiates the formal planned curriculum of government and publishers within his/her practice, alongside the lives of learners” (Murphy & Pushor, 2010, p. 658). In short, teachers “take it [prescribed curriculum] and develop it within the range and scope of the child’s life” (Dewey, 2020, p. 24). This is because curriculum documents are not brought to bear in some archetypal classroom, as proponents of standards and accountability lead us to believe, but in a particular locus in time and space with smells, shadows, seats and conditions outside its walls which may have much to do with what is achieved inside. (Schwab, 1970, p. 35)

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Thus, in the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image, attention necessarily reverts from written plans, authorized textbooks, and politicized government mandates that typically privilege the subject matter commonplace and assign teachers to purveyor of knowledge roles, to curriculum as it is lived in the context and specificities of people’s lives (Downey & Clandinin, 2010). This automatically returns us to the confluence of the curriculum commonplaces mediated by the teacher. And, in sharp contrast to lists of codified knowledge—abstracted from context, extracted from persons, and devoid of relationship—what emerges are vital aspects of teacher knowledge, matters that are “ephemeral, passionate, shadowy and significant…for the most part…reflect[ing] teachers’ lives” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2004, p. 42).

Curriculum Making in Action To capture teachers’ live curriculum making experiences, I now spotlight the images of teachers-as-curriculum-makers and teachers-asimplementers brushing up against one another in the context of four American teachers’ pedagogical practices. Daryl Wilson (literacy department head—20-year research participant), Bernadette Lohle (art teacher—13-year research participant), Helen Macalla (physical education teacher/mentor—3-year research participant), and 4) Anna Dean (beginning literacy teacher—6-year research participant) are the teachers whose curriculum making experiences I feature. After that, I synthesize what these four teachers’ experiences convey about curriculum making and the tensions between the root images of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and teacher-as-curriculum-maker before I move on to sharing observations in Chinese classrooms along with an overarching commentary about curriculum making in Chapter 2. Daryl Wilson (1997–2017) My longitudinal research with Daryl Wilson has been marked by six different reforms that took place at T. P. Yaeger Middle School between 1997 and 2017. Each of these change efforts enhanced or detracted from Daryl’s curriculum making, which in turn, added or subtracted from his possible growth as a teacher. This is because learning has the capacity to “diminish the mind as well as expand it” (Eisner, 1982, p. 13).

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Also, none of the change efforts was discrete. Each had other developments that concurrently happened. The reforms in question were: (1) standardized teaching methods (models of teaching) (1997–2000), (2) standardized teacher communities (professional learning communities) (2002–2006), (3) standardized teaching practices (readers and writers workshop) (2007–2009), (4) standardized teacher evaluation (school district digitized format) (2009–2012), (5) standardized workbooks (testing company-produced) (2013–2015), and (6) standardized payfor-performance (value-added measures) (2015–2017). As foreshadowed, each presents struggles between teachers’ assigned roles as implementers and their personal and professional desires to be curriculum makers. When I first began working with Daryl Wilson and other teachers in his department, the models of teaching change effort was underway. This meant that Daryl could not draw on his personal repository of teacher knowledge nor on his teaching sensibilities to instruct his students in a manner pleasing to him as a middle school literacy teacher. On the contrary, he was required to demonstrate one of six teaching models that a state staff developer required him to use when she entered his classroom. As might be expected, Daryl and his colleagues found this approach insulting because it directly affronted their abilities to be curriculum makers. Below is a discussion that took place between Charles, a sixthgrade literacy teacher, and Daryl, who was an eighth-grade literacy teacher as well as the literacy department chair. This passage is one of several that are illustrative of the teachers’ dissatisfaction with the models they were required to use as curriculum implementers: Charles: The lesson models are moving in the opposite direction to teacher empowerment. They are so prescribed that they take away our empowerment. This year is such a mixed bag – imaging coming in the middle of two class periods and making judgments [about teachers’ practices].

Later … Charles: There is this mirroring thing here that is not collaborative. It means doing what they expect us to do. It does not give individuals credit for their own smarts. Daryl: I resent having to play the game. People cannot be worked with like they, and their knowledge and experiences, are interchangeable parts (Craig, 2001, p. 321)

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Because the models of teaching were expected to be implemented “cleanly, not creatively” (staff developer’s words), they eventually were “shelved” (teachers’ expression) but not before several teachers, including the principal, exited the school, with some leaving the profession altogether. Upon her departure, the principal declared that the models of teaching reform revealed the extent to which those working in schools (teachers and administrators alike) are “on the short end of the stick.” Daryl and other teachers in his department were then required to participate in another change initiative: professional learning communities (PLCs). On this occasion, the school district formally announced that it would “implement professional learning communities [PLCs]…and give administrators the tools needed to create PLCs throughout the district” (School District, 2007). The district specifically spoke of implementation and, by definition, privileged principals’ versions of teacher community not the natural versions of teacher knowledge communities that existed prior to the administrative imposition of PLCs on them. However, this was not initially a problem because Yaeger’s principal was brand-new. He allowed the literacy teachers to organize themselves into small study groups, which were essentially their versions of a PLC. In these self-selected, self-styled knowledge communities (Craig, 1995a, 1995b, 2007), they responded as curriculum makers to two books in their subject area: The art of teaching reading (Calkins, 2001) and Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a readers workshop (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997). This was part-and-parcel of what other teachers termed “the halcyon days” of school change in Greater Houston (Craig et al., 2020). Below is how one group of teachers captured what they learned as curriculum makers from their group-directed professional development experiences: Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, It had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of the book’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations.’ (From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) And we ask ourselves, with the art of reading teaching before our eyes and beyond our reach, how? How to teach questioning, how to teach visualizing, how to teach wondering,

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how to teach connecting, to the child with no questions, no wonders, no connections, and no pictures or conversations peeping and whispering from the pages of the book Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look at her, And to wonder what was going to happen next.

So far, we see that the more deeply Yaeger’s literacy teachers reflected on their situations, the more their questions emerged and the more memories they called forth for the purposes of interpretation. Their writing continued: Flipping back to remembered pages Gliding our fingers across the lines We reread To ourselves To each other, Connecting Calkins to classroom, Keene to colleagues, and text to students, we wonder is the data accurate, or does it become curiousor and curiousor the closer you look? Are we teaching a test, a text, Or a student? And we question What does Calkins mean by ‘a curriculum of talk’ and Keene by ‘a mosaic of thought’ and with these questions stirring the air…

As foreshadowed, questions continued to “stir in the air” for the Yaeger teachers. This time around, though, they directly addressed the theses of

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Calkins’ and Keene’s books and moved toward resolution of what up to now has been lived and named tensions: She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. ‘Why, it’s a Looking-Glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.’

The teachers’ ah-hah movement presaged the literacy teachers’ own conclusions: And then we laugh, And breathe, And realize We will teach them to do What we do as readers To touch the text with our fingers, To question the text with our curiosity, To visualize the text with our pictures, To connect the text with our lives, And to enter that Wonderland that is Reading. And Alice knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. (Craig, 2010, pp. 428–429)

However, despite the teachers’ powerful poetry writing, a major problem persisted. The Yaeger literacy teachers collectively presented challenges as learners in addition to their considerable strengths. They, like the students whom they taught, were not learning how to teach using readers and writers workshop (subject matter) at a uniform rate. Further to this, the learning of neither the teachers nor the students could be blueprinted. This deeply concerned their new principal who had awakened to the fact of what a revolving one-year contract from his school district (milieu) meant where his career advancement was concerned. He knew he could potentially lose his job if the Yaeger teachers did not perform in ways that statistically increased students’ accountability test scores. Hence, he standardized and accelerated the literacy teachers’ use of readers and writers workshop, which was the next reform he instituted, also through funding Yaeger received from a philanthropy. To expedite his efforts, he hired a literacy staff developer (a teacher of teachers) from an east-coast state. Soon, all the teachers at each grade level were teaching the same content

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in the same way and commonly assessing their students’ progress. Consequently, Daryl Wilson, who had previously created and taught a highly meaningful Holocaust literacy unit4 in which his students and he were deeply invested, had to ditch it in favor of a unit of study that the literacy staff developer prescribed. Further to this, the staff developer and others visited each classroom 20–50 times per year with the others being school administrators, teachers in the department and school guests. On one such visit, the staff developer told Daryl Wilson in front of his peers, his administrators, and a handful of school guests that his students were the “worst GT (gifted & talented) class” she had ever observed. This judgmental comment, which cut deeply into the heart of his practice, was highly problematic to Daryl as a teaching professional. It also irritated his colleagues who likewise faced public condemnations in front of their students and peers. Daryl’s colleague, Laura Curtis, explained: …the way it was done with all of these people with clipboards and the microscopic way they came in and zeroed in on [a teacher] and one child. And the children [particularly those who were English-as-a-secondlanguage learners and possibly offspring of undocumented workers] were very nervous.

Laura went on to say: The staff developer had a way of putting you on the spot saying, “Why do you do this?” “Why do your kids need that?” And everything was an instant demand…All of a sudden you are thinking I have got to answer this person. I’ve got to answer this individual because the individual wants an answer now—and if I do not give the right answer, then the person will get mad at me in front of my principal, peers, and children and say ugly things to me.

The change effort that followed freed the teachers from “the handcuffs” (Daryl’s expression) the staff developer placed on the teachers’ workshop teaching, but even more greatly threatened their overall abilities to be curriculum makers. The incoming reform had to do with standardized teacher assessments. These assessments came after the school had experienced an almost complete leadership change. Only one assistant 4 Daryl Wilson personally traveled to Israel and the death camps in Europe to learn about the Holocaust and victims’ experiences.

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principal with one year of experience remained. Unfortunately, a beginning assistant principal with elementary school experience was assigned responsibility for Yaeger’s middle school literacy department. His content area was not reading or writing. To make matters worse, the school district had concurrently adopted a value-added approach to teacher assessment. This meant that teachers’ evaluations would be linked statistically to students’ high stakes accountability test scores. Further to this, the school appeared to have a limited number of points available for distribution among its high-performing faculty. This resulted in the teachers receiving less points and poorer evaluations than previously had been the case. Hence, Daryl dropped 20 points, another teacher reported a loss of 27 points, and Anna Dean, the beginning teacher I discuss later, received a score significantly lower than her previous years as well. As with the previous reforms, more specially prepared teachers left Yaeger. Also, two new back-to-back principals joined the campus leadership team and left shortly thereafter. With multiple school districts operating in the densely populated area, employment was easy to obtain elsewhere, particularly if you were a strong teacher as faculty at Yaeger historically had been. The fifth reform that Daryl Wilson experienced in my twenty-year continuum at the campus pertained to standardized workbooks. The rationale for this change was unknown. It may have occurred because the district was hiring mostly alternately certified teachers lacking in field experience and knowledge of curriculum mandates. Viewed another way, the problem could have been parents threatening lawsuits for their children’s failures to enter universities of their dreams. Package deals with book publishers may also have been a contributing factor. I do not know. Whatever the reason/s, Daryl and his colleagues were required to choose one of two expendable workbooks published by testing companies, each of which cost $50 per student annually (1500 x $50 = $7500 per annum for the campus). The Yaeger teachers agreed on one workbook; the district superintendent dictated that the school purchase the other one. While Daryl as department chair found the assigned workbooks reasonably “okay” (his word), he did not personally use them as part of his classroom instruction. Instead, he, like other members of his department, continued to embed the mechanics of writing and spelling in the writers workshop shell that the campus had adopted and perfected. Hence, Daryl, like the other teachers in his department, hid the workbooks because students and parents had complained they were too clumsy for homework use. Consequently, the workbooks could be found behind novel

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sets in classroom libraries, stacked behind pillows or curtains, or stored in covered chests. Other than consuming precious space in Yaeger’s smallerthan-usual classrooms, the workbooks wasted public taxpayers’ dollars. The workbooks thrust teachers into teacher-as-curriculum-implementer roles because the workbooks could be both curriculum and resource. However, the Yaeger literacy faculty found creative ways to maneuver around them so the expendable books neither became the curriculum nor served the purposes of curriculum implementation. In short, they capitalized on their moments of choice because they knew that “no command or instruction can be so formulated as to control…artistic judgment or behavior…” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245) Next came the final literacy reform I studied, the decisive factor that ended Daryl’s career. Daryl Wilson, like the other Yaeger teachers, received monetary bonuses as a matter of course because literacy was a tested school subject and his students, contrary to the staff developer’s searing criticism, were mostly performing well on the state’s standardized reading and writing tests. Unfortunately, however, another new principal—Daryl’s seventh since I had known him (9th overall)—was appointed to the campus in the interim. Before the new school year began, she decided to remove Daryl from his department chair position. Her stated reason (cover story?) was that Daryl had received less of a value-added bonus in the previous year than he did in the years before. She apparently did not take into account that Daryl worked with different groups of students in different years and accordingly received different bonuses. Alternately, the principal’s concern about Daryl’s changes in bonuses/student test scores could have been a thinly guised ruse for age discrimination. Whatever the case may have been, Daryl came to the realization that: This is what we have come to… There is no other way to explain it… Data is [G]od…. (Craig, 2020, p. 1)

Knowing there was “nowhere to go from here” (Craig, 2020, p. 10), Daryl Wilson resigned from his department chair and teaching positions, bringing his years of teaching and teacher leadership at one of the most venerable middle schools in the southern US to a close. Once again, a clash between curriculum implementation and curriculum making

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happened, this time with the tyranny of metrics being used in “dysfunctional and oppressive way[s]” (Mueller, 2018, p. xvii) that left Daryl “on the short end of the stick” without title, and continuing employment and entering a new phase of life where his identity was concerned. Bernadette Lohle (1998–2011) Like Daryl Wilson, Bernadette Lohle was an experienced teacher who worked in a school district adjacent to his city center one. While both districts were issued federal court orders to desegregate their students and teachers, Daryl’s district integrated its minority Black and majority white populations more expeditiously and settled its case, which remains a sealed, historical document to this day. Bernadette’s district, on the other hand, failed to comply and the case was re-opened about two decades later. The unsettled decree had to do with a particular neighborhood, the neighborhood where Bernadette’s campus, Cochrane Academy, was located. Settled by African Americans, it was part of the most populous Black communities outside of Harlem. The large concentration of children of color coupled with the district’s ongoing federal lawsuit meant that Cochrane easily qualified as a school reform site and was able to acquire a large sum of funding over a five-year period (1997–2002). The school was also the recipient of a $1 million federal arts grant due to its high priority needs. I played leading roles in both endeavors. The second five-year award (2000–2005) is the one mainly discussed here. As Cochrane’s senior arts teacher and program chair, Bernadette Lohle taught and led the school’s nationally recognized arts program, which, according to its request for funding proposal, was to be spread within its district, the larger community and across the country. From the outset, Bernadette was dismayed that the funding agency termed her Grounds for Learning project a “dissemination” effort: There is something about the word, dissemination—like the word, seminal —that is totally and utterly wrong… We need new ways to describe how ideas become shared. Perhaps then we could more ably understand what happens and what needs to happen in order for teachers to share knowledge in ways that are helpful. (Craig, 2006, p. 257)

While it was a grant program expectation that Bernadette would function as a curriculum implementer in the arts program dissemination, she

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personally considered herself a curriculum maker modeling a story of how others could make curriculum alongside elementary school children as she had done throughout her career. Most specifically, …Grounds for Learning moves the child from the confines of the traditional classroom of four walls of learning to the outside…school environment. It was developed to heighten children’s awareness of the diversity of cultures and their history, while exploring topics that invite the integration of the disciplines. Through these experiences, [Cochrane’s faculty] would assist children in understanding the uniqueness of individuals, as well as nurturing respect for the very foundation on which history is built. (Craig, 2006, p. 277)

However, the word, dissemination, and the focus of the project were not the only challenges that Bernadette faced. Her principal, who fully supported the arts and arts-based teaching at Cochrane, also resigned to take up a prestigious leadership position in the city. This was about the time the Grounds for Learning grant was launched. Further to this, the high stakes testing agenda, which began in Texas, had become federal law (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Hence, accountability demands were increasing. Given the significant changes in the broader educational policy milieu, the school district opted for a different leadership focus at Cochrane Academy. Unlike Bernadette’s past principal who unconditionally championed the arts, her new principal called the arts “fluff” (her word) to offset hard-nosed instruction in “tested subject areas.” Needless to say, Bernadette’s (and the other teachers’) desires to make curriculum alongside children collided with the prevailing administrative imperative that instrumentally focused on test score improvement. This shift in orientation effectively made the standardized state exams the Cochrane children’s curriculum. In the passage that follows, Bernadette and I discussed what transpired as this change unfolded: Bernadette: It (the arts/arts-based learning philosophy) was slowly chipped away by people who did not understand the relevance of the program from the beginning…. Researcher: Mm-hmm… Bernadette: …who did not know what the vision was, and thought that it was arbitrary. Researcher: And then some strong themes like testing and accountability came into play?

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Bernadette: Exactly. And then a kind of power struggle ensued—the arts…we knew what our role was supposed to be and we were not going to change that. We were not going to be dessert. And we were not going to be “fluff.”…There is a big difference between quality and fluff, and you have to know the difference. (Craig, 2006, pp. 274–275)

Bernadette continued: And some people think that when you put on a production and you just see the end results that it only took a week’s time. But what they do not realize in the arts is that we have planned for that performance for the entire year… It is knowing what quality is…and it is a sequential learning process. And you teach more than the arts. Every lesson you teach history. Every lesson you work on involves forms of proportional measurement. And with color, you are constantly working with the science of the world, how color affects the human eye and human emotions. In short, you are learning about life. (Craig, 2006, p. 275)

As a curriculum maker, Bernadette focused her attention on her oeuvre: quality teaching and learning. Her principal, on the other hand, was instrumentalist in her outlook: she simply wanted the federal grant deliverables out of the way so full attention could be placed on Cochrane’s students passing their state accountability tests. Hence, Bernadette’s principal insisted that she “get the lesson plans done.” It was clear that “coverage...[drove her] train” (Rodgers, 2020, p. 14). She placated Bernadette by saying that the units “did not need to be perfect,” which further irritated Bernadette (Craig, 2006, p. 19) who had self-acknowledged perfectionist tendencies. This further heightened the conflict between the two women because the writing of lesson plans would not accomplish what Bernadette had set out to do. What she wanted was to find a creative way to share her knowledge of the arts and the way she went about arts-based teaching. Also, Bernadette had figured out that disseminated products, if they were to be impactful, needed to be arts-based. She knew they had to “create experiences” rather than “communicate messages” (Dewey, 1934, p. 104) as her principal was requiring her to do. A teacher new to Cochrane captured the school’s ethos when experience drove the curriculum and teachers’ curriculum making rested on their sensibilities not on the edicts raining down on them from the administrative conduit above:

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When I first saw [Cochrane’s] students [in action]—it was a little noisier than usual, but what I saw was not so much the noise of goofing off and not being on task, but the noise of learning. I saw a lot of hands-on, a lot of collaborative group learning. A lot of fine arts and visual arts and a great deal of [subject] integration. (Olson & Craig, 2009b, p. 563)

However, the mother of all Black swan events5 —September 11, 2001—happened not long after that and interrupted everything at Cochrane Academy; indeed, everyday life as Americans had known it. In response, the world paused to pay tribute to the many Americans whose lives were lost or torn apart. Bernadette Lohle, who had been born and raised in Brooklyn, took the catastrophe especially hard. In the midst of the all-consuming national crisis, Bernadette and her students directed their artistic attention and energies toward the creation of a mural befittingly called The Shadows of New York. The mural began as a simple shading lesson. However, the mundane activity became a profound curricular experience for the Cochrane Academy youth. The mural illustrated how “dumb matter… [takes on] meaning” (Dewey, 1972, p. 292). While this powerful learning experience was taking place, Bernadette’s administrators repeatedly inquired whether her students were sufficiently prepared to write their standardized examinations in the main content areas. She was further questioned whether her students’ instructional time outdoors and in the art studio could have been better spent in their desks “bubbling in answers on practice tests.” To add salt to the wound, Bernadette was grilled with questions about the mural’s value and meaning—as if this was not self-evident. Once completed, The Shadows of New York, which covered the exterior wall of Cochrane Academy’s front entrance, was shipped to New York as originally planned (see Fig. 1.2 for a photo given to me by Bernadette Lohle and used with permission). Children’s heartfelt messages accompanied the package: The Shadows of New York is about putting New Yorkers’ hearts together again. I hope our mural works. (Jessica) We are sending this mural as a memorial to those of you who lost someone. (Jeronimo)

5 This was how I heard the events of September 11, 2001 described by a British citizen when I attended a conference in the UK.

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Fig. 1.2 The Shadow of New York mural (Courtesy of Bernadette Lohle)

We hope The Shadows of New York lifts your spirits and helps you to move on. (Alex) We hope our drawing makes your hearts sing. (Alberto) (Craig, 2006, p. 280)

In a special ceremony, New York City’s then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani accepted the children’s curriculum making product on behalf of the citizens of New York. After that, The Shadows of New York was featured on local, state, and national newscasts and blazed the cover of an important Wall Street magazine. New Yorkers also personally corresponded with Cochrane’s students. Some even created scholarships for the children in their school’s name as the generative nature of the profound curriculum making experience spilled over to other facets of life and imagined futures for America and America’s underserved children of color. In the background, the questions posed by Cochrane’s administrator took a different tact. This time Bernadette was asked why she had not insisted that the mural be returned to Texas. Apparently, the principal now wanted it displayed in the school district’s front foyer. While this was going on, Bernadette unpacked what the mural experience had taught her about curriculum making: • [it] was not a lesson, nor even a unit…it did not fit a lesson plan template….it involved months of building and layering • it was not clear cut…it went in all directions…

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• it was a happening…and a great deal more was happening than what happened (Craig, 2006, p. 282) Bernadette also reflected on the lesson plans she was supposed to write. She recognized that the lessons would have made curriculum implementers of other teachers if she had shown fidelity to the funder’s implementation agenda. She reiterated: The writing of the lessons [was] not the essence. It was the work that came out of it… The “bones” of the lessons simply cannot be duplicated… Teachers need to have the passion to enter into the work; they need to experience the emotions themselves to be able to engage the students…They need to be attentive to what transpires…just a flat lesson plan is not helpful…What was happening was much more powerful than a template could ever be. (Craig, 2006, p. 285)

Infuriated by the “pressure-cooker…situation,” Bernadette did not hold back on her synopsis of what she had learned from The Shadows of New York experience: There was something cold about what [was] done…the way children [were] being manipulated, the way art [was] being controlled, the use of art for testing purposes. Life is more than a mere numbers game. We need to remember that World War II was a number; September 11 will go down in history as [a number] too… Life does not come down to a score on a standardized test. Through focusing on numbers, we are totally missing the picture. (Craig, 2006, p. 285)

Here, Bernadette echoed Milli (2014) who likewise spoke of “…[people] in jail being given a number; people in concentration campus having numbers; systems reducing people to numbers…” (p. 48). When Bernadette arrived at her disturbing realization, she resigned from her teaching position at Cochrane Academy. Her Grounds for Learning experience had amply informed her that “[the school’s commitment to the arts] was just not there” (her words). At the core of her being, she knew that children’s artwork is not a “diversion or side issue.” Rather, it is “the most educational of all human activities” because it holds the power to “pierce the veil and give sense to…reality beyond appearances…” (Murdoch, 1970, pp. 87–88). This most certainly was the case

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with Bernadette Lohle’s arts dissemination grant experience and her 0911-2001-induced Shadows of New York mural that traveled to the heart of a national wound in a valiant effort to heal it. Helen Macalla (2008–2011) Like Daryl Wilson and Bernadette Lohle, Helen Macalla was also an experienced teacher. She, like Daryl and Bernadette, migrated to Texas from a different region of the US. While Daryl moved from the Deep South and Bernadette came from the East Coast, Helen arrived from the Mid-West. She became a Physical Education (PE) teacher in the Mid-South when employment in her specialty area was no longer available to her in the mid-western US. In Greater Houston, Helen Macalla’s career mostly blossomed despite her being in a male-dominated profession that caused her to feel like “a lone wolf.” Eventually, she became a co-department chair of an experimental PE program with Randy, her male counterpart, who shared beliefs similar to her about their chosen subject area. Their freshly minted, integrated PE program was far removed from street-corner PE that focuses on some iteration of throwing balls, developing competitive sports teams, and preparing professional athletes. What Randy and Helen created was “Hiding the Physical of Education.” What their program boiled down to was PE experienced through everyday life activities; that is, PE with the usual sweat and grind disguised. This is how Helen described the underlying rationale of “Hiding the Physical of Education”: Helen: I call it camouflaging the activity. They do not realize that they are actively working at something [a stated unit objective]… Researcher: But they are enjoying it… Helen: They have a good time doing it. And, all of a sudden, we give them a traditional test and they find out, “I know something….” (Craig, You, & Oh, 2017, p. 764)

Unfortunately, the innovative program came to a screeching halt when Randy accepted employment at a private high school so that his daughter could receive free tuition there. About this time, the school district rethought the experimental school concept and decided to return it to status quo teaching and learning. Heartbroken over the “death” of Randy’s and her PE program, Helen quit teaching to take up a second

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passion: fish. While her intention had always been to own an exotic fish store, her plan did not materialize because an economic downturn hit the energy-dependent economy of the city. Consequently, Helen began work at Pet Smart. One day, one of the most difficult youths she had ever taught showed up at the store to purchase a pet. When he saw Helen working there, he inquired as to why she had left teaching, a question she found utterly preposterous for him to ask. The student then proceeded to tell her about his deep regrets about her leaving the teaching profession, regrets apparent in the field note below: Without [Helen], he confessed, he might not have made it to [a Tier 1] university… He told [her]: I think of you every day because something happened to me when you taught me.” He went on to say, “Will you do me a favor and return to teaching?” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 763)

As a person of faith, Helen equated this young man’s re-appearance in her life as a sign from God. This is how our conversation continued to unfold: Researcher: So you came back to teaching a second time and knew where you needed to be…. Helen: Yes, I am listening now. I was sent the worst person in my entire life to visit me and to give me direction….Thank you, Lord (glancing upward) Researcher: That is phenomenal, is it not? Helen: Well, He [God] had to get my attention somehow… I am now in a very good place… It [PE teaching] is my gift… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 766)

Hence, when Helen returned to teaching, she adjusted her perspective considerably: Helen: I have already built a PE program, so I have met that goal… I do not care if I ever build another program. I do not care if I am ever named Teacher of the Year. These things do not motivate me. Neither do I want to be a PE Chair again. (Craig et al., 2017, p. 766)

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Helen joined a six-member PE Department with both female and male teachers representing each grade level. She found herself unofficially paired with JD, an African American beginning teacher who had previously played football on a university varsity team. While it was not mandatory that the two of them team teach, teaching pairs typically collaborated with one another from time-to-time. Additionally, it is important to note that a male department member was JD’s official mentor, but that relationship possibly did not work out because of background rivalries concerning who would coach the football team (i.e., the returning coach/coaches or the football player). Researcher: So how did you start, you know, to mentor JD? Helen: He originally had a different mentor at the beginning of the year. And then another [male teacher] become his official mentor. And JD and I began to spend a lot of time planning things together or talking together, and he and I got along really well. So, the unwritten rules that no one really talks about, I’ll share with him. So that’s how he and I got closer; because people were expecting things from him, but he didn’t have any experience…Because we are all brought up differently in PE, you know… Researcher: Being a mentor takes up so much time… Helen: I think I see it more as us just talking about things… I do not see it as a [burden] …. Researcher: Is there benefit? Helen: Yes, I get things from him. I mean he is young…He is fresh… I get to see him as a young person dealing with the students because students react to younger people better than they do to older people…I’m watching him to see what he’s doing that really excites the students— things I can imitate and put into my life to make my students have the same thrills that his students do… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 777)

Helen’s mentoring of JD was tethered to her personal image of teaching as a strand of pearls, which she introduced in a conversation: Helen: You know…I have been here for four years. I think most people are aware that what I do is rigorous. You know, I am happy with the baby steps. Like I told JD, you know it is all about the pearls. You make a pearl necklace. You add a few pearls each year. Researcher: Hmm…

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Helen: And he goes: “Man, you have a long string…” And I go: “Well, the strand keeps growing… Teaching is a strand of pearls…” Researcher: Right, wonderful… So, you are thinking your teaching is ‘a strand of pearls’? Helen: Right. A strand of pearls… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 767)

The conversation continued to unfurl his way: Researcher: JD’s not into pearls? Helen: No, he has no problem with that… You know some guys would go, “What would I want to do with pearls?” But JD sees what I am [figuratively] talking about…He knows: “She’s not into pearls either, but it is a way to talk about her pedagogy….” Researcher: There is this whole sense of doing and inquiring and…. continuous flow and development…. Helen: Nobody wants to talk about [inexpensive] keys on a chain….The want to talk about something valuable…Pearls are valuable… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 767)

The topic of teaching as a strand of pearls came up on other occasions as well such as in the following two instances: Interaction 1 Helen: JD said to me one time: “But I don’t do everything you do…” And I said: JD… and like I told Cheryl Craig, “it’s about the pearl.” You can buy—can only afford one or two pearls a year. I said; “By the time you have as many years of experiences as I have, “you will have many pearls.” But you need to worry about a few this year… I said to him, “Your football unit, that’s your pearl.” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 767)

Interaction 2 Helen: [JD’s] doing a whole lot more. He’s doing a really good job… I said to him, ‘Right now, you are creating…. I call it ‘making a strand of pearls.’ Every year, you add something great to what you teach. I said, “Well, you know, you made two pearls this year?” JD said: “I did? What did I do?” I said, “Well, you know your football thing was a big pearl…”

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Later: Helen: “…And our dance unit.” He goes: “It was really cool, too.” And I said: “Those are two pearls….Next year, they are already in the bag. You do not need to re-do them—You just have to tweak them here and there every year, and add to what you know…Next year, we’ll find another pearl or two for you to make…” (Craig et al., 2017, pp. 767–768)

Working alongside JD who had refined two pearls (football unit of study, dance unit of study), Helen revealed other pearls on her teaching strand that was “longer” and “more elaborate” than JD’s as both teachers agreed. These included Pearl 1—Mentoring a beginning teacher partner, Pearl 2—Physical Education notebooks, Pearl 3—Mystery activity, Pearl 4—Fishing field trip, and Pearl 5—Homer’s brain and Frankenstein’s body. Helen’s strand, however, did not include non-pearls, activities like her International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (IBMYP) units of study. Here is how Bernadette explained her inclusion and exclusion criteria for pearls on her teaching “strand”: Researcher: How about the IBMYP units you have written? Would they be pearls? Helen: No. They are just extensions of what I am doing… They are more like what I did in college—writing a lesson plan…. Researcher: More of an academic exercise? So, the pearls are lived experiences that are brought to fruition? Helen: Yes, and they also remain in my teaching… I may tweak them…but it is still the same essence… Researcher: Okay. So pearls involve live interactions with students? Helen: Yes. They learn and I feel good about it. (Craig et al., 2017, p. 774)

When collaboration among the PE department members became a topic that our research team (Suhak Oh, JeongAe You, Cheryl Craig) decided to pursue (see Chapter 3 for further discussion), it is not surprising that the following three themes rose to the fore: (1) Space—the sharing of the sports field, (2) Activities—fishing field trip and (3) Relationships—team teaching. Two of these three topics—activities (Pearl 4) and relationships (Pearl 1)—were pearls on Helen’s curriculum making strand—and JD’s developing curriculum making strand. As for the sports field, it pertained to all six PE teachers because the gymnasium could only

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accommodate two teachers and their classes of learners at one time. This left as many as four other teachers providing instruction alongside one another in the company of all of their students on the field. Despite the teachers’ collaborative partitioning of the sports field being a sight to behold (particularly since their students also respected the imaginary boundaries separating grade levels/teachers’ instructional spaces), there was one occasion when Helen’s and JD’s curriculum making collided with the curriculum making of other teachers and clashed with their school’s policy as well. This incident was significant because it triggered a rancorous debate among the usually cohesive PE teachers, eventually requiring intervention from the grade level assistant principal. On the surface, the seed of the problem traced to an unanticipated torrential downpour of rain that occurred one afternoon. But the matter had much deeper roots than it appeared. The size of the school population had always warranted a second gymnasium since the campus’s 1926 opening. However, a parking lot had been built on the land meant for the second gym. The absence of the second gymnasium meant that any classes (always a minimum of two) engaging in outdoor PE would have no choice but to leave the sports field and make their way to the only gymnasium available for shelter in unfavorable weather. This is because the other ancillary spaces in the school—the wellness room (one PE class), the art room (another PE class), the dance room (the dance club), and the lunchroom (other subject area classes)—were occupied. However, when the two male PE teachers on the field requested to bring their PE students into the gym to join the two classes already there (Helen’s class, JD’s class), Helen hedged at first and then outright refused to grant them permission. It seems JD and Helen were in the final stages of their dance unit; it was the last chance for the performative assessment of the students’ dance routines to take place. Hence, on the one side of the issue, two classes of students sat, needing protection from heavy rain and lightning, and on the other side of the issue, two classes of students danced to conclude their unit of study because unit rotations occurred the next day (see Fig. 1.3). In the midst of the predicament was induction year teacher, JD, whom Helen was informally mentoring. Their mentor-mentee curriculum making relationship needed the IB dance unit to come full circle (planning-instruction-assessment). At the same time, the school’s rainy-day policy stated that all students on the field should be provided safe shelter in the school—even if only 20 minutes of class time remained, as Helen and JD counter argued. Eventually, the storm

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The map of activities on the sports field

outside the school building blew over. Also, the squall inside the school dissipated. In fact, the matter—like the passing rainstorm—became a soon forgotten ripple because the assistant principal stepped in and used practical logic (Cohen & Schwab, 1965) to resolve the issue without blame or judgment. My three years of fieldwork with Helen showed her thriving at curriculum making and mentoring. She deftly blended the two into an eclectic amalgam that worked well for JD and her as well as for the students they taught. It became abundantly clear that Helen favored making curriculum in her own way so much that she previously had quit the teaching profession when her designer teacher-as-a-curriculum-maker program ended at the city’s experimental high school. Helen chose to honor her call to teach (Hansen, 1995) and leave the teaching profession rather than to implement curriculum in “hollowed out” “half-life” ways. Then, when Helen’s curriculum making collided with other teachers’ curriculum making, she privileged JD’s learning as a beginning teacher and the learning of their students engaged in the dance unit of study over the learning of other students and teachers. This left a mass of students sitting on the gym floor or near the gym entrance with nothing to do. The

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scenario demonstrated the length Helen was willing to go to ensure that the curriculum that JD and she taught was a full-life experience for their students despite the rainy-day school policy that collectively had been obeyed until the fateful day when Helen put what had been accepted protocol to the test. Anna Dean (2004–2010) Anna Dean, who was a beginning teacher at T. P. Yaeger Middle School at the same time as Daryl Wilson led the literacy department, said she started teaching “in the eye of the storm.” As early as her entry interview in 2004, she knew that the literacy faculty was bifurcated and that her answers to queries might be pleasing to one faction of the department and an abomination to the remaining faculty. While both groups of teachers favored the workshop approach to the teaching of reading and writing, their agreement ended there. One set of teachers wished to engage in open-ended learning to come to know workshop better while the other group wanted an expert staff developer to tell them what they needed to do. Thus, from the beginning, part of the literacy faculty wanted everyone to exercise their curriculum making rights where workshop was concerned. However, the other part of the department wanted the freewill curriculum makers to implement curriculum under the thumb of the staff developer who would journey to Texas from an east coast state to teach them. What further complicated matters was the fact that the principal (power) was on the latter group’s side. Consequently, Anna Dean felt “like a deer in the headlights” when she first was hired at Yaeger. “What [she] was…witnessing and feeling….” was not anything like what she was prepared to experience. Everything she had theoretically heard about teacher community had been “smooth” and “unproblematic” but everything in her new practical school placement was “complex,” “disputed,” and “bizarre” (Craig, 2013, p. 31). Anna tried to make sense of what the principal was trying to do. Here is what she shared with me: …The principal may have been using [the staff developer] to weed people out who were not fitting his version of a professional learning community… Not that he did not think the staff developer did not have a lot to share, which she did. They were trying to make cookie-cutters out of us. (Craig, 2013, p. 32)

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Another teacher, Laura Curtis, put a slightly different spin on it: Laura: The principal was in his professional learning community groove and he wanted us to be a workshop school. Whatever we would be would be school-wide and professional learning community-related. Researcher: Was that ever discussed with everybody? Laura: Actually, it would not have been a problem, probably, it was the way it was done by forcing people… I think a lot of people would not have been disturbed by what is basically an idea… Researcher: So you would have been okay with it, but it was the forcing that was the problem? Laura: It was the forcing. He wanted us all as a professional learning community on the same page on the same day. Because kids, particularly those in Gifted-and Talented classes and in the regular program, are just not on the same page nor do they need to be. It’s just been hard, very, very hard. (Craig, 2013, p. 32)

Anna and Laura went on to speak about the classroom observations, which enforced the teachers’ fidelity to the readers and writers workshop implementation plan, given that the principal and the staff developer headed up the viewing process. Anna noted that: …the [observation process] was really awful. They [the principal, the staff developer, etc.] just went after people. I felt guilty simply because I was there listening to it and thinking, “Gosh, I am glad they are not going after me, if you know what I mean.” (Craig, 2013, p. 33)

Laura added: …when I went into other people’s rooms, I felt so badly for them… It was embarrassing. What was being said to them in front of kids and other teachers… Even if it was justified, I do not think it was in the students’ best interests. It diminished the teacher in front of the children… (Craig, 2013, p. 33)

Laura continued by sharing what happened in her own classroom: My children [particularly those who were ESL learners and possibly offspring of undocumented workers] were very nervous. And I could feel the tension from them and how they looked at me as their leader. And

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when they saw me starting to falter and be nervous, they also were upset… (Craig, 2013, p. 33)

Eventually, the teachers became very disturbed by the 20–50 visitations to their classrooms, which they increasingly likened to “funeral visitations” (their expression). The whole situation came to a head and a major argument—“a storm”—occurred on a Saturday when the staff developer engaged the teachers in a professional development session. Teachers like Daryl, Laura, Miguel (Anna’s official mentor), Miguel’s partner, and Anna preferred that the staff developer assist them with their curriculum overviews for the forthcoming year. However, the principal and others wanted the classroom visits to continue to unfold for the remainder of the year. Eventually, a “showdown” happened, which was, in Laura’s words: …so confrontational … [The] staff developer pretty much instigated it and from what I heard and saw, it was a mean and ugly thing, something that should not be happening in a professional setting. There was so much tension, I think everybody thought something is going to blow… (Craig, 2013, p. 34)

And blow it did, as Laura continued to explain: The staff developer…blew the engines… I am coming through. I am going to do this come hell or high water. This is the way it is going to happen…. and it just intimidated us so badly, the demeanor, the manner, the culture…what was said and how it was said… I did not like being bullied like that. (Craig, 2013, p. 34)

After the fateful professional development day, the principal further upped the ante through ramping up his use of power. He required every literacy teacher to sign an oath declaring that she/he would follow the workshop method as directed by the staff developer or would accept a transfer to another district campus. The result was that four of the 14 highly prepared literacy teachers left the school that year with others like Daryl, Laura, and Anna remaining less-than-impressed by their being downgraded to implementers. This concluded Anna’s first year of teaching under the leadership of the principal who went on to be a school district leader. For the following four years, Anna had three different principals: a second principal followed by an acting principal and then by her third principal. Anna’s second

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principal arrived like a breath of fresh air, but unfortunately left quickly thereafter also to become a district leader in the rapidly shifting urban milieu. This, of course, led to Anna’s literacy assistant principal becoming the school’s acting principal and a third administrator being introduced to the T. P. Yaeger context in a short span of time. When the new principal arrived, she consciously avoided discussion of the oath of allegiance to the particular workshop method. In an interview, however, she did share how she wanted the reform to unfold as it moved forward: …she wanted the literacy reform restarted…she had told the staff developer that… positive reform cannot be achieved by shoving things down people’s throats… Paying a staff developer to contribute to a group’s dysfunction was too much…. Something had gone awry. The collaborative piece was in jeopardy…The team piece was amiss… It was time to mend fences… (Craig, 2014, p. 16)

Fortunately, the teachers had almost recovered from the trauma of the previous year despite the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) increasingly taking hold and despite them having to continue to work with the staff developer due to a long-term contract that the previous principal had struck. Anna Dean particularly showed growth under the tutelage of the literacy assistant principal who then became her acting principal. She was especially complemented on her ability to partner with the teacher who was her mentor’s adversary in the brouhaha that occurred the previous year. However, one incident occurred during her second principal’s tenure. The conflict was between the staff developer and a highly revered, new to the campus teacher. That teacher had a terminal degree and more credentials in literacy and leadership than did anyone else in the school, including the staff developer. This time the controversy had to do with him not following the staff developer’s version of readers/writers workshop to the letter of her law. What he had done, which made the staff developer go ballistic, was to use workshop as “a shell” that he flexibly used to serve his instructional purposes, not a recipe from whose direction he could not deviate. The incident returned the teachers to the “borderline abuse” state in which they had been the previous year. And, Anna Dean, who by now was completing her Master’s degree, wondered whether readers and

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writers workshop had become so formulaic not because the staff developer wanted it to be that way, but because it needed to be responsive to the high stakes testing environment that increasingly marked their boundaries? In the end, the animosity that developed between the highly experienced teacher and the staff developer was handled differently by school administration this time around. Instead of backing up the staff developer, the principal threw her full support behind the teacher. This brought great satisfaction to Anna who was by now mentoring a beginning teacher who had been hired by the literacy department. Anna, whose own reputation had become sterling, was sad to learn that she would lose her second principal to central district administration. She was also relieved when the literacy assistant principal became the acting principal in the interim because the literacy principal had always been supportive of her and had scaffolded Anna’s blossoming career as a teacher. In Anna’s fifth year of teaching, a third principal became Yaeger’s leader. Having come from a private school in another state, he knew a great deal about International Baccalaureate programs and continued to consult in that area. Unfortunately, that principal knew precious little about public school finance (i.e., school budgets). This combination proved perilous for the campus. Unfortunately, the principal’s frequent absences meant he did not know many of the Yaeger faculty members by name (including Anna). He also lacked time to give the school budget the attention it deserved despite his having hired a clerk to help him with it. This resulted in ongoing clashes with the literacy assistant principal (former acting principal) who was acutely aware of the perilous state of the school’s finances. He would also make cameo appearances in literacy department meetings when the assistant literacy principal and the literacy teachers were engaged in deep learning and interrupt their trains of thought with “trivial announcements…about his pet IB projects” (Craig, 2014, p. 21). The long and short of it was that this principal’s contract was not renewed. Furthermore, the campus’s financial situation was so dire that the school district had to step in and settle Yaeger’s outstanding accounts over the summer months. Here is what Anna Dean shared at the conclusion of her third principal’s tenure: At the end of my fifth year, I decided to give Yaeger one more chance. Despite every year being a new one, I knew morale was not good… Poor teacher morale is not good for creativity, for the vitality of the department and for engendering confidence in the school/school district as an ethical

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place to work. I also joined the teachers’ union…I increasingly recognized that I could be fired for anything [Texas is an at-will state]…By belonging to the teachers’ union, I thought I would at least be able to raise an issue…

To recap, Anna had had three different principals and one acting principal when she began her sixth year of experience. However, the crucible of change in which her practice was nested was about to become further intensified. This was because (1) a new superintendent was appointed to her school district, (2) a new principal was appointed to Yaeger, (3) five of Yaeger’s six assistant principals left the campus, (4) a new literacy assistant principal was named, (5) a shift occurred in the composition of the school’s student body, and (6) the school district tightened its policies and procedures in response to increasing high stakes accountability demands. The new superintendent who had unsettled other urban school districts in the country before coming to Greater Houston arrived in the midst of controversy and left the local milieu having done significant damage. He seriously questioned the expertise of the district’s teachers and put statistical measures in place that equated their values as educators with their students’ academic performances on their annual evaluations. As for Yaeger’s new principal, she came from an elementary campus, but had been placed in a middle school environment. In addition, she inherited “a mess” (Anna’s description) because the faculty was disgruntled and the school was seriously in debt with little money remaining in the typically overflowing parent coffers. Where the literacy department’s assistant principal was concerned, he too was new to the job, new to the literacy subject area and from an elementary school. He seemed to lack knowledge of the high caliber faculty members with whom he was working. Additionally, the student body at Yaeger had significantly changed. To make up for budget deficits, the previous principal had agreed to accept more in-district minority-to-majority student transfers, which brought Title 1 funding to the school for the first time in its lengthy history. This extra funding would help to address the campus’s financial crisis. However, Yaeger’s faculty members were not prepared for this change in student population, which compounded tensions in relationships and added further problems to the ones the school already experienced (i.e., gang activity). All these matters deeply affected Anna Dean—but the final one, the intensification of accountability measures—was the one that brought everything to a climax.

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When Anna first began teaching, Yaeger’s literacy department was led by its chair, Daryl Wilson. The highly respected literacy assistant principal provided oversight but mostly left the instructional and pedagogical leadership to the department chair. However, with the ramping up of accountability demands, the new literacy assistant principal took over leadership of the department and effectively made it all about accountability—not teaching and learning using readers and writers workshop—which had been the focus of the teachers’ attention and debates. Tensions mounted to a fever pitch as the exchanges between the teachers and their assigned administrator became increasingly fractured. Ultimately, this neophyte literacy assistant principal possessed a great deal of power because he conducted their teacher evaluations and assigned them their points, as they would soon find out. As presaged, Daryl Wilson received 20 points lower than his previous evaluation, a teacher who questioned the assistant principal’s professionalism scored 27 points less than before and Anna Dean—the newest teacher on the literacy team (the other beginning teacher she mentored had already left)—lost 32 points at the hand of the inexperienced, out-ofsubject area administrator. Anna’s points decreased from 5’s (above expectations) in all categories to 3’s (average). Faculty members, including Anna, shared that their largest decrease was in Domain VII, Compliance with Policies, Operating Procedures and requirements (3 competencies) (see Table 1.1). According to the teachers, this domain was the area where they were least able to provide counter-evidence because the competencies were administrative not instructional or professional in nature. “The most hurtful and incomprehensible thing about what happened,” Anna said in retrospect, was that she was “docked for not setting the discipline policy for the school”—“as if that was [her] responsibility,” she added. She then summed up her 6 years of employment as a beginning teacher in a rapidly changing urban milieu in the following way: I was a cluster leader, taught 93 students every day on a block schedule and the number of high needs students had increased from 120 to 160 at my grade level (Note: This was due to the former principal allowing more minority-to-majority transfers to generate federal revenue to make up for the school’s budget shortfall). The students were tough kids with significant education problems quite unlike those usually entering the school (i.e., arrest for drug trafficking was a first for the school). Furthermore,

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Table 1.1 Teacher evaluation system (Professional development assessment system [PDAS]) Domain

Overview

Domain I

Active, successful student participation in the learning process Learner-centered evaluation Evaluation and feedback on student progress Management of student discipline, instructional strategies, time and materials Professional communication Professional development Compliance with policies, operating procedures and requirements Improvement of academic performance of all students

Domain II Domain III Domain IV Domain V Domain VI Domain VII Domain VIII

Competencies 5 9 8 6 6 4 3 9

the special education teachers were very overwhelmed and a whole new slate of assistant principals had been named (except for one returning one). Discipline at Yaeger needed to be firm and fair, but it had become very lax. Things were getting out of hand. I worried that a major incident would happen. (Craig, 2014, p. 107)

She continued: My colleagues and I also sought help from the literacy assistant principal. But both assistant principals (grade level assistant principal, literacy assistant principal) were new to their jobs and [less-than-prepared], particularly when compared to the previous assistant principal with who I had worked in the literacy department and at my grade level. It was a very, very difficult year. (Craig, 2014, p. 107)

Anna Dean ended her reflective look backward by saying: Cumulatively, it was too much for a veteran, much less a new teacher, but I had learned how to wade and swim backward in a sea that was slowly pulling me under. I decided to seek other alternatives for my career path…The time had come to leave… (Craig, 2014, p. 107)

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Summary Thus far, I have introduced curriculum making, the commonplaces of curriculum, root images of teaching, and delved deeply into four American teachers’ practices (Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, Anna). I featured incidents when their desires to be curriculum makers collided with others who demanded that they act as curriculum implementers. For instance, Daryl Wilson, the first teacher I spotlighted, faced challenges from school leadership and his school district. He also brushed against state and federal policy edicts. All of these sources sought to narrow his opportunities to create curriculum alongside the teens in his classroom. Furthermore, a staff developer, acting on the authority invested in her by his principal, unexpectedly turned a curriculum making approach (readers and writers workshop) into a technocratic exercise in curriculum implementation. She enacted a theory that controlled teaching (her version of workshop) “as if [it] were complete and without competitors, and as if it required no interaction of applicator and adaptor…to do its work of educating” (Schwab cited in Dublin, 1989, p. 115). The second teacher, Bernadette Lohle, experienced ongoing skirmishes with her principal as well. Her administration also privileged the successful implementation of state and federal policies in Cochrane Academy’s high stakes accountability environment. This negatively impacted the campus’s nationally recognized arts program that served to inspire Cochrane’s students of color. Bernadette additionally discovered that the federally funded grant her campus was awarded consigned other teachers to curriculum implementer roles, which robbed them of their voices and agency in their workplaces. This arrangement was contrary to the curriculum maker image she wanted them to live and breathe. As for Helen Macalla, the third teacher I featured, she cherished her teacher-as-curriculum-maker experiences so much that she abandoned the teaching profession when her innovative curriculum program, Hiding the physical of education, was slashed. She decided she would rather become an attrition statistic than lose her call to teach (Yinon & Orland-Barak, 2017). Then, when she later returned to the profession, she disregarded the ways that teachers typically advance in their careers. Instead, Helen paid unwavering attention to her students’ learning as well as to JD, the beginning teacher of color she began to mentor on her own accord. Helen also had a brush with policy—the school’s rainy-day rule—which predictably put teachers at odds with one another, Helen in particular. Finally, beginning teacher Anna Dean, the fourth teacher on whom I focused full

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attention, entered a divided literacy department where one group of teachers wanted to explore readers and writers workshop of their own volition while the other group wanted to standardize its implementation and replicate what the staff developer advised. Those advocating for teachers-as-implementers won out because the principal supported the external staff developer and not the majority of his own faculty members. However, all that changed when Anna’s second principal loosened the staff developer’s vise-grip and directly told her not to interfere with the teachers’ practices. Unfortunately, the staff developer did not heed the principal’s warning. A further squall happened when a highly qualified new-to-school teacher joined the faculty. The staff developer assigned the new teacher to a curriculum implementer role consistent with her way of doing things. However, he vehemently opposed her. This resulted in a major plot shift when the second principal threw her full support behind the teacher and not the staff developer, as previously had been the case. Then, two more leadership changes happened in quick succession, both setting the groundwork for Anna’s final straw: her annual evaluation linking her students’ high stakes accountability test scores with the points assigned to her by a neophyte literacy assistant principal with a STEM (Science | Technology | Engineering | Mathematics) background. Anna Dean, whose workshop teaching had thrived under the six-year direction of the former literacy assistant principal, discovered that her score plummeted at the hand of the new “literacy” assistant principal. Anna was unable to hide her disdain for the instrumental and authoritarian way he weighed and measured her practice. She, like Daryl, Helen, and Bernadette before her, reached a point where it was “time to leave.” For all the featured teachers, teaching—at one point or other—had “come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measures, as if only that which can be counted really counts” (Mueller, 2018, p. 40). While they actively sought to enrich lived curriculum experences for students in their classrooms, those in control wanted to narrow what was going on so it could be more easily measured. Collectively, the four teachers’ narratives show how urban teacher attrition becomes a lived beginning and experienced teacher phenomena. Sustained efforts to reduce teachers’ classroom maneuverability by stripping them of their decision-making power strikes at the heart of teachers and the meanings they ascribe to the act of teaching. With statistics, standardized performance measures and big data taking front-and-center stage in their lives, “professional judgement based upon [teachers’] experience

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and talent [became] retrograde—almost anachronistic” (Mueller, 2018, p. xxii). Revolving-door principals also played major contributing roles not only through their short-term tenures but also by virtue of their financial and curriculum decision-making legacies. School districts further escalated problems through heavy-handed interventions that resulted in one-size-fits-all answers to topics of study/resources to socially engineering the evaluations of both teachers and principals. Most of all, we see that challenges to teachers’ curriculum making arose in particular ways for particular reasons for Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, and Anna. In the end, multiple influences conspired together to constrict their curriculum making capacities, which added to their discontentment and disenfranchisement and ultimately to their decisions to leave their urban school milieus.

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Stenhouse, L. (1976). Case study as a basis for research in a theoretical contemporary history of action (Unpublished Paper). University of East Anglia, UK. Stone, E. (1988). Black sheep and kissing cousins: How our family stories shape us. New York: Times Books. U.S. Department of Education. (2002). Executive Summary: The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Van der Wal, J., & Van der Bie, G. (2015). The incarnating embryo—Human embryonic development in a phenomenological perspective. In T. Liem (Ed.), Osteopathic energetics: Morphodynamic and biodynamic principle in health and disease. Pencaitland, UK: Handspring Publishing. Varkey Foundation. (2016, February 7). The top ten reasons why teachers matter. Global Teacher Prize. https://www.globalteacherprize.org/fr/nouvelles-etblogs/the-top-ten-reasons-why-teachers-matter. Vinz, R. (1997). Capturing a moving form: ‘Becoming’ as teachers. English Education, 29(2), 137–146. Waldman, A. (2016). Ayelet Waldman. In M. Maran (Ed.), Why we write about ourselves (pp. 215–230). New York, NY: Plume. Ward, J. (2016). Jesmyn Ward’s wisdom for memoir writers. In M. Maran (Ed.), Why we write about ourselves: Twenty memorists on why they expose themselves (and others) in the name of literature (pp. 231–242). New York, NY: Plume. Westbury, I. (2000). Teaching as a reflective practice: What might Didaktik teach curriculum? In I. Westbury (Ed.), Studies in curriculum theory: Teaching as reflective practice—The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 15–39). Mahwa, NJ: Erlbaum. Wilson, S. (2014). Evolving systems of US teacher preparation. Theory into Practice, 53, 183–195. Wu, Z. (2004). Being, understanding and naming: Teachers’ life and work in harmony. International Journal of Educational Research, 41, 307–323. Wulf, K. (2020, March 14). 1619 Project Live Forum. In Pierre-Antoine Louis (columnist). Race/Related. New York Times. Yinon, H., & Orland-Barak, L. (2017). Career stories of Israeli teachers who left teaching: A salutogenic view of teacher attrition. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 23(8), 914–927. Zhang, H., & Gao, Z. (2014). Curriculum studies in China. In W. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (pp. 118–133). New York, NY: Routledge. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

CHAPTER 2

Curriculum Making 2

Abstract This chapter, Curriculum Making 2, captures my first impressions of the Chinese context and my beginning knowing about those who teach and learn within that social, cultural, and historical milieu. After that, I hone in on details specific to Chinese teachers, students, subject matter, and milieu. Using the curriculum commonplace framework, I then share four exemplars that convey my observations and experiences in Chinese schools, and four exemplars, which communicate particular cultural understandings I came to know directly or indirectly in the midst. While not as deeply nuanced as the exemplars of the four American teachers I spotlighted in Chapter 1, the examples in this chapter reflect my heightening awareness of teaching and learning in China. This chapter ends with a summary of both Curriculum 1 and Curriculum 2, which segues readers to Chapter 3, Reciprocal Learning. Keywords Curriculum making · Commonplaces · Classroom teachers · Backbone teachers · B¯anzhuˇ rèn teachers · Three-rung career ladder · New Basic Education · Confucian tradition

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0_2

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Curriculum Making in China Having visited China 18 times and been involved in the CanadaChina Reciprocal Learning Project for most of those visits, I have experienced the commonplaces of curriculum, images of teaching and teachers’ curriculum making in action in the Chinese context in addition to the Canadian and American educational milieus. However, I never interacted with the Chinese teachers and principals for sustained lengths of time as I did in Canada and the US. Hence, what I share is more surface level because it came to me interactively through sporadic first-hand visits and/or via what guides and colleagues shared with me through translation. Also, while in China, particularly during classroom observations, I endeavored to “behave toward everyone respectfully as if receiving a great guest”) (出门如见大宾in Mandarin. Analects, Yan Yuan, 122), which positioned me differently. Attempting to mirror how I conducted my research studies in the US and Canada to the extent I was able, I sought to understand the Chinese teachers’ practices in their own terms—most especially their cultural terms—with which I grappled to make sense. Curriculum Making Backdrop in China First, let me set the broader contextual backdrop over my nearly two decades of experiencing education in China. When I initially traveled to East Asia in the late 1980s, no major freeways existed. From a tour bus window, I could see an airport under construction, but there was no road to access it. People mainly rode on bicycles, sometimes with carts dragging behind them. There was no such thing as lanes of traffic. People were moving in every which direction, but there was an underlying order amid the seeming chaos, although it was not initially apparent to me. Two things of import stood out: (1) an invitation to visit a commune and (2) a scheduled visit to a primary school. The visit to the commune was a happenstance occurrence that immediately became a long-remembered event. It was the first time I experienced Chinese citizens’ utter delight in meeting “kindred spirit[s]…from afar” (Is it not delightful to have men [sic] of kindred spirit come to one from afar? 有朋自远方来, 不亦乐乎 in Mandarin) (Confucius, 1995, p. 1). Unfortunately, only four people showed up for the scheduled tour. Cautious not to disappoint, our guide queried, “Would you like to follow

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the itinerary or go to a commune instead?” The decision was unanimous. A commune was far more interesting to us than the pre-planned tour activities. On the commune, we experienced up-close the swift pace of change in China. We met our guide’s grandfather who was dressed in a Mao suit (like mostly everyone else we met), engaged in manual labor with a yoke on his back, and lived in a dirt floor home. His son, our guide’s cousin, lived across the dirt path. The son wore a golf shirt, owned a three-story house, and cooked family meals using three heat sources, which he proudly showed us, along with the family’s refrigerator. His spouse and he had three children despite the country’s legally enforced one-child policy, which reportedly had prevented 400 million births (Chen, 2003; Yang, 2007) in the country. The son owned a factory that manufactured windshields for motorcycles, which were just beginning to rival bicycles as the preferred Chinese mode of transportation. I distinctly remember his spouse offering us thick slices of watermelon locally grown on the commune. Over juicy watermelon and steeped green tea, we learned that the parents refused to live in a new house the younger couple offered to build them. The older parents declined the opportunity, despite the massive changes swirling around them that would soon make living on communes an obsolete way of Chinese life. The second thing that stood out to me on my first visit to China was the primary school tour, which was on our planned itinerary. I was intrigued by the campus’s arts-infused milieu. I imagined it to be a Chinese version of an Italian Montessori school, given that the children cleaned their classrooms. However, I later learned that all custodial work in schools is the responsibility of Chinese students regardless of their grade level placements. I particularly recall the sweet sound of the children’s voices and the shy smiles they gave us as strangers from faraway. Above the children’s bobbing heads was something I also found fascinating: a portrait of John Dewey, along with an excerpt of his philosophy translated into Mandarin (Fig. 2.1).1 To date, I have only found one line from Dewey’s philosophy immortalized on an American school wall (T. P. Yaeger!) but I have never seen a photo of the great North American philosopher displayed in either Canadian or American school settings. 1 My graduated doctoral student, Dr. Michaelann Kelley, also encountered a photo of John Dewey on the wall of a classroom in China. She returned from China with this photo that she shared with me. Figure 2.1 is Michaelann Kelley’s photo, which was taken inside a school in Beijing.

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Fig. 2.1 Tribute to John Dewey on a school wall in Beijing, China

There are, of course, busts of John Dewey periodically on display at the University of Chicago and Teachers College New York (Craig & Flores, 2020). On this first trip, I learned that Dewey himself had visited China in the early 1920s and delivered over 200 lectures. I also came to know that he had three famous Chinese students: Hu Shih, Chiang Monlin, and Tao Xingzhi (Fig. 2.2). Each had helped spread Dewey’s experiential philosophy throughout China (Wen & Xie, 2017). In fact, Tao Xingzhi held John Dewey in such high esteem that he had changed his name from Zhixing (知行), in which the Chinese character of knowing (知) comes before acting (行) to Xingzhi (行), meaning “act[ing] before knowing,” which more suitably reflected Dewey’s theory of experience (Han, 2020). Through his personal lectures and via the influence of his followers, John Dewey became widely known as “the second Confucius” (Bu & Han, 2019; Grange, 2004; Qi, 2005)—“the Western Confucius”—in China

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Fig. 2.2 John Dewey’s Chinese students (From top left to top right: Hu Shih, Chiang Monlin, Tao, Xingzhi, Zhang Zuoping; From bottom left to bottom right: Shi Liangcai, Alice Dewey, John Dewey)

(Bu & Zhu, 2021; Han & Feng, 2013). This “yok[ing of] the twentieth century philosopher [Dewey] with the found[ing] of the [Chinese] cultural outlook…” (Grange, 2004, p. xiv), I learned, was immensely important to the development of Chinese education at that time. Obviously, China has rapidly changed since my initial visit. Communes no longer exist, Beijing’s hutongs have mostly disappeared and many rural citizens have found gainful employment in cities. Further to this, the Friendship Store, the only shop where I was able to buy souvenirs on my first trip to China, had shut its doors on my most recent visit to Shanghai. Because friends from afar (foreigners) can now purchase high-quality merchandise anywhere in China, demand for the Friendship Store’s cultural artifacts no longer exist. Additionally, Shanghai and Beijing, among many other cities, now have impressive shopping malls like the Global Harbor Shopping Centre as well as a multitude of contemporary high-rise buildings dotting their skylines. Further to

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this, high-speed trains carry passengers from metropolis-to-metropolis in record time. One example is the Maglev, the world’s fastest bullet train on which I have ridden several times, which moves at a speed of 267+ miles per hour. Another major change I personally experienced in China oddly had to do with eye glasses. On my 16th trip to Shanghai, I purchased a new pair of lenses. When I returned to China six months later and tried to visit the same optician to have my glasses adjusted, an enormous change had happened in the interim. The shop no longer existed. Neither did the road on which it was located—at least in its past form. A six-lane freeway had replaced the two-lane thoroughfare and had wiped out all the small businesses located on it. China’s escalated rate of change became vividly apparent to me that day. Immediately, my mind returned to Canada and its comparatively snail-like pace of change. I also remembered how even the US’s Interstate Highway 45, which cuts through Houston, Texas, has been under repair since I arrived over a quarter-century ago. At the same time, I know from my trip to northern China that development in China’s rural areas also move at a much slower pace. Commonplaces of Curriculum in China When I entered classrooms in China, I brought with me one major understanding of the Chinese language and culture that I had learned from Ted Aoki in Canada and my readings of his work. Aoki, who was a Japanese Canadian, admired the elegance of the Chinese language [普通话 (the common language)] and underscored the fact that a person in China would have: 耳Ears, to hear 嘴Mouth, to speak 领导者Leader, who stands between heaven and earth 人Person (It takes at least two to make a person). (Aoki, 1989/1990 cited in Craig et al., 2015)

Hence, when I began to think about the commonplaces as they applied to China, I recalled that the Chinese refer to a human being in plural form. I recognized that an individual in Confucian thinking was always dialogically located in a social context and would not exist without others, which Aoki always stressed. As Woo (2019) more recently has

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stated, the human being in Asian thinking is really “two people leaning against each other” (Woo, 2019, p. 1091). Knowing this, I expected Schwab’s commonplaces to be applicable to the Chinese setting due to their near universality, but I anticipated that they would play out somewhat differently in different situations because the Chinese seek harmony not uniformity (Li, 2013). With these thoughts lying in the backdrop of my mind, I awakened to some particularities about the teacher commonplace during my multiple visits to Chinese classrooms. One of the first things that stood out in China’s elementary schools is that teachers are not generalists; they are subject matter specialists known by their content areas. Hence, they identify with their sub-specialties, which undoubtedly affects how their identities are formed (Mandarin teacher, English teacher, Music teacher, and so forth), which would make them fundamentally different to Canada’s elementary school teachers (Hong, 2010). Additionally, two different varieties of teachers exist in addition to those westerners would consider regular classroom teachers: B¯anzhuˇ rèn teachers (班主任) (Bu & Li, 2013; Li & Chen, 2013) and backbone teachers (骨干教师) (Bu & Han, 2019) with some backbone teachers being of the B¯anzhuˇ rèn type. B¯anzhuˇ rèn teachers are similar to homeroom teachers who tend to the individual, social, and familial aspects of children’s education (As an aside, I encountered a café mama in Sweden who similarly monitored students’ social lives and interactions in the school cafeteria.). Most backbone teachers, on the other hand, assume leadership roles in schools where efficiency, subject matter, classroom leadership, and inter-school/school-family collaborations are concerned. As models of moral behavior, they are crucial to Chinese teachers’ professional learning, particularly in the New Basic Education program founded by Ye Lan (1994, 1997, 2004, 2006), from which my example is drawn (Fig. 2.3) (Bu & Han, 2019). Figure 2.3 shows the stages of cooperative and symbiotic relationships between individual teachers, backbone teachers, and teacher research group s as hubs of teaching and learning where knowledge and action become refined through ongoing collaboration and deliberation in New Basic Education schools. Backbone teachers seem similar to American department heads (i.e., Daryl Wilson) and subject specialist teachers (i.e., Bernadette Lohle) in some ways but their roles can be more expansive (Bu & Han, 2019). All teachers, whether B¯anzhuˇ rèn, backbone or regular, are addressed as Lˇaosh¯ı (老師) (Craig et al., 2015), which conveys the respect bestowed

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Fig. 2.3 The concept of cooperative and symbiotic teaching research (Bu & Han, 2019)

on them as the moral guardians of Chinese culture2 (Paine, 1995). I have also come to know that Asian students honor their teachers and professors years after their initial contact. As a professor, my former Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese doctoral students and visiting scholars typically contact me on teacher’s day near the beginning of September, and/or on Chinese New Year’s in February. In Asian culture, I have come to know through multiple personal experiences that a teacher is a student’s forever teacher/elder/influence. “A teacher for one day is like a father [sic] for a lifetime” (一日为师,终身为父) is how the sentiment was phrased in the Tang Dynasty, although it has presently evolved to “being a teacher for one day, ...being a friend for life” (Cheng, 2008). Another Chinese feature of the teacher commonplace is the three-rung career ladder that exists within each school context (Fig. 2.4). About 50% of teachers on any given campus are on Rung 3 (bottom rung) while 20– 30% of the teachers are on Rung 2 (middle rung). Rung 1 (top rung) is reserved for 10–20% of a campus’s teachers (backbone teachers). Twenty

2 This is reminiscent of the respect given teachers in Iran and Cuba, countries where teachers are also called nation builders (Iran) and souls of education (Cuba) (Craig, 2016, pp. 70–71).

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1st rung: 10-20% of the teachers in a school (Increase by 10% each year) 2nd rung: 20-30% of the teachers in a school (Increase by 20% each year) 3rd rung: 50-60% of the teachers in a school

Fig. 2.4 Teacher construction and development model in Chinese schools (Bu et al., unpublished paper)

percent of Rung 3 teachers are expected to advance to Rung 2 and 10– 20% of Rung 2 teachers are expected to elevate themselves to Rung 1 (Bu et al., unpublished paper). In addition, outstanding teachers in China are chosen sometimes as principals. Other times, those with connections fill the school leadership position. Asian American teacher, Shi Tan, shared through translation, that these relationships—described as gu¯anxì (关系)— are “hard to explain in English” but they have to do with “the people one knows” and “the influence a [family] name carries” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 6). Given this backdrop, the follow-up question had to do with what would be done with less-competent teachers and principals in China. The reply was that this teacher/principal problem would not exist because of miànzi (面子) (in Mandarin, meaning saving one’s face in social situations), the cultural practice that fuels China’s shame culture would cause them to exit ahead-of-time. They “would bow out to save face or even be pressured [to leave] to save the image of the system” was how Shi Tan explained it (Craig et al., 2017, p. 8). As for Schwab’s learner commonplace, my multiple visits to China have informed me that Chinese students are more compliant than Canadian or American youths. This seeming submissiveness comes from China’s Confucian tradition and its collectivist origins where individuals yield to

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authority and follow the interests of the group (Han, personal communication, 2020). What some call “herd mentality” (Wang, Wang and Li, 2017, p. 1480) favors the collective over the individual. I once thought this was the reason Chinese teachers do not question students by name in class. (I have since learned that in the Confucian tradition students pose questions of their teacher—not the other way around!) Also, past generations of young Chinese learners were educated to lower their heads to show respect to their teachers and elders, but this has changed with time (Li, personal conversation, 2020). Nevertheless, filial piety (孝), China’s moral code, continues to revolve around loyalty and showing deference to one’s parents, one’s teachers, one’s ancestors, and one’s country, along with its leaders. Finally, we come to the milieu commonplace. One of the most profound differences between the educational landscape of China and the educational landscape of the US (or China and Canada) is that: …the Chinese have a profound faith in education. High and low and rich and poor are absolutely of one mind on this matter … In the West there are many ways by which a man [sic] may rise to eminence … In China, [the paths] … all narrow…to one, and it is the one that leads to the schoolhouse. (MacGowan, 1912, p. 55)

Further to this, filial piety, as earlier introduced, spills over to other key relationships in the Chinese milieu: king-minister, father-son, husbandwife, older brother-younger brother, and friend-friend. This explains why the Chinese government and its leaders, as prefigured, are held in as high esteem as one’s own family members. This further ensures China’s social, economic, and political cohesiveness. Additionally, retaining highquality gu¯anxì (关系) is requisite to maintaining one’s job and position in society. However, this makes gu¯anxì (关系) tension-filled in Chinese cultural milieus as it works as an unspoken asset for some and as a nagging deficit for others who are well aware of the subterranean privileges given others. I have also learned that age matters a great deal in the Chinese milieu. This is evident in the rituals surrounding ancestor worship. A national holiday is dedicated to tomb sweeping, which is the only day of the year when roots and trees can be removed from burial grounds for fear of bad f¯engshuˇı (风水) (Chen, personal communication, 2020). Also, a place is sometimes set at the table on Chinese New Year for a deceased family

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member (Bu, personal communication, 2019). This empty place setting honors the lost relative’s spirit in the afterlife, a practice similar to Day of the Dead in Mexico, which is celebrated by many Latinx Americans as well. Gender also has a major role to play. Chinese hospitals do not inform couples of the sex of their unborn child during or after ultrasound tests. In the past, female fetuses were aborted due to China’s traditional patriarchal culture. This also was a more frequent phenomenon during the one-child policy era. Hence, it is possible, though unlikely, that those adhering to more traditional ways may cling to this practice. Additionally, I have personally experienced how the intermingling of age and gender unfurls in the Chinese milieu. The situation in question arose when Ian Westbury (US), Michael Connelly (Canada), Miriam Ben-Peretz (Israel), and I (US) were invited to give keynote speeches at Capital Normal University in Beijing in 2007. In Western university contexts, Miriam Ben-Peretz (now deceased) would be introduced first out of respect for her age, gender, contributions and length of term in the field. I probably would have followed due to my gender (females before males). This was not the case in China. Ian Westbury and Michael Connelly were introduced first based on gender and age; Miriam Ben-Peretz and I came next based on our gender and age. A further contextual subtlety I have experienced is the importance of the chair around the table in which one is seated in meetings or when dining or having tea (only the host pours the tea) as a guest in China. The reason one is motioned to sit in a particular chair also has to do with energy flow (风水) in the room and the respect accorded guests. Finally, I cannot leave this section without mentioning the five virtues (Confucius, 1995) underpinning Chinese culture that I have come to know well through my relationships in the Chinese context: benevolence (generosity), righteousness (doing the right thing), propriety (behaving correctly in society), knowledge (learning), and sincerity (genuineness). Confucius thought so highly of learning that he considered it a virtue despite ranking it lower than moral behavior. At the end of the day, though, most Chinese abide by the golden mean (中庸)—the golden rule. When questioned about the meaning of this rule, Confucius replied, “Is not RECIPROCITY…? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” (Analects, VX-23, capital letters in original). This principle resembles the precept that most of us in the West follow. The only difference is that the Chinese attribute their rule to Confucius while our Western cultural and religious norms trace to the Ancient Greeks and the Judeo-Christian belief system.

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Curriculum Making in China To discuss my experiences of classrooms in China, I have chosen to shine the spotlight on four lessons where I experienced Chinese teachers attempting to enact the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image amid China’s test-driven culture, which curbs teachers’ abilities to make curriculum alongside children and chokes their creativity. I will not dig deeper into this politically charged issue whose sentiments bubbled to the surface in the four US cases (Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, Anna) as well. At the same time, I will present the backdrop of the Chinese educational landscape from a local point of view in addition to my wide-angle lens. According to fellow Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project advisory board member, Zongjie Wu, Many teachers in China are…harassed by bureaucratic discourse in the form of reformulation of curriculum standards and performance measurements on the basis of expert knowledge and political arbitrariness. In the name of modernisation, educational change has been hijacked…to manipulate teachers’ professional life and teacher development [has] become a process of putting in place procedures to ensure compliance, docility and the creation of schools as institutions whose main concern is meeting requirements…” (Wu, 2004, pp. 307)

Wu’s description of the Chinese backdrop reminds me of the years building up to the No Child Left Behind Act in the US when accountability measures started to take hold in the state of Texas prior to accountability nationally being written into law in the US in 2001. Daryl Wilson’s 20-year account captured what happened as policy directives became introduced to classrooms. While China has a much longer and more competitive history of testing, it is not the only country in the world where preparing children to take examinations risks becoming the lived curriculum that students experience. I now present the four lessons: (1) Grade 3 mathematics lesson, (2) Grade 4 literacy lesson, (3) Grade 6 science lesson, and (4) Grade 9 English language arts lesson. I also close this section with other understandings that I gleaned from multiple lessons. Cumulatively, I feature eight lessons because I know the number 4 (四) is an unlucky one for the Chinese because the word is homophonous with the word death. Eight, on the other hand, means wealth and success. Therefore, I have

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divided my exemplars into groups of 4 + 4 = 8. I begin now with the four exemplary lessons—the first half of my eight exemplars. A Grade 3 mathematics teacher who worked in a city near Beijing taught the first lesson I wish to describe. The teacher organized her 48 students in eight groups who sat at circular tables with space for her to walk in-between them. From the interpreter, I sensed that the children were using manipulatives to compare the properties of additionsubtraction with the properties of multiplication-division. The young students were given ample time to experiment with the manipulatives. The teacher then posed three structured questions and the students returned to the objects—arranging and rearranging them—while deliberating with one another. Then, the teacher offered a possible solution—which I presumed was an overarching generalization—and asked the children to put their heads on their tables to rest before they would make the intellectual leap to connect the four properties. While this was going on, the teacher and an assistant teacher (probably a novice teacher with two backbone teachers positioned at the rear of the classroom with me?) removed all the materials from the tables. The teacher then asked the young people to lift their heads and to close their eyes for a moment to verify their answers. The teacher repeated the big query—and, amazingly, all of the children’s hands shot up with answers. I left this classroom space remembering the teacher’s problem posing ability and the manner in which she invited the children to work with the manipulatives and converse with one another. I noted how each task set the stage for the introduction of the work that followed it much like the metaphorical unfolding of traditional Chinese screens as Xu (2006, 2017) noted in her dissertation and book. Also, the physical rest between the concepts and the generalization stood out to me as something I wanted to reciprocally carry forward from this lesson. A second class I visited in the same school, a Grade 4 literacy one, also remains etched in my memory. My field notes captured the teacher-ascurriculum-maker experience in the following way: The lesson was conducted with the teacher characteristically at the front of the classroom speaking into a satellite microphone attached to her clothing. This made her enunciation crystal clear and her voice bell-like. The confounding thing is that [the teacher] – in comparison to others observed– did not seem to fill the instructional space with words. (Zou et al., 2016, p. 848)

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I continued: There were, of course, questions for students to ponder [about the story that was shared], but next-to-no extraneous explanation or praise-related comments directed at individual students. Instead, the teacher’s face – through a myriad of expressions – seemed to be doing the talking. It seemed to me that I was experiencing what I unofficially termed ‘teaching without words’. (Zou et al., 2016, p. 848)

Upon returning to the US, I immediately wanted to find out the professional development initiative in which the teacher was participating. On the Internet, I watched a “teaching without words” TEDx lecture where a dyslexic mathematician shared the need to reduce the language density of mathematics so those with dyslexia could learn with less background explanation and verbalization (Peterson, 2011). I also read about the streamlining of language and vocabulary to separate culture from the teaching of English as Foreign Language students (Genc & Bada, 2005). I further learned about wordless books (picture books) (Larrick, 1976) and the unloading of language for learning-disabled students (Ward, 2015). While these leads were informative and in the vicinity, they did not hit the mark. However, when I puzzled over the lesson I observed with my Chinese American-born and Chinese national students, I discovered the missing piece that was sitting immediately before my eyes: culture. My students informed me that the Chinese as a cultural group abhor “empty praise.” From them, I reciprocally learned that praise is infrequent and only granted in truly remarkable situations. As Grange (2004) succinctly explained, “the Chinese are not flatterers given to easy compliments” (p. xiv). This insight greatly aided my understanding of the Chinese teacher’s curriculum making alongside her students. The teacher was employing facial expressions—instead of language—to engage and respond to her students. By not filling the air space with gratuitous teacher talk, she was leaving extra room for student-generated thinking. Also, her facial expressions held her students’ attention in a way that did not detract from her presence or diminish her importance in the classroom. Later, I learned of a Taoist influence that could have additionally contributed to the “teaching without words” phenomenon. Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching [道德经]) declared that “The saint treats the world with an inactive attitude, and does things without words (圣人处无为之事, 行不言之 教) (italics added) (Bu et al., 2020). Undeniably, one or more cultural

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influences shaped the Grade 4 teacher’s curriculum making alongside her learners, aptly resulting in a culturally infused “happy teaching, happy learning” (乐教爱学) (Craig et al., 2015, p. 147) environment. The lesson I mutually learned from this Chinese teacher-as-curriculum-maker was the use of the microphone to ensure that directions are clearly understood, the pedagogical use of suspense and wait time, and the increased use of facial expressions accompanied by the teacher’s movement around the classroom. The next curriculum making experience I highlight was a Grade 6 science lesson on circuitry taught via the inquiry method. The lesson involved 40 students sitting in groups of five in conjoined desks on a stage, which was an atypical classroom space. Approximately 200 people (Bu et al., 2020) gathered in the audience to observe the lesson in live action on the platform. I imagined the lesson was Stage 3 of the New Basic Education symbiotic lesson planning cycle outlined in Fig. 2.3, although I am uncertain. Two teachers representing the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project were to facilitate the class: an experienced female teacher from an inner-city school in Canada and a male backbone science teacher from China. However, there was a change in plan and the male backbone teacher assigned the female teacher who he was mentoring to be the Canadian teacher’s co-teacher. The female Chinese teacher was not on Rung 1 as her mentor was. She was a Rung 3 teacher. It is quite likely her male mentor (sufi) (苏飞老师) assigned the demonstration lesson to her to build her confidence. Despite what seemed to be a last minute change to the demonstration team composition, the two women masterfully facilitated the science as inquiry lesson with youths unaccustomed to hands-on learning while being observed. The students in the groups had tubs of materials with which to work. The materials included insulated wires, batteries of all sizes, tape, cardboard, aluminum foil, plastic, steel wool, wood, rubber, fabric, wire coat hangers, switches, etc. The first challenge was for students to role-play how electricity flows through a circuit. Then, they experimented with the materials and drew provisional diagrams to show the flow of electrons through a circuit. Later, they added a switch. All the while, the students deliberated with one another with their two teachers asking clarifying questions. The students’ tentative diagrams and the expressions on their faces were live-streamed on a screen behind them. The teachers circulated throughout their stage classroom with the

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Canadian teacher bending down and communicating one-on-one at eyelevel with the students and the Chinese teacher paying close attention to the children’s questions and the tasks in which the students engaged during the “figuring out” time. In the background, audience members quickly warmed up to this intercultural demonstration of a relatively new teaching method in China. The class ended with the students reflecting backward on the inquiry process. Only male students answered the questions at this point despite both genders engaging actively in the co-taught science as inquiry lesson. The Canadian teacher encouraged two girls to participate but they respectfully declined. It crossed my mind that their behavior may have reflected a learned cultural norm (Shi Tan in Craig et al., 2017) and/or showed the long-term effects of China’s one-child policy historically privileging males a generation later. My observation of this lesson reminded me of something Connelly and Xu (2019) shared about the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project. They reckoned that if teachers from Windsor, Canada and teachers from Chongqing, China observed one another, they would see different enactments of inquiry-based teaching (Connelly & Xu, 2019). In my case, I was a dual citizen (Canadian/American) professor observing teachers from Toronto, Canada and Shanghai, China co-instructing students who were unknown (Canadian teacher) and somewhat known (Chinese teacher) to them. The inquiry lesson they demonstrated included both Chinese and Canadian elements. Because the teachers spent 30 minutes responding to the audience members’ questions in Mandarin, I did not have an opportunity to ask them about points of convergence/divergence in the co-teaching of the science as inquiry lesson. Also, I would never have done so in a public audience because it is contrary to how I position myself as a Western professor and researcher—and especially not in a country that is not my own. To the teachers’ credit, they were forthright about the seeming switch in plans I witnessed. Also, I did notice—on my own accord—the different positioning and posturing of the teachers in the classroom and the fact that near the class’s conclusion, males dominated the conversation. While this may have been more blatantly obvious in this demonstration lesson observed in China, the fact of the matter is that the participation of females in the STEM disciplines is a problem mutually shared by Canada, China, and the US. A Grade 9 literacy class I observed in Beijing is the last episode of curriculum making I will highlight. When I approached the door of the Grade 9 class, a young man was exiting the room with a mop and pail

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in hand. I realized he had scrubbed the floor squeaky clean to prepare for “a guest from afar.” Once inside the classroom, I was struck by the wall-to-wall students—50 in all—sitting in desks somewhat small for their teenage frames, with books and other possessions spilling out from the open trays beneath their seats. Also, the students’ desks were arranged in pairs on cement risers, which meant they could only safely communicate with their partner immediately beside them. The teacher began the class by presenting poems written in subway stations around the world. Along with each example of subway poetry, he located the place of origin on a world map. The students and I sat mesmerized as we toured the underground subways of Rome, Paris, London, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Moscow, St. Petersburg (all of which I have been in and used) and learned about the poems that are on display there. The lesson ended with each pair of students choosing a world city not among those demonstrated and committing to co-author a subway poem appropriate to the selected locale for presentation in next week’s class. Clearly, the idea of creating subway poetry motivated the Chinese teens. All of them wanted to travel internationally and experience the subway phenomenon in a city other than Beijing. As I left the classroom, I complimented the teacher on how he had held the undivided attention of 50 students. As an afterthought, I said he must have devoted many personal vacations to gathering his evidence and background for the unit of study. The teacher replied that he had found all the material through surfing the Internet; he said he had never left China. The lesson I reciprocally learned from this teacher was the value of vicarious experience—how world-traveling (Lugones, 1987) in one’s own mind with whatever resources one has at hand—can harness one’s own and others’ attention and springboard learning in ways not previously considered. This teacher’s reply brought me up short. I had imagined he was like Daryl Wilson who physically world-traveled to offer his middle school literacy students his stunning Holocaust unit. But here was a teacher on the other side of the world—also dedicated to curriculum making alongside his students—accomplishing similar learning outcomes based on second-hand experiences for both the teacher and the students with both Daryl and he engaging in uniquely situated curriculum making (Aoki, 1985/1991). As foreshadowed (i.e., 4 + 4 = 8 ~ wealth, success), I also learned four overarching cultural understandings from observing teachers facilitating learning in China that also warrant mentioning. This time I have organized what I learned—not by lesson (despite lessons, teachers,

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and students necessarily being part of instruction), but by the cultural understanding that I took away from teaching-learning situations. 1. the Chinese cultural ability to work the opposites amid tensions I have observed Chinese teachers disagreeing with one another about how instruction should take place in live classroom settings. I also have witnessed polarized positions (Li et al., 2009) surfacing from time-to-time during collaborative lesson planning. Of course, I was unable to ascertain the subtleties of what was problematic in the exchanges. However, from a Western perspective, the situations would have been beyond repair because personal boundaries of relationship between professionals would have been crossed. On the contrary, the tensions I observed in China were remedied in a relatively short time through keeping the good of the whole frontand-center. I attribute this repair to the cultural respect afforded the dualities of y¯ın (阴) and yáng (阳) and the fact that the Chinese value harmony above all else as everything comes into being with the harmony of Yin and Yang (He, 2011, p. 244). Good manners could have influenced the situations as well, given most Chinese adhere to the Confucian belief that “if one does not learn manners (etiquettes, courtesy, etc.), one does not know how to behave properly” (“不学礼, 无以立”) (Xia, 2012). 2. the cultural ability to move past difficult situations In Jing Li’s dissertation work (Li, 2018), her research participant, Bing, worked as a teacher-principal on an extremely challenging campus in rural China. What I (Craig) found remarkable about Bing (Li et al., 2019) was that he continued to pursue his best-loved self (Craig, 2013)—eventually in an online knowledge community (Craig, 1995a, 1995b, 2007; Curtis et al., 2013)—which enabled him to champion the teachers and students on his campus and to support their best-loved selves while concurrently sustaining himself by promoting his best-loved self. In my understanding of Chinese culture, Bing exhibited jiayou (加 加油)—the ability to keep at it, to carry on, even amid the daily grind of teaching (Jackson, 1968) and the grueling hardship. Jiayou as a cultural attribute has also stood out to me in many of my observations in classrooms and schools elsewhere in China. 3. the critical importance of the past in the Chinese milieu

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On one occasion, I visited a participating Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project school with Zongyi Deng (National Institute of Education, Singapore—now University College London) and Zongjie Wu (China). Rather than focusing my attention on the school context, the content of the lessons and the teachers and children in it, I listened carefully and watched for what my esteemed colleagues viewed as culturally relevant in the human interactions in the particular school context. I discovered that the early childhood activities I was observing were not merely random stories, calligraphy, art, drama, music and movement activities. I learned from my fellow researchers that the young children’s experiences engaged them in culturally responsive ways that allowed them to connect with different dynasties in China’s long and distinguished history. Even the clothing the children wore in the drama activity center reflected particular epochs of time—they were not dressed in play clothes or Halloween costumes; they wore period regalia, as my colleagues astutely pointed out. Also, some students bore an imperial carriage (辇) on their shoulders, wore historical attire specific to the Song Dynasty and attracted a procession of joy-filled youths following behind the coach, all of whom were also appropriately dressed. On this particular occasion, I reciprocally learned not only from the teachers, principals and the Canada-Chinese partners in the schools, but from my fellow researchers how vestiges of the country’s ancient societies have made their way into modern Chinese school life. As Connelly and Xu (2019) wrote in a recent article, one feels like Confucius might stroll down the hallway at any moment. I likewise experienced China’s intentional merging of its present and its past during the aforementioned school observation, among others. Overall, I witnessed primary learning as “nourishment of life” (Wu, 2004, p. 307). 4) deep appreciation for education that pervades the Chinese way of life I began this section on Chinese teachers-as-curriculum-makers by citing a turn-of-the-century missionary to China who witnessed the primacy of schools and schooling in traditional Chinese culture before more intense colonization took place. Over time, I increasingly have become familiar with the Analects largely because of my participation in the Reciprocal Learning Project but also through my international students who come from the eastern part of the world to study in a younger, more frontier-like culture. I also have

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received a silk version of the Analects as a gift, which is precious to me. It is therefore fitting that I end this section with what Confucius had to say about being educated. The first version—one often batted around in the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project— is probably a more Westernized translation of what Confucius said; the latter version probably more closely follows Confucius’s original meaning: First version: Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace. Second version: The intelligent and the wise are never disoriented; the kind and the benevolent are never beset with worries; and the valiant are never gripped with fear. Regardless of the translation, we arrive at a similar understanding: an educated person in the Chinese milieu is wise, kind, and valiant. Commingled Understandings of the Images of Teaching from American and Chinese Educational Milieus Cumulatively in Chapters 1 and 2, I have discussed the primacy of teachers, the commonplaces of curriculum, tensions between different teaching images, and how the tug-and-pull forces between the images of teachers-as-curriculum-implementers and teachers-as-curriculum-makers unfolds in two different national setting. I also summarized four exemplary lessons taught by teachers in China and four culturally embedded takeaway points that I came to know through my lived experiences of observing teaching in that country. Where possible, I threaded in what I reciprocally learned in the midst from my face-to-face encounters. I now end this chapter (Curriculum 2) with overarching understandings I have gleaned about curriculum making in both China and the US. First, what happens in schools and classrooms is nested within educational policy environments of specific countries, with each country being governed by its own political system. Nations, in turn, attempt to provide quality teaching and learning to students via teachers mostly employed by government agencies (Craig, 2016). Second, because teachers are minded professionals and personal and social human beings, they are frequently unable to implement policies flowing down the conduit to them in replicable ways. They necessarily must bring themselves, their emotions and personalities and their relationships with students into the

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mix. Third, teachers recognize that learners are thinking, feeling human beings and not automatons. Like themselves, students need creative license to contribute to curriculum making in ways that fulfill their needs and desires as learners. Fourth, focus needs to be placed on balancing (Dewey, Schwab) or harmonizing (Confucius) felt tensions (Dewey) between the image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and the image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). Ted Aoki (1989/1990) noted that strings of instruments play less well if they are too loose and make no sound at all (an “everything goes” mentality). However, if the strings are too taut (‘strung out’), they may snap—never to be played again. The same is true of the images of teaching: a fruitful tension needs to exist between them so they make “beautiful music” ( 美妙的音乐) (Xu Laoshi [老师] in Craig et al., 2017, p. 152). Fifth, the contexts of teaching (policies, leaders, community, government) need to nourish and sustain teachers and students intellectually, socially, and emotionally so that people can become their best-loved self and society flourishes in life-giving, generative ways (Craig, 2017). In Philip Jackson’s words, this can only happen through individuals metaphorically “play[ing] their instruments”—that is, their selves—well (Jackson, 2014 cited in Craig & Flores, 2020). I will develop this idea much further in Chapter 4, The Best-Loved Self. Having shared this taste of what is to come, I now shift gears and direct full attention to Chapter 3: Reciprocal Learning, which has been foreshadowed in Chapters 1 and 2.

References Analects. Trans. into English by Legge, J. (1930). The four books. Shanghai, China: The Chinese Book Co. (R. T. Ames & H. Rosemont Jr., Trans. into English, 1998). The Analects of Confucius. New York, NY: Ballantine Book. Aoki, T. (1985/1991). Signs of vitality in scholarship. In T. Aoki (Ed.), Inspiriting curriculum and pedagogy: Talks to teachers (pp. 23–28). Edmonton, AB: Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. Aoki, T. (1989/1990). Beyond the half-life of curriculum and pedagogy. One World. Edmonton, AB: Alberta Teachers’ Association. Bu, Y., & Han, X. (2019). Promoting the development of backbone teachers through university-school collaborative research: The case of new basic education (NBE) reform in China. Teachers and Teaching, 25(2), 200–219. Bu, Y., & Li, J. (2013). The new basic education and whole school reform: A Chinese experience. Frontiers of Education in China, 8(4), 576–595.

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Bu, Y., Qi, S., Zhong, C., Li, Y., & Zhu, L. (2020). Narrative inquiry into reciprocal learning between Canada-China Sister Schools: A Chinese perspective. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. Bu, Y., Zheng, L., & Han, X. (unpublished). Living reform stories: How have backbone teachers changed? Bu, Y., & Zhu, Y. (2021). What would Confucius say to Dewey? Research-based reflections on the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project. Chen, X. (2003). The social impact of China’s one-child policy. Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 7 (1), 74–76. Cheng, X. (2008). Interpretation of “Being a teacher for one day and being a father for a life”: A survey and reflection on the traditional metaphor of teacher-student relationship. Teaching Research, 5 (In Chinese). Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1992). Teacher as curriculum maker. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of curriculum (pp. 363–461). New York: Macmillan. Cohen, B., & Schwab, J. J. (1965). Practical logic: Problems of ethical decision. The American Behavioral Scientist, 8, 23–27. Confucius. (1995). Confucius: The Analects. Mineola, NY: Dover. Connelly, M., & Xu, S. (2019). Reciprocal learning in the partnership project: From knowing to doing in comparative research models. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 25(6), 627–646. Craig, C. (1995a). Dilemmas in crossing the boundaries on the professional knowledge landscape. In D. J. Clandinin & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press. Craig, C. (1995b). Knowledge communities: A way of making sense of how beginning teachers come to know. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(2), 151–175. Craig, C. (2007). Dilemmas in crossing the boundaries: From K-12 to higher education and back again. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(7), 1165– 1176. Craig, C. (2013). Coming to know in the ‘eye of a storm’: A beginning teacher’s introduction to different versions of teacher community. Teaching and Teacher Education, 29, 25–38. Craig, C. (2016). Structure of teacher education. In J. Loughran & M. L. Hamilton (Eds.), Handbook of international teacher education (pp. 69–135). New York, NY: Springer. Craig, C. (2017). Sustaining teachers: The best-loved self in teacher education and beyond. In X. Zhu, A. L. Goodwin & H. Zhang (Eds.), Quality of teacher education and learning: Theory and practice (New Frontiers of Educational Research Series). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Publications. Craig, C. (2020). “Data is [G]od”: The influence of cumulative policy reforms on teachers’ knowledge in an urban middle school in the United States. Teaching and Teacher Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2020.103027.

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Craig, C., & Flores, M. (2020). Fifty years of life in classrooms: An inquiry into the scholarly contributions of Philip Jackson. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(2), 161–176. Craig, C., Curtis, G., Kelley, M., Martindell, P. T., & Perez, M. M. (2020). Knowledge communities in teacher education: Sustaining collaborative work. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Craig, C., Zou, Y., & Curtis, G. (2017). The developing knowledge and identity of an Asian American teacher: A narrative inquiry into the influence of a China study abroad experience. Learning, Culture & Social Interaction, 17, 1–20. Craig, C., Zou, Y., & Poimbeauf, R. (2015). A narrative inquiry into schooling in China: Three images of the principalship. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47 (1), 141–169. Curtis, G., Reid, D., Kelley, M., Martindell, P. T., & Craig, C. (2013). Braided lives: Multiple ways of knowing, flowing in and out of knowledge communities. Studying Teacher Education: Journal of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, 9(2), 175–186. Dewey, J. (1897, January 16). My pedagogical creed. The School Journal, 54(3), 77–80. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1920). What holds China back? In Middle Works (1889–1924). In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (pp. 51–59). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (2020). The child & the curriculum. Coppel, TX: Will Jonson & Dog’s Tail Books. Genc, B., & Bada, E. (2005). Culture in language learning and teaching. The Reading Matrix, 5(1), 73–84. Grange, J. (2004). John Dewey, Confucius, and global philosophy. Suny, NY: SUNY Press. Han, X. (2020). Bridging the East and the West: Reflections on learning, leading and life. In C. Craig, L. Turchi, & D. McDonald (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration in teacher education: Cases of learning and leading. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Han, X., & Feng, Z. (2013). School-based instructional research (SBIR): An approach to teacher professional development in China. In C. Craig, P. C. Meijer, & J. Broeckmans (Eds.), From teacher thinking to teachers and teaching: The evolution of a research community (pp. 503–525). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Hansen, D. (1995). The call to teach. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. He, N. (2011). Collected explanations of the Huainanzi. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.

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Hong, J. (2010). Pre-service and beginning teachers’ professional identity and its relation to dropping out of the profession. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 1530–1543. Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in classrooms. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston. Larrick, N. (1976). Wordless picture books and the teaching of reading. Reading Teacher, 29, 743–746. Laozi. (6th. Cen. B. C. E.). Dao De Jing. Chapter 2. Li, C. (2013). The Confucian philosophy of harmony. New York, NY: Routledge. Li, J. (2018). Narrative inquiries into teachers’ fostering their best-loved selves in rural China (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Texas A & M University, College Station, TX. Li, J., & Chen, J. (2013). Banzhuren and classrooming: Democracy in the Chinese classroom. International Journal of Progressive Education, 9(3), 91–106. Li, J., Yang, X., & Craig, C. (2019). A narrative inquiry into the fostering of a teacher-principal’s best-loved self in an online teacher community in China. Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(3), 290–305. Li, X., Conle, C., & Elbaz-Luwisch, F. (2009). Shifting polarized positions: A narrative approach to teacher education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 10(2), 23–43. MacGowan, J. (1912). Men and manners of modern China. London, UK: T.F. Unwin. Paine, L. (1995). Teacher education in search of a metaphor: Defining the relationship between teachers, teaching and the state of China. In M. B. Ginsbury & B. Lindsay (Eds.), The political dimension in teacher education: Comparative perspectives on policy formation, socialization, and society (pp. 76–98). London, UK: Falmer Press. Peterson, M. (2011). Teaching without words. TEDx Orange Coast Lecture. Ryles, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Qi, J. (2005). A history of the present: Chinese intellectuals, Confucianism and pragmatism. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Inventing the modern self and John Dewey (pp. 255–277). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. School District. (2007). State of the schools: 2006 annual report ) (pp. 1–28). TX: School District. Schwab, J. (1959/1978). The “impossible” role of the teacher in progressive education. School Review, 67, 139–159. Schwab, J. (1956). Science and civil discourse: The uses of diversity. The Journal of General Education, 9(3), 132–143. Schwab, J. (1974). Decision and choice: The coming duty of science teaching. Journal of Research for Science Teaching, 11(4), 309–311.

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CHAPTER 3

Reciprocal Learning

Abstract This chapter, Reciprocal Learning, addresses the second topic of my tripartite agenda. It captures the meanings I ascribe to reciprocal learning and how I have experienced reciprocity in my research career. Examples of what I have learned from teachers and principals participating in collaborative research studies, from my research program undertaken over time, and from recent transnational research projects conducted alongside diverse research partners are shared. In the featured scenarios, “each side has something to teach and something to learn” (Bateson, 2010). Connelly and Xu’s (2017, 2019) image of “reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership” is featured near the end of the chapter. Their vision of collaborative partnership fuels what Bateson (2010) terms a “dialogue between civilizations.” In such transnational exchanges, curiosity is encouraged, mutual knowledge is cultivated, and no one leaves partnerships unchanged. Reciprocal learning is praiseworthy because it has the power to transform how transnational research is studied and intercultural exchanges are made. It also affects how local sense is made of one’s own and others’ practices as arising out of particular narrative histories involving time, place and relationship. Keywords Reciprocal learning · Reciprocity · Relationships · Partnerships

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0_3

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Reciprocal learning is the second of the three major pillars around which this book, Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-loved self , coheres. Even before the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project began, an early description of reciprocity struck a chord with me, heavily influencing my thinking: …reciprocity in learning [is] where each side has something to teach and something to learn from the other…. Too often we think of teachers or [researchers] as acting upon students or [research participants]…acting beneficently, to be sure, but unchanged by them. Even parents sometimes believe themselves to be guiding and forming their children without letting themselves be reshaped in the process. (Bateson, 2010, p. 250)

Bateson went on to say: …if there is to be a dialogue between civilizations, the learning must go in both directions, and each must go in both directions, and each must acknowledge the need to learn from the other. This means encouraging curiosity and respectful mutual knowledge without proselytizing. (Bateson, 2010, p. 250)

In my view, Bateson’s emphasis on mutuality is profound. Her words reminded me that we live “in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., phrased it (King, 1964, p. 87). Both Bateson and King, Jr. return us to Dewey’s caution: “Sometimes…benevolent interest in others may be…an unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of an endeavor to free them so they may seek their good of their choice” (Dewey, 1916, p. 121). Bateson’s concept of reciprocity resonates with King’s stance and heeds Dewey’s warning. She advocates for respecting others in their own terms rather than elevating oneself as a better knower of their needs. She avoids “arrogant perception,” favoring “loving acceptance” instead (Lugones, 1990). Bateson’s conceptualization resonates with the goals of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project around which this Palgrave Pivot book in the Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series revolves. It also speaks to me as a researcher with a cross-national, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural history of conducting school-based inquiries alongside teachers, principals, and children. Bateson, King, Jr., Dewey and the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project challenge me to think hard about what I have mutually

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learned from co-researchers (research participants and colleagues) with whom I have co-conducted studies. Bateson’s concept particularly causes me to reflect on the influences I have included in my published works, but it also reminds me to disclose learnings that have taken me longer to digest and to reveal issues with which I continue to wrestle. Dewey makes it clear that reciprocal relationships have nothing to do with privileging one’s own knowing and fulfilling one’s desires at others’ expenses while Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke eloquently about humanity’s inevitable interconnectedness. In this chapter, I take a different approach than I did in Chapters 1 and 2. This time I focus on what I have learned over time that matters. These reciprocal learning threads traverse my research program and collaborative research relationships. I discuss four interrelated topics, each having to do with my experiences of reciprocal learning: 1. Reciprocal 2. Reciprocal 3. Reciprocal ences 4. Reciprocal Reciprocal

learning in my published scholarship learning that came after-the-fact learning arising from my transnational research experilearning provoked by Connelly and Xu’s Canada-China Learning Project

As can be seen, this chapter, like Chapters 1 and 2, addresses a wide swath of my career experiences. Before I elucidate what I have reciprocally learned from others over time, readers need to know that my research niche largely pertains to how preservice and in-service teachers come to know, do and be in context. I mostly focus on takeaway points from different studies here. However, I do include references that lead to original sources, should readers wish to dive more deeply into my research program.

Reciprocal Learning in My Scholarship One of my early learnings in Canadian academia came from research participant, Benita Dalton, with whom I conducted both my doctoral and post-doctoral research. I followed Benita from her preservice teacher education program (Craig, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c), to her practicum experiences, and finally into her beginning teaching positions at three different

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schools in Western Canada. I distinctly recall that Benita learned to team teach in her teacher education classes and during her extended practicum experiences in the field (Craig, 1998). However, when she began teaching in her first school setting, her teaching partner did not want to co-teach and physically and metaphorically closed the folding wall adjoining their classrooms. This effectively shut down any possibilities of them team teaching from that point onward. The situation taught me as a researcher that team teaching partnerships must appeal to both parties. Both partners—regardless of prevailing philosophies—must be committed to the same thing. At a very basic level, a shared agenda—a commonplace of experience (Lane, 1988)—must bind partners together in shared purpose. Benita experienced a different team teaching arrangement at her second school when she co-taught alongside two other teaching peers. What the three teachers did was to pretend to teach collaboratively. In reality, they lived a “cover story” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Olson & Craig, 2005). In actuality, they taught in collusion with one another, intentionally masking the nature of their partnership (Craig, 1998). Benita and her co-partners pseudo-team taught because the school district and the principal wanted them to co-instruct their multi-aged grades of students. However, the children’s parents were adamantly opposed to the campus’s administrative and pedagogical approach. Thus, projecting a semblance of team teaching was the teachers’ way of managing the dilemma and their time without contributing to the ongoing brouhaha. Finally, when Benita moved to her third context of employment, she was placed with a new teaching partner and became part of a sixmember, Grade 3 team where everyone—the principal, the parents, the teachers and the community—favored team teaching practices. Because Benita shared her developing personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985) with me and allowed me to conduct research alongside her in her three vastly different school settings, I learned—in an up-close and personal way—that the contexts of teaching greatly shape what teachers like Benita can do and be, regardless of what they know. In short, through conducting research with Benita, I learned—via our collaborative research partnership—that the context of schools matters where teacher learning and the enactment of shared pedagogies are concerned. Reduced to the essence, teachers’ knowing and doing is anchored in place with others sharing that context also playing key shaping roles. Tim was the second beginning teacher with whom I worked closely in my doctoral research studies in Canada (Craig, 1995b, 1995c). Tim

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was the son of a principal, a friend of his school’s vice principal and interested in school leadership as a beginning teacher. Also, every time I would try to conduct research with Tim, I could not make it past the campus’s front entrance where the principal’s office was located. Eventually, I clued into the fact that Tim’s principal was lonely because he, like Tim, had no one with whom he could share his day-to-day practices. I subsequently became one of the principal’s knowledge communities (Craig, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 2007), a person with whom he shared his “narratives of experience” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) and negotiated their meaning. I ended up drawing to the surface the principal’s image of leadership (Craig, 1999)—“principal as rebel”—at the same time as I studied Tim’s image of teaching. From my fine-grained research experiences with Tim, alongside his principal, Victor, I reciprocally learned the importance of school leadership. How formal leaders position themselves in school contexts (Flores, 2004) and the images of the principalship they hold and express greatly affects what teachers and children come to know, do and be in given school milieus. They also influence how research agendas unfold within the schools they lead. Where Tim was concerned, his image of teaching, perhaps unsurprisingly, revolved around the “good school” (Craig, 1995c, 1999). By way of contrast, Benita’s influences were female teacher leaders who contributed to her holding and expressing an image of the “good teacher” (1995a, 1995b). Upon completing my doctoral and post-doctoral studies, I moved to the southern US, approximately 1800 miles from where I lived in Canada. My initial job centered on the study of the largest privately funded school reform movement as it made its way to Houston and its 11 specially named lead schools, although I did not know it at the time I was employed. After the $20 million grant award was received and matched locally by $40 million for a $60 million dollar investment in school reform, I was invited to be the formative researcher at five of the 11 lead campuses and the summative evaluator at a sixth lead campus. Altogether, I worked with two high schools (Eagle High School, Destiny High School), two middle schools (Hardy Academy, T. P. Yaeger Middle School) and two elementary schools (Cochrane Academy, Heights Community Learning Center) for over five years. The six schools were located in three different school districts. For the first time in my career, my partners—at point of entry into the project—were

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whole school campuses (T. P. Yaeger Middle School, Heights Community Learning Center, Cochrane Academy, Hardy Academy, Eagle High School) not individual teachers like Tim and Benita. At T. P. Yaeger (Craig, 2001a, 2001b), the faculty initially opposed my presence on the campus. Yaeger’s middle school teachers forthrightly told me that they were “fed up with being numbered and ordered” quantitatively in their school district’s reports. They were also furious with previous researchers who had written about their school and themselves without seeking their input and/or having their findings substantiated by them. Put differently, the teachers at T. P. Yaeger had had their fill of the arrogance of seemingly beneficent researchers, who at the same time stripped them of their rights to inform the research agenda and to contribute to the reporting of research findings. This is when I reciprocally learned—in a close-up, in-your-face way—that human relationships matter and that the theory-practice relationship matters as well when conducting a shared research agenda together. Where human relationships were concerned, I also learned that every action on my part contributes productively or non-productively to the perceptions of other researchers who would visit particular campuses from that point onward. The importance of researchers individually and collectively becoming the Confucian equivalent of “good guests” (Khoo, 2017) in school contexts became reinforced for me. Moreover, where the theory-practice relationship is concerned, I learned that teachers prefer a dialectical (theory ↔ practice) relationship to a logistical (hierarchical) (theory → practice) relationship or even a problem-based theory-practice arrangement (theory → problem ← practice) (McKeon, 1952). It became strikingly apparent to me that the dialectical approach uniquely lends itself to reciprocity and mutuality. It enables “persons, caring for one another…to look through another’s eyes, [to] talk about what they are discovering together about themselves, about the world, about what is and what might be” (Greene, 2001, p. 108). Two of the schools with which I was paired (Cochrane Academy, Hardy Academy) were located in Houston’s historical African American community described in Chapter 1. In the high school I attended as a teenager in western Canada, I had studied how the American federal government had forced the southern states to desegregate their public schools. The intent was for majority (race) white and minority (race) Black children to attend the same campuses and have access to the same

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educational resources and presumably the same educational opportunities. As shared, Cochrane Academy and Hardy Academy were physically located in the neighborhood with one of the longest unresolved failure to desegregate properly cases in the US. During a teacher research meeting at Cochrane, attended by teachers from Cochrane, Hardy, and Eagle, the contentious issue of the forced desegregation of the state’s school districts became the focal point of a charged debate (Craig, 2004a). Approximately forty years earlier, a father from the historical neighborhood had crossed the interstate highway and attempted to enroll his Black children in a white school. The denial of his request triggered a lawsuit whose conditions were not met. Thus, the situation festered for decades. Hence, when the tensions became re-ignited at the Cochrane Academy meeting that day, they were so palpable that it felt to me like someone had thrown a lit match into the room. The experienced teachers, who were mostly white, talked abstractly about the situation with one particularly stressing that Texas had to do “what the federal government forced us to do” when desegregation happened. The other mid-career and beginning career teachers, who were primarily Black, were the children of parents or had relatives in the local schools when the desegregation order was issued. All of the latter personally knew former students who had been bussed to white neighborhoods, even some who had missed their graduation ceremonies. They knew in deeply personal ways that the segregation and desegregation of African Americans was not something that could be obliquely “white-splained” away (local Black vernacular). Just because laws had been replaced, it did not mean that the behaviors of individuals and groups had changed. In that heated exchange, I reciprocally learned that the social narrative histories of people and places matter in the conduct and authoring of educational research studies. Working alongside teachers, I came to know that one engages in research at one’s own peril if one does not take major contributing factors like personal and social histories into consideration in one’s educational inquiries. My early years of conducting research in the southern US taught me that the social narrative history of race relations would leave a deep and lasting impression on my work and myself as a researcher and a person. This explains why my

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US-based research has a self-acknowledged “sharper”1 tone than my earlier studies in Canada. Further to this, my not having the same social narrative history as those involved in my studies was not quite the liability I initially surmised it would be. At Hardy, I found the participating teachers were more likely to share their narrative truths (Spence, 1984) with me once they realized I had no stake in the local history, despite me being Caucasian. For example, when I supported Hardy Academy’s plan to sponsor a homecoming event that would bring all those adversely affected by desegregation back to the historical community to discuss their experiences, my level of acceptance at Hardy skyrocketed (Craig, 2003). I soon received a formal invitation to the Homecoming, which I, in turn, accepted. I was also invited to be present in the room when community elders exchanged stories of their desegregation experience in ways that history books cannot—and certainly have not—endeavored to capture. I was also able to witness the historical moment of school district officials sharing the same stage with members of the historical African American community, something that had not previously happened due to the long-standing animus. Further to this, I heard fervent prayers expressing deep longings for freedom and equality, an experience that sent—and still sends—shivers up and down my spine. Additionally, I was permitted to scan the community’s historical documents and to enter them into my data pool. I cumulatively learned that, even in the midst of deep-seated rancor, person-to-person relationships are still possible. Because I sought to learn, avoided judgment, and respected others as knowers of their own experiences and feelings and agents of their own voices, human kindness prevailed, despite the heavyweight of history roiling around us. In my work at T. P. Yaeger Middle School (Craig, 2001a), I learned something quite different: that teachers “tell all the truth but tell it slant” as poet Emily Dickinson (1951/1999) advised. I came to know that literacy teachers Charles Wright (white male), Daryl Wilson (white male), Bob Henderson (white male), and Howard Woodstock (Black male) used metaphors to describe their personal experiences of school reform. Through different turns of phrase, their individual metaphors of school reform—“a monkey on one’s back” (Charles Wright), “monkey 1 Janice Huber from the University of Alberta who completed her master’s degree while I was in my Ph.D. program identified this change in my voice as a researcher. Both Janice (who later completed her Ph.D.) and I were students of D. Jean Clandinin.

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see, monkey do” (Daryl Wilson), “monkey business” (Bob Henderson), and “monkey wrenches” (Howard Woodstock)—all involved monkeys. Each of these broad-ranging monkey metaphors traced to the eighthgrade reading anthology, specifically to J. J. Jacobs’s short story, The Monkey’s Paw. In fact, the four teachers agreed that “[school reform] is The Monkey’s Paw. It appears as it is a gift, but it really is not a gift… School reform holds many ironies for teachers.” From my work with Charles, Daryl, Bob, and Howard, I reciprocally learned that metaphors of lived experience matter because they are code words for “compressed narrative[s]” (Hanne, 1999; Ritchie, 2010) that convey teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985; Connelly & Clandinin, 1985) forged in context. Metaphors enable others to “view situation[s] through the conceptual lens proposed by th[ose] who utter [them]” (Hanne, 2015, p. 24). Furthermore, whenever educators invoke lived metaphors—particularly inventive metaphors—to characterize their practices, opportunities to unpack the metaphor in teachers’ own terms appear (Craig, 2018). When storying and restorying the metaphors, I imagine their educational and social significance in the local context as well as their contributions to the national and international understanding of teachers’ knowledge, communities of knowing and identities understood in narrative terms—that is, as “stories to live by” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). For example, the article, “Butterfly under a pin” (Craig, 2012), revolved around Laura Curtis’s inventive metaphor of her feeling like a pinned butterfly—a captured insect having its life sucked out of it—during a period of forced curriculum reform. Collectively, from working closely with teachers and principals in the six lead schools and later with four second-tier schools, I learned that educational policy matters—although policy affects each teacher’s practice and each school context in subtly different ways (Craig, 2009b). This latter learning is most apparent in my “Dragon in school backyards” article (Craig, 2004b). In this Eagle High School-situated research study, the emerging testing as curriculum agenda, the precursor to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, challenged and eventually snuffed out the innovative changes introduced to the campus by Henry Richards, Eagle’s forward-thinking principal. This eventually caused him to seek employment in another school district. Clearly, the state of Texas’s accountability agenda—Henry Richards’ major dragon—trumped in importance other productive changes underway at Eagle, the school whose backyard federal

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accountability policies were encroaching on in what appeared to be draconian ways. However, the state’s performativity policy (European expression) did not only affect Eagle High School, it also affected the nine other campuses where I conducted research (five remaining lead schools, four second-tier schools) as well. In “The contested classroom space” article (Craig, 2009b), I specifically showed how the No Child Left Behind Act affected teachers and schools uniquely—with most of the influences being negative despite the policy’s supposed well-meaning intentions. Cochrane Academy and Hardy Academy, for instance, found the policy detrimental to the two schools’ arts-based learning philosophies (Cochrane’s experience was shared in Chapter 1) whereas Heights Community Learning Center experienced challenges that affected its second language learner population. I could go on and on with other examples. Suffice to say that all the campuses had innovative practical projects in different disciplines, geared to specific student learners, which clashed with the 2001 policy. Sadly, the educational edict promoting standardized, status quo teaching and teacher education practices won all the clashes, given that the hierarchy of power was on its side. Still, near imperceptive changes trickled into the bloodstream of the local school milieus and the personal practical knowledge of teachers. The School Portfolio Group of teachers, which I spearheaded in 1998 (Craig, 2007; Curtis, Reid, Kelley, Martindell, & Craig, 2013), and the Faculty Academy (McDonald, 2018), which I created later in 2002, both bear witness to this latter phenomenon.2 Having directly focused on reciprocal learning I experienced in conducting my research studies, I now transition to examples of reciprocal learning that did not come to me immediately—examples where reciprocal learning came after-the-fact.

2 Members of the Portfolio Group and members of the Faculty Academy have recently published their own volumes in the Palgrave Leadership and Learning in Teacher Education Series edited by Maria Flores and Thuwayba Al Barwani. Their accounts are partner pieces to this book despite this volume appearing in a different series then their Palgrave-Macmillan one. The Portfolio Groups book is Knowledge Communities in Teacher Education: Sustaining Collaborative Work (Craig et al., 2020b); the Faculty Academy volume is Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Institutional Collaboration in Teacher Education: Cases of Learning and Leading (Craig, Turchi, & McDonald, 2020a).

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Reciprocal Learning After the Fact Countless times in my career, I have felt compelled to write sequels to my published research to share understandings that came to me longitudinally rather than immediately. My research on tensions in teacher community (Craig, 2009a) is a prime example of reciprocal learning revealed over time. In my early studies, I witnessed T. P. Yaeger Middle School’s teachers interacting with one another productively in their organic knowledge communities (i.e., Craig, 2001a), despite school reform being a “monkey’s paw” unfurling in an unexpected manner with teachers experiencing something different from what they imagined. However, in my mid-stage work at T. P. Yaeger, I was additionally able to capture how destructive professional learning communities administratively imposed on teachers were to their natural knowledge communities (Craig, 2012) as described in Chapter 1. I witnessed that it took the Yaeger literacy teachers a few years to recover the collegial, collaborative spirit that characteristically had marked their relationships and interactions. In fact, some teachers shunned one another for a year. Over the long haul, I learned that conceptions of teacher community matter but also that tensions themselves matter. My general rule of thumb is that push-and-pull forces signal themes around which I can write research papers. However, I need time to unpack entries in my storied research record in order to decipher the competing and conflicting forces sitting at the roots of the tensions. I also need to figure out why the tensions are so important to the teachers who experience them. From my long-term experiences as a researcher, I know that these matters tend to be “ephemeral, passionate, shadowy and significant…for the most part…reflect[ing] teachers’ lives” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2004, p. 42) as stressed in Chapter 1. Another example of reciprocal learning that came to me over the long haul had to do with what teachers ultimately are seeking in their relationships with children, in their teaching practices, in their work with their peers and principals, and in their careers and lives as a whole. Strangely enough, my naming of this phenomena did not happen in my direct research with children, teachers, and principals, but it came through listening to other researchers discussing their studies at international conferences and coupling what they were endeavoring to capture—and realizing I had the same phenomenon at work in my own program of research. I soon determined that they and I were striving to capture what Schwab (1954/1978) termed teachers’ “best-loved selves.” Given a

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chance to re-do or add to my early research studies, teachers’ best-loved selves would most certainly appear as a key concept and an additional pillar in my literature reviews. That is because I have learned—repeatedly and in reciprocal ways—that best-loved selves matter a great deal, not only in education, but also in life. That is why a whole chapter of this book—Chapter 4—is dedicated to that theme. But I digress… A further ingot of understanding I have learned over the continuum is that there are always elements of surprise—peripeteia (sudden changes to routine events in stories) (Bruner, 2002)—that enter narrative inquiries, particularly in contested school contexts or in situations seemingly devoid of hope. For example, during the teacher community fray at T. P. Yaeger, it appeared as if some teachers would need to transfer to other campuses or quit the teaching profession because the stress levels at Yaeger had reached the point of no return. However, the principal unexpectedly transferred to a different campus, which set Yaeger on a new social historical course. Further to this, the incoming principal abandoned the school district initiative as explained in Chapter 1 and treated the teachers as knowledgeable and knowing professionals living in knowledge communities alongside one another. Voila—the issue quietened down in an entirely unpredictable way—that is, until the new principal also unexpectedly left the campus and other principals put their signatures—and left their deposits (i.e., changes in school policies, depleted bank accounts)—on the school landscape. A similar thing happened with Anna Dean, the beginning teacher I studied for six years who I featured in Chapter 1. She suddenly quit teaching, which seemed like the endpoint of my research with her— at least when I first reported it (Craig, 2013, 2014). However, Anna subsequently shifted her plotline and, instead of leaving the teaching profession, she restoried herself within the context of international education. She embraced global education, teaching first at an International Baccalaureate (IB) School in Beijing, China and then at an IB campus near London, England. These plot shifts proved to be game-changers. I happened to jet to both places to give keynote addresses and was able to catch up with her on a few occasions. Clearly, Anna’s personal and professional life had changed for the better. Outside the US, Anna’s value as a teacher was restored. The quality of her practice was never questioned again. A third example of elements of surprise involves Ashley Thomas, Yaeger’s experienced English-as-a-Second-Language teacher, whose

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milieu was introduced in Chapter 1. Ashley quit teaching before her official retirement date because of the personal narrative history she brought to her teaching position. While I always was aware that T. P. Yaeger had a teacher on faculty who graduated from Oxford University, it surprised me to find out that the particular teacher was my research participant, Ashley Thomas (Craig, 2019). As our research collaboration unfurled, I further learned that Ashley came from a highly influential family in the Panhandle region of Texas and that family members received monthly oil revenue. This, too, was out-of-the-ordinary news. It suggested that Ashley did not have the same economic need to work at Yaeger as the other teachers did, a point that Ashley later confirmed. However, the chief element of surprise came at the conclusion of my work with Ashley. When I routinely asked if she would like to add anything to the manuscript that we had fully negotiated, Ashley felt comfortable enough to disclose that she wanted to identify herself as a lesbian in the work. Together, we revisited how her story of “leaving teaching” played out, carefully weaving in gender implications. This unanticipated disclosure greatly contributed to the understanding of the gender-related complexities of teachers’ identities and the context of teachers’ decision-making processes, allowing for deeper understanding then what initially meets the eye in longitudinal studies. What I mostly learned with these long-term research surprises is that life goes on. The fact that life goes on matters because it always offers research participants and ourselves hope for the future. From these experiences, I repeatedly learned that issues are never resolved for all time and all places. The page of life can turn and the pursuit of previous plotlines can resume after stressful circumstances. Furthermore, because life goes on, our inquiries can likewise continue through our becoming more richly informed and “awake” (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2006) as researchers to our participants’ experiences and the milieus in which their storied experiences take place. In this way, inquiry-driven research studies—especially those conducted over time—matter. From sustained research, we are able to recognize long-term struggles that are worthy of our fullest research attention. Concurrently, we can identify passing problems that fade into nothingness, unworthy of any attention. This leads to another point I wish to underscore. I do not think that individual researchers (like me)—or even communities of researchers—do enough of something vitally important to their research niches. Schwab (1983) called it “serial interpretation”—that is, looking for repeated

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evidence of phenomena not only present in one study—but evident across a series of studies. I have learned that “talking across” (Stone, 1988, p. 5) or “looking across” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 13) research studies matters. Consequently, I have started to make serial interpretation a major part of my research agenda, with this book being emblematic of my use of this research device. I elaborate three examples here to further clarify what I mean. The first exemplar involves the article, “Metaphors of knowing, doing and being: Capturing experience in teaching and teacher education” (Craig, 2018). In that work, I serially interpreted five metaphors from my single-authored publications. The five metaphors were: (1) Anna Dean’s (Craig, 2013) coming to teach in the “eye of a storm” (beginning teacher), (2) Laura Curtis’s (Craig, 2012) “butterfly under a pin” (experienced teacher), (3) Helen Macalla’s (Craig, You, & Oh, 2017) pedagogy as a “strand of pearls” (teacher mentor), (4) teacher community as a “braided river” (Curtis et al., 2013), and 5) school as a “rainbow fish” (high school principal) (Craig, 2003). My meta-level, cross-case narrative analysis added depth and breadth to the understanding of how educators use metaphors to characterize their teaching and their contexts of teaching. The same is true for my second exemplar, “The embodied nature of narrative knowledge: A cross-study analysis of embodied knowledge in teaching, learning, and life” (Craig, You, et al., 2018), which also was also published in 2018. In this second serial interpretation, my research collaborators and I were more expansive in the cases we chose than when I was as a single author in the first instance shared. This second time around I was an author of all of the articles but my coauthors differed according to the different funded studies we shared. We inquired into how embodied knowledge surfaced as an underlying theme in five research grants: three funded by the National Science Foundation, one funded by the Asian American Study Center (University of Houston) and the final one funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and Chung-Ang University. These narrative inquiries involved physical education, travel study abroad, computer science, physics, and teacher education. We established that embodied knowledge was more likely to be present in “small stories” (Olson & Craig, 2009) told by research participants than in the metanarratives that society gives them. Furthermore, embodied knowledge involves tools that serve as extensions of the body, such things as sports equipment (PE), cameras (travel study abroad), computers (computer science), and laboratory equipment (physics). The

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third exemplar I share involves a totally different group of collaborators: members of my research team. I mistakenly thought we could serially interpret five published works about Helen Macalla, the PE teacher, introduced in Chapter 1. However, each of my doctoral students needed to individually learn from Helen and serially interpret the five papers independently. Also, the highly diverse group of students—both local (white, Black, Latinx) and international (Nepal, Korea, Iran)—used different serial interpretive lenses. However, one thing is for certain: my doctoral students’ Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making book (Asadi & Craig, 2021) illuminates the vicarious nature of reciprocal learning as well as the portability of serial interpretation as a meaning-making research tool within and across cultures. Across all three cases, the reflective storying and restorying of experience brought research participants’ highly nuanced experiences of embodied knowing to the forefront. As an author team representing different sets of co-authors and countries, we showed—across multiple fields and disciplines—that the narrative nature of embodied knowledge sits at the heart of both teaching and teacher education. My colleagues and I furthermore know that our work merely scratches the surface of this critically important topic. We recognize that we and other research teams need to pay a great deal more research attention to it. I now turn to my next body of reciprocal learning experiences: what I have learned from diverse others while working collaboratively on international research projects.

Reciprocal Learning from Diverse Others In this section, I discuss (1) my South Korean research collaboration with JeongAe You and Suhak Oh, (2) my China-based research with my Asian American colleague, Yali Zou, and (3) my work with Yuhua Bu within the context of New Basic Education in China and the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project. JeongAe You and Suhak Oh, South Korea A few years back, I worked on South Korean research projects funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and later by Chung-Ung University. Dr. JeongAe You from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea and Dr. Suhak Oh from Inha University in Incheon, Korea were my research collaborators. The original grant was a comparative one having

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to do with teachers’ experiences of curriculum change in Physical Education. We jointly gathered the US data for the study when JeongAe and Suhak spent their sabbatical years with me when I worked at the University of Houston. JeongAe You and Suhak Oh mostly generated the Korea data pool with me contributing when I visited their country for two-week stints twice during the grant period. I particularly recall when Suhak and JeongAe first accompanied me to our American middle school research site. They were amazed to see the South Korean flag flying in the campus’s foyer, along with the flags from other nations around the world. The presence of the national symbol of their home country made them feel welcome and accepted by those with whom we would be conducting the research study. In this small interaction, I learned that international research projects not only involve collaborations between researchers and universities, but also collaborations with school partners, school sites, and school systems. I came to know that all collaborators matter in transnational research projects and that all voices matter when communicating collaboratively conducted research. Later in our study, after we had collected some of our field texts, we began to survey our data pool to determine likely research papers to write. This is when I learned about the Korean notion of “nunchi.” “Nunchi” is a cultural practice that finds its roots in Confucianism, which roughly means using all of one’s senses to comprehend complex human interactions. One of the first ideas for a possible article came from JeongAe You. She suggested that we had plenty of evidence to co-author an article on teachers’ collaborative curriculum making. The three of us heartily agreed that this was a fine suggestion. We each then traversed our data pool separately, looking for prime examples of collaboration between and among the participating teachers. Suhak Oh and JeongAe You (Oh, You, Kim, & Craig, 2013) found all sorts of examples of older, more experienced teachers working productively with younger, less-experienced teachers in the US sites. To them, this was strikingly different to how experienced and novice teachers interact in Korea where respect for elders and elder worship are important religious, cultural, and educational influences. Meanwhile, I, as a North American, accepted younger and older teachers co-planning and co-teaching as a given. I therefore focused my research attention on the kinds of situations in which the teachers chose to collaborate (Craig et al., 2017). I identified the Physical Space Story (the sports field), the Physical Activity Story (the fishing field trip), and

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the Human Relationship Story (team teaching). Very quickly, my South Korean colleagues and I determined that we were using the same word, collaboration, but not sharing the same meaning for it in our respective educational contexts. Suhak Oh and JeongAe were specifically thinking about collaborations between different age groups of teachers in the US and in Canada whereas I accepted the fact that younger and older teachers work together and focused my gaze on the topics and situations in which they collaborated. However, despite our contrasting interpretations, our divergent meanings for collaboration lent a richness to the study that would not have otherwise existed. In the process, I reciprocally learned that my colleagues’ culturally infused meanings for terms matter. Fortunately, for us, following the historical, cultural, and social narrative threads around the theme of collaboration produced two— not one—quality research papers on teachers’ collaborative curriculum making. Even more important than my learning that terms matter was the critically significant lesson that diversity matters not only with respect to culture and practices, but also with respect to the interpretation of data and project outcomes. It was not long before we reciprocally learned that we needed to accept the complexities surrounding diversity in order to mine its richness instead of essentializing it—and ourselves—to achieve a unified public face. Gunaratnam (2003) particularly informed us that “merging or swallowing up difference through imposed and contrived versions of commonality” does not work (p. 102). In his view, “rather than…eras[ing] the complexities of difference and power relations…, much is to be achieved by distrusting…neatness, and actively search[ing] the mess” (p. 104). Toward the end of the global research project, JeongAe You and I jointly discovered that one of our US middle school teachers, Helen Macalla, viewed pedagogy as a strand of pearls as I made known earlier (Craig et al., 2017). We were able to identify multiple examples of Helen intentionally cultivating metaphorical pearls of practice for both herself and beginning teacher, JD, who was her team partner that she informally mentored. JeongAe You and I were very excited about this because the pearl metaphor surfaced in several interview conversations between JeongAe You and Helen (PE teacher), and Helen and me. These synergies indicated that Helen Macalla saw us conducting the study as collaborative team partners, rather than as independent researchers, a

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revelation that delighted us. A balanced (harmonious) team partner relationship was exactly how we wanted Helen to perceive us because all things grow (Shen & Wang, p. 309) in robust, relational conditions. In JeongAe You’s and my excitement of uncovering the teaching image and Helen’s acceptance of us as a collaborative research team, we lost sight of our shared study being an international comparative one. Using his keen sense of nunchi, Suhak Oh swiftly returned us to our central task. He gently reminded us of our grant’s overarching purpose when he commented: “Fortunately, pearls are prized in all world cultures and religions.” The reciprocal learning for me here was that both the local and the global matter in transnational studies of this nature. While we need to pay close attention to what is unfolding locally, we should not lose sight of what is happening with one’s partner on another continent immersed in different cultural stories. The back-and-forth movement between the local and the global—Western societies and Eastern societies—must always be present. Reciprocity and mutuality are paramount even when we are engaged in asymmetrical reporting. Through close-up and personal experience, I learned alongside my Korean colleagues that reciprocity drives what everyone is coming to know behind the scenes, regardless of which aspect of the research project is being publicly spotlighted. Yali Zou, University of Houston My research collaborations with Dr. Yali Zou, Director of Global Leadership and the Asian American Study Center at the University of Houston have also richly contributed to my understanding of reciprocal learning. Collaboratively co-authored articles such as those that follow have taught me lessons: (1) “A narrative inquiry into schooling in China: Three images of the principalship” (Craig, Zou, & Poimbeauf, 2015), (2) “What the West could learn from the East: A reflective analysis (Zou et al., 2016), and (3) ‘The developing knowledge and identity of an AsianAmerican teacher: The influence of a China study abroad experience” (Craig, Zou, & Curtis, 2018). Not only did co-writing the manuscripts with Yali help me to better understand Asian perspectives nationally and internationally, I also came to know the social cultural history of China and how intimately nested Yali Zou’s personal narrative is in her home country’s historical trajectory, given she was born the same year as the New China.

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In the first paper, the principalship one, Rita Poimbeauf (second coauthor) and I initially identified themes having to do with teaching (image of principal as lead teacher) and leadership (principal as teacher maker), presuming we had covered everything of significance in our storied data pool. Then Yali Zou named a third image: image of principal as agent of China’s harmonious society. With her identification of this additional image, the whole character of our manuscript changed. Thanks to Yali, Rita and I avoided the Western methodological challenge of coming across as “sure interpreters” or “reigning interpreters” (Lindemann Nelson, 1995). To begin, Chinese pseudonyms for our research participants were selected for their meaning, replacing the contrived names we had come up with. This is entirely reflective of how Mandarin revolves around meaning-making while English focuses on sounds. Consequently, the Chinese school’s fake name became Hexie Elementary School, which means Harmony Elementary School, reflecting a core Chinese value when translated into Mandarin. Additionally, the Chinese way of addressing teachers as Laoshi 老师 was added throughout the manuscript to give our scholarship an authentic ring. It did not take long before Rita Poimbeauf and I found ourselves deeply immersed in the underpinnings of Chinese traditional culture. Thanks to Yali Zou, we learned—in a culturally relevant way—about the reciprocal relationship between teaching and learning at Hexie. We further intuited that the campus’s motto, “happy teaching, happy learning (乐教爱学),” harkens back to the golden mean (中庸), the relational balance sought between Chinese teachers and students. Had we not worked alongside Yali Zou, these insights would have been unavailable to us and our manuscript would have been less authentic and less culturally appropriate. In a nutshell, it would have been a surface telling because the parts did not harmoniously interweave Chinese culture (Shen & Wang, 1988). As mentioned earlier, teaching without words, one of the three major learnings we identified in the second paper with Yali (Zou et al., 2016), reminded us of how much extraneous verbiage there is in classroom discourse in Western schools. We more clearly could see how some of this vacuous talk might interfere with students learning vital knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the core disciplines. Also, Yali Zou confirmed what my students and visiting scholars at the time were saying: that Chinese parents/adults rarely heap praise on their offspring/youth. This prompted me to question whether some of the student praise in American classrooms might be gratuitous and disingenuous. I began to think

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that Western teaching and learning would be stronger if the aforementioned Eastern considerations were taken into account. I furthermore thought that nesting images of the principalship—the topic of our first co-authored article—in other countries’ political systems might be enlightening. For example, I could have dug more deeply into Victor’s image of “principal as rebel” in my early Canadian research study (Craig, 1999) and examined how his image of the principalship reflects Canada’s democratic system of government. This added layer of interpretation also might have deepened my analysis of Henry Richards’ “dragon in school backyards” metaphor. This reciprocal learning that came to me while I was engaged in research alongside Yali Zou is something I most certainly will carry with me into future studies. This brings me to the third learning from the second paper that could be of major import to the West: shared responsibility for failure. Rather than solely blaming teachers for students’ poor academic performances, as is the case in the American accountability, British performativity and other systems, the Chinese recognize that condemnation needs to be shared by everyone up-and-down the line, including parents and leaders. From their perspective, low achievement test scores are a “we” problem, not a “you” problem. In the Asian worldview, blaming one party would be disharmonious and would interfere with the problem’s solution (Rickett, 1985). This shift in perspective taking might be an elixir, if enacted in a Western educational context. It quite possibly could open up robust channels of change. The third co-authored paper with Yali Zou that I spotlight is the one having to do with the developing identity of an Asian American teacher who participated in a travel study abroad trip. In this work, Yali awakened Gayle Curtis and me to what our research participant, Shi Tan, meant when she spoke of guan xi (关系), “the relationships one has and the people one knows”—that is, “the influence a [family] name carries” (Craig, Zou, et al., 2018, p. 4). Gayle and I were more able to see this principle at work in Shi Tan’s life as an educator, but also in Yali Zou’s life as a professor. We clearly saw that guan xi (关系) explains why Yali buys luxury items for friends and colleagues in China every time she visits. Also, Yali provided valuable insights into mian zi (面子) as well. Our research participant, Shi Tan, introduced us to saving face when she told us that her parents had “engrained [mian zi] in [her brother and her] from the beginning…to make sure…we…did not blemish our reputations [or] [the reputation] of our family” (Craig, Zou, et al., 2018, p. 6). Yali

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Zou, our co-author, confirmed Shi Tan’s explanation. She also deepened our understanding by sharing parallel examples from her own life. This ensured that we fully understood Shi Tan’s meaning as an Asian American female. I now discuss my collaborative work with Dr. Yuhua Bu of East China Normal University and what I have reciprocally learned from her graduate students and her. Yuhua Bu, East China Normal University For four years, I have collaborated with Dr. Yuhua Bu who leads New Basic Education (NBE) at East China Normal University in China. This collaboration has walked hand-in-hand with the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning partnership project. NBE was the brainchild of Ye Lan, Yuhua Bu’s doctoral supervisor. I came to see Yuhua as a protégée of Ye Lan just as I am a protégée of D. Jean Clandinin (doctoral advisor/post-doctoral advisor) and F. Michael Connelly (post-doctoral advisor). Through Yuhua Bu, I learned that campuses like Hexie Elementary School are part of a score of experimental campuses that emerged after John Dewey’s twoyear visit to China (Ornstein & Hunkins, 1998). I already knew that Dewey was so highly esteemed in China that he was awarded the coveted Order of Jade, a civilian honor reserved for outstanding heads of foreign states. However, I came to know through my reciprocal relationship with Yuhua Bu that the educational philosophies of Confucius and Dewey are more complementary than different. Imagine how humbled I was when I learned that Yuhua Bu positioned F. Michael Connelly, D. Jean Clandinin, and me on Dewey’s academic line in her book3 because so much of our cumulative scholarship traces to Dewey. A second thing I have reciprocally learned from Yuhua Bu is about the normal school tradition in China, which began with the establishment of East China Normal University (ECNU). I have always deeply respected ECNU’s mission, which is carved on a stone at the center of campus: “Seek truth, foster originality, and live up to the name of a teacher.” My discussions with Yuhua Bu have led me to believe that there may be a 3 Dr. Yuhua Bu and her students have authored the book, Narrative Inquiry into reciprocal learning between Canada-China Sister Schools: A Chinese perspective that also appears in Palgrave’s Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series.

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new version of the theory-practice relationship (McKeon, 1952) undergirding NBE in China.4 It seems as if a relationship different from the logistic theory-practice relationship (theory → practice), the problematic theory-practice relationship (theory → problem ← practice) and the dialectical theory-practice relationship (theory ↔ practice) is underway. It may be that there are two practices at work (P1-school teachers; P2normal university faculty) as well as theory and policy, with the latter most definitely being hierarchical (McKeon, 1952). I want to learn more about this theory-practice 1-practice 2-policy relationship and co-author an article with Yuhua Bu about this special relationship in the near future. The third thing I have learned reciprocally from Yuhua Bu is how open she is to learning how schooling is lived in Canada while concurrently striving to understand why education has taken shape the way it has in China. This has given rise to many enlightening conversations between us. Some of the educational topics we have discussed at length are special education, teaching as inquiry, school rules, teaching minority youth, educating girls, handicapped students and the like. Personally, Yuhua and her research assistants taught me how to make Chinese dumplings, one of my favorite dishes, in her home. My folded dumplings stood out on the tray. We laughed because they resembled the Polish pierogi I make for my spouse—with a Chinese fan effect. While feasting on dumplings, Yuhua told me about the village crier who attended her father’s funeral whose role it was to stimulate family members’ expressions of grief (Bu, personal communication). I immediately realized that I would have benefited from a public crier when my father, mother, and brother passed away because I, as a Westerner, kept my grief locked tightly inside of me instead of openly expressing it. This Chinese tradition instantly reminded me of the role of the wailer in Jewish culture in addition to the Wailing Wall, the most sacred site in the world for Jews, which is the kosel/kotel for those practicing Islam. These richly intertwined personal and professional conversations have ensured that more reciprocal conversation will occur in the future because Yuhua Bu, like Yali Zou, JeongAe You and Suhak Oh, has introduced me to a “myriad of [Eastern-based] stories” (Stone, 1988, p. 244) in need of unpacking. These narratives have taken on added meaning for me through

4 John Dewey mentored Richard McKeon. McKeon’s philosophy formed the basis for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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my awakening to them through my close relationships with Yuhua, Yali, JeongAe, and Suhak. Altogether, I have learned that stories matter and that we always need to be in conversation with the stories we tell ourselves as well as the stories others tell us. The fact that certain stories continue to appear and reappear means they have lasting powers. Such stories “give messages and instructions; …offer blueprints and ideals; …issue warnings and prohibitions” (Stone, 1988, p. 5). At the same time, I know that we can story ourselves out of one narrative and story ourselves into other narratives, but we can never escape story itself. The world locally and globally is composed of stories that matter to the human race. I end this chapter by discussing reciprocal learning as presented in Connelly and Xu’s (2019) and Xu and Connelly’s (2017) articles. I was first introduced to their 2017 article at East China Normal University in Shanghai and at a conference held in Atlanta, Georgia. As for the second paper, it was published in a special issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice that John K-C Lee5 , another Canada-China Reciprocal Learning advisory board member, and I co-edited.

Reciprocal Learning in Connelly and Xu’s Articles Let me begin by saying that I was not surprised to find some of the transnational research challenges I have personally experienced reiterated in Michael Connelly and Shijing Xu’s (Connelly & Xu, 2019; Xu & Connelly, 2017) scholarship. I identified with the “deceptive simplicity” of reciprocal learning as the guiding principle behind the Canada-China Partnership Project and the conceptual challenges associated with the term’s meaning. Connelly and Xu emphasized—much like Suhak Oh reminded JeongAe You and me—that mutual learning must always be spotlighted—and that learning needs to be traced to the historical, cultural, and narrative roots out which it arises in each school and educational setting. For example, the different ways, JeongAe You, Suhak Oh, and I interpreted teachers’ collaborative curriculum making was the product of our different national contexts, different histories, different 5 John K-C Lee is also Vice President and Provost of the Offices of the President, Co-Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and teaching; Director, Center for Religious and Spirituality Education; Chair Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, at the Education University of Hong Kong.

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religious, and philosophical understandings—in short, different narratives of experience. At the same time, both interpretations were valid, once we stilled the altogether human quality of wanting to proselytize, as Bateson (2010) earlier phrased it—that is, to arrogantly claim “that my world/my meaning is better than your world/your meaning”—as Maria Lugones (1990) worded it. We had to awaken to the fact that we consciously had to learn to honor diversity “rather than to wash out differences in the search of a [singular] voice” (Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Orr, 2009). Also, we needed to be reminded that the essence of partnership is not to adopt the partner’s practices per se, but to understand the origins of the practices and to mutually deliberate common issues that the field of education currently faces. Concomitantly, we also needed to understand that changes in thinking, doing and being will more likely occur when lived and told stories converge in a shared space—an in-between space—that is neither entirely Chinese (or Korean) nor entirely Canadian (or American), but collaboratively constituted and informed through relationship. Connelly and Xu outlined four models in comparative education in their scholarship, all of which I will discuss: Model 1: Reciprocal Learning Model 2: Reciprocal Learning Comparative Values Model 3: Reciprocal Learning Model 4: Reciprocal Learning

as Comparative Education as Comparative Achievement/ as Comparative Pedagogy as Collaborative Partnership

In Model 1, Reciprocal Learning as Comparative Education, a researcher from one culture/national context may conduct research on another culture/national setting. Problems of bias and perspective may enter the inquiry. Additionally, different meanings for terms may occur. Overall, the analysis lines up different cultural lists of “knowing that” understandings and “knowing how” understandings and compares them (Fig. 3.1). Model 2 involves the comparison of achievement and values as in IES Studies (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) and PISA Studies (Program for International Student Assessment) sponsored by the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD). The danger of this model is the wholesale

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Fig. 3.1 Comparative models: Comparison and interpretation (Connelly & Xu, 2019)

borrowing of others’ approaches without understanding the social narrative histories and policy environments within which the pedagogies or practices came into being (Fig. 3.1). Reciprocal Learning as comparative pedagogy is the third model. According to Connelly and Xu (2017), this model centers on systems and their similarities and differences. It fosters respect and understanding among partners. Model 3 is a significant improvement over Models 1 and 2 because it gets into the school and addresses the instructional level, which makes it a more likely reciprocal learning model (See Fig. 3.2),

Fig. 3.2 Knowing and doing (Connelly & Xu, 2019)

Knowing That and Knowing How

Doing That

Model 1, 2, 3

Model 4

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albeit featuring a thinner kind of reciprocity existing at the level of transaction (Jameson, Clayton, & Jaeger, 2010, pp. 264–265). This brings us to Model 4, Reciprocal Learning as Collaborative Partnership, the raison d’être of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project (Connelly & Xu, 2019). The reciprocal learning model moves the comparative unit of analysis from “knowing that and knowing how [to] doing this and doing that and doing it this way and doing it that way with a sense of inquiry” (Connelly & Xu, 2017, p. 17, emphasis in original article). The partnership model studies partners working together and engaging in contextualized inquiries alongside each other. In this approach, predetermined definitions are avoided. Instead, tracing the narrative essences of terms, in the Westbury (2000) and Hopmann and Riquarts (2000) sense, is advised. Due to the heightened attention given shared voices, knowledge co-construction and joint ownership (Craig and Lee, 2019, p. 626), Model 4 exemplifies “thick reciprocity” (Jameson et al., 2010, pp. 264–265) due to the deep partnerships cultivated over time and place. The ongoing exchange of ideas and actions give rise to a profound sense of “reciprocal empowerment” (Chun and Evans, 2009; Darlington and Mulvaney, 2014) (Fig. 3.2), which cannot be individually achieved. As readers can see, the deceptively simple question, “What are people learning from one another as they work together?” becomes extraordinarily complicated by the different conceptual understandings of reciprocal learning embedded in Models 1, 2, 3, and 4. Michael Connelly and Shijing Xu have challenged those participating in the CanadaChina Reciprocal Learning Project to reach beyond the existing models. For example, reaching beyond could result in fresh insights into (1) the disciplines (including the profession of teaching), (2) interactions between/among local and global researchers, (3) exchanges between researchers and participants, (4) conceptions of research ethics, (5) ideas about lives lived in relation to one another, and (6) partnerships privileging reciprocal learning. Personally, I have discovered a number of foundational elements that matter in the cultivation and sustenance of reciprocal relationships. Over the course of my career, I have learned that: 1. School contexts matter 2. Leadership matters 3. Human relationships matter 4. Theory-practice relationship matters

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5. Histories of people matter 6. Histories of places matter 7. Metaphors of lived experience matter 8. Educational policy matters 9. Conceptions of teacher community matter 10. Tensions matter 11. Best-loved selves matter 12. Unfurling lives matter 13. Continuing research matters 14. Talking across studies matters 15. All collaborators matter 16. All voices matter 17. Meaning of terms matter 18. Diversity matters 19. The local and the global matter 20. Stories matter Learning with one another—not merely learning about or from one another (Zhu, 2018) (Fig. 3.3)—sits at the heart of reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership. This approach could drive future research agendas and reveal new practices and concepts of considerable significance to comparative education and international education (Connelly & Xu, 2019). In this chapter, mostly thick reciprocity—reciprocity where voices are heard and knowledge is shared among partners—has been foregrounded. Through active engagement in inquiry, deep forms of

In cross cultural environment Learn about each other

Contextualized knowledge Learn from each other

Constructing new knowledge Learning with each other

Fig. 3.3 Visual representation of process of reciprocal learning over time (Zhu, 2018)

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reciprocal learning embedded in the realm of doing supplant the mere knowing of this and knowing of that. To close this chapter, I want to underscore the fact that the usurping of knowing that and knowing how with doing this and doing that with a sense of inquiry generates new knowledge formed in relationship with others. The shared knowledge, understandings, and insights that arise from sustained transnational deliberations such as those highlighted in this chapter provide ample reason why Connelly and Xu’s concept of reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership represents a new model of comparative education. Their innovative approach focuses on learning together “while accepting and collecting data on knowing that and knowing how as appropriate” (Connelly & Xu, 2019, p. 640, italics added) but not as the penultimate goal. Those living and championing reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership provide a powerful counterstory (Lindemann Nelson, 1995, 2001) to the politicization of global education mega-narrative (Olson & Craig, 2009) that currently prevails.

References Bateson, M. C. (2010). Composing a further life: The age of active wisdom. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Bruner, J. S. (2002). Making stories: law, literature, life. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chun, E., & Evans, A. (2009). Bridging the diversity divide-globalization and reciprocal empowerment in higher education. ASHE Higher Education Report, 35(1), 1–144. Clandinin, D. J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge: A study of teachers’ classroom images. Curriculum Inquiry, 15(4), 361–385. Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Developing qualitative inquiry. Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (Eds.). (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 88–101). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D. J., Murphy, M. S., Huber, J., & Orr, A. M. (2009). Negotiating narrative inquiries: Living in a tension-filled midst. The Journal of Educational Research, 103(2), 81–90. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge and the modes of knowing: Relevance for teaching and learning. In E. Eisner (Ed.), Learning and teaching the ways of knowing (pp. 174–198). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (Eds.). (1999). Shaping a professional identity: Stories of educational practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (2004). Canadian teacher education in transition. In Y. C. Cheng, K. W. Chow, & M. C. Magdalena Mok (Eds.), Reform of teacher education in the Asia-Pacific in the new millennium: Trends and challenges (pp. 35–43). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publisher. Connelly, F. M., & Xu, S. (2017). Reciprocal learning: Comparative models and cross-cultural study. Problematizing in/equality. Comparative and International Education Studies (CIES) Conference Annual Meeting. Atlanta, Georgia. Connelly, F. M., & Xu, S. (2019). Reciprocal learning in the partnership project: From knowing to doing in comparative research models. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 25(6), 627–646. Craig, C. (1992). Coming to know in the professional knowledge context: Beginning teachers experience (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Craig, C. (1995a). Knowledge communities: A way of making sense of how beginning teachers come to know in their professional knowledge contexts. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(2), 151–175. Craig, C. (1995b). Safe places in the professional knowledge landscapes. In D. J. Clandinin & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 137–141). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Craig, C. (1995c). A story of Tim’s coming to know sacred stories in school. In D. J. Clandinin & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 88–101). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Craig, C. (1998). The influence of context on one teacher’s interpretive knowledge of team teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(4), 371–383. Craig, C. (1999). Life on the professional knowledge landscape: Living the image of “principal as rebel”. In F. M. Connelly & D. J. Clandinin (Eds.), Shaping a professional identity: Stories of educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Craig, C. (2001a). The relationships between and among teachers’ narrative knowledge, communities of knowing, and school reform: A case of the monkey’s paw. Curriculum Inquiry, 31(3), 303–331. Craig, C. (2001b). No satisfaction: ‘A case of the monkey’s paw’, top-down school reform, and the conduit. Curriculum Inquiry, 31(3), 341–350. Craig, C. (2003). Narrative inquiries of school reform: Storied lives, storied landscapes, storied metaphors. Charlotte, NC: IAP.

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Westbury, I. (2000). Teaching as a reflective practice: What might Didaktik teach curriculum? In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice: The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 15–39). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Xu, S., & Connelly, F. M. (2017). Reciprocal learning between Canada and China in teacher education and school education: Partnership studies of practice in cultural context. Frontiers of Education in China, 12(2), 135–150. Zhu, S. (2018). Reciprocal learning partnerships between elementary mathematics teachers: A partnership between Canada and China (Doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto, Canada. Retrieved from https://search-proquestcom.srv-proxy2.library.tamu.edu/pqdtglobal/results/C3949875DDF3480 3PQ/1?accountid=7082. Zou, Y., Craig, C., & Poimbeauf, R. (2016). What the West could learn from the East: A reflective analysis. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 22(7), 842–857.

CHAPTER 4

The Best-Loved Self

Abstract In this chapter, I shine the spotlight on the teacher’s bestloved self. I begin by tracing my journey to discovering the unnamed phenomenon in my own and others’ research programs. My ongoing search eventually led to the lexis, the best-loved self, an apt phrase Schwab used to signify that teachers are more than the subject matter they teach. I then interweave concepts and ideas from other researchers who arrived at similar understandings. After that, I dive deeply into my own research program and examine expressions of the best-loved self in the experiential accounts of Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, and Anna Dean, together with Ashley Thomas, Shi Tan, and other teachers who have appeared in my published works. Lastly, I capture expressions of my best-loved self in the context of my professional life. Keywords Best-loved self · Identity · Lived curriculum · Contexts of schooling

The Best-Loved Self Traces of the best-loved self, the third pillar of Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning and the Best-Loved Self , appear in Chapters 1, 2, and © The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0_4

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3. However, in this chapter, I focus directly on the concept and painstakingly follow its development. I begin by sharing background information about my personal experience of uncovering the best-loved self and key ideas I excerpted from Schwab’s scholarship that fueled my naming of the phenomenon. Next, I present synergies that exist between the “best-loved self” identity formation and aspects of other scholars’ research. After that, I center on the best-loved selves of Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, and Anna Dean within their comprehensive storied accounts. I also weave in stories about Ashley Thomas, Shi Tan, and other in-service teachers with whom I have worked. Finally, I reflectively discuss my personal best-loved self— doing my work in my own deliberative way—as it found expression in my daily life and career.

Encountering the Best-Loved Self After conducting studies with several teachers and principals in their respective school milieus, I sensed a new conceptualization emerging in my research program. This occurred after I had developed the “story constellations” approach to narrative inquiry (Craig, 2007) and before I began using “serial interpretation” (Schwab, 1983) in a full-blown way in my own research (i.e., Craig, 2018a) and alongside my research collaborators (i.e., Craig, Evans, Verma, Stokes, & Li, 2018; Craig, You, Zou, Curtis, & Poimbeauf, under review). Annie Lamott (2016) described the experience as one of an emerging idea “knitting itself, getting itself organized” to provoke “a really deep arrival of something unavoidable.” David Hansen (2017) likened the process to ideas growing and taking shape much the same way as human beings experience growth. Oliver Sacks said that “ideas [are like]…living creatures…aris[ing] and flourish[ing] and go[ing] in all directions…” (Sacks, 2017, p. 216). What Lamott, Hansen, and Sacks observed as writers and researchers resembled my own journey of coming to know the best-loved self as an educational concept of increasing meaning and heightened importance in my research niche and within the field of education. My sense of moving toward the discovery of something that did not have a name began with my work with Daryl Wilson (Craig, 2009a, 2009b) and his colleagues when T. P. Yaeger was involved in the readers and writers workshop approach to literacy instruction. As previously mentioned, Daryl Wilson was told that he could no longer teach the Holocaust unit of study that he had refined over several years, alongside

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his concentration camp travels in Europe and visits to Israel. Daryl, in turn, felt like his scholarship as a teacher had been purged. Daryl bewailed the loss of the Holocaust study—not only for himself as a teacher, but also for T. P. Yaeger’s student body. Furthermore, the new content that the principal’s hired staff developer prescribed did not engage the teens in Daryl’s classroom in the way his Holocaust study had done. As the situation unfolded, Daryl’s agency as a teacher-as-curriculum-maker was overtaken by the teacher-as-curriculum-implementer image imposed on members of the literacy department (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). Daryl’s colleague, Laura Curtis, said the heavy-handed approach crushed her like a “butterfly under a pin” (Craig, 2012). Another teacher claimed it “pulled [teachers] through knotholes” on trees. Whether we unpack one metaphor (butterfly under a pin), another (knotholes in trees) or another (data is [G]od [Craig, 2020]), it is clear that the Yaeger teachers found their practices forcibly revamped to appease those in authority (staff developer, principal, school district officials) who were standardizing curriculum for local, national, and international comparison test purposes. This happened at the expense of teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985; 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1985) and robbed them of their narrative authority (Olson, 1995; Olson & Craig, 2002). Consequently, for some of Yaeger’s literacy teachers (i.e., Anna Dean), their “stories to leave by” (Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009) superseded in importance their “stories to live by” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). This was because the teachers could “no longer live out their personal practical knowledge” (Clandinin et al., 2009, p. 146) and enact their narrative authority in their imagined futures at Yaeger. I next share an influential piece of scholarship from Miriam BenPeretz’s (1995, pp. 76–77) Israeli research program that also became part of my journey to naming the unknown phenomenon. Ben-Peretz’s account was about a teacher with more than five years of experience. That teacher taught a 5th grade mathematics lesson according to what an expert textbook author advised. The teacher’s teaching performance was then assessed by the same superintendent who had previously observed her language arts and Bible classes. The teacher predictably passed the inspection. However, on this occasion, the superintendent added a sidebar comment that the teacher found profound. He emphasized that she should not feel compelled to teach in ways that did not resonate with her. He particularly stressed, “Don’t use a teaching method that doesn’t suit your personality. Be yourself.” His off-the-cuff remark permitted the

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teacher to disclose that her second lesson was, in her words, “not me.” The superintendent’s naming of the mismatch reminded the teacher of the vital connections that are needed between the personal and the professional. His identification of the problem further stressed that educators should not have to compromise one (the personal) for the other (the professional). The exchange between the teacher and the superintendent additionally illuminated how “identity is formed and reformed by the stories we tell and which we draw upon in our communications with others” (Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004, p. 123). Also important is the fact that the teacher relayed her story to Miriam Ben-Peretz eight years after the teacher retired from a 35-year career of teaching and that Ben-Peretz herself chose to include the telling comment from her 1995 book in a 2009 keynote address in Beijing, China (Ben-Peretz, 2009). These multiple references over time underscore the importance of the teacher’s recollection as well as the significance both the teacher and the researcher afforded it. Marieke Pillen’s Dutch research also informed my thinking as I strove to identify the yet-to-be-named conceptualization. I attended her presentation on professional identity dilemmas (Pillen, Beijaard, & Den Brok, 2009) that she made on behalf of her author team at the 2009 International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) Conference in Rovaniemi, Finland. While conceptualizing personal, professional, and contextual elements of teacher identity, Pillen highlighted a passage where a preservice teacher candidate reflected on his expert mentor’s advice by saying, “He tells me how to teach, but that is not how I want to teach: It does not suit me.” Once again, the more powerful expert— this time, a mentor enacting a particular image of mentorship/teaching (i.e., mentor-teacher-as-implementer)—determined what constitutes the most appropriate practice. Meanwhile, the preservice teacher’s knowing and sensibilities were diminished—but not without the entry-level teacher expressing his personal practical knowing and sharing his regrets about his situation. Also, Pillen et al. as a research team recognized the import of the text and, like Ben-Peretz, chose to highlight it in their presentation. Around this time, I happened upon a passage from a life history interview that Ivor Goodson (Great Britain → Canada → US → Great Britain) conducted, which likewise informed my sense-making of the unnamed concept. An American teacher informed Goodson of the “McDonaldization of education” and the turning of teachers into “passive

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deliverers of pre-digested curriculum…” According to him, the surreptitious goal was to “eliminate personality” from teaching. The teacher then described himself as “a human being in front of a bunch of other human beings giving a part of myself that I care about and giving them things that I care about…” He ended by saying that “education takes place in the corner of the eye…It is not what we aim for that kids really learn and really makes a difference, it’s the peripherals…” (Goodson, 2003, p. 72). Once again, the tension between what teachers are mandated to teach in the classroom (teacher-as-curriculum-implementer-image) and what teachers are able to accomplish of their own making (teacher-ascurriculum-maker) was sparked. Also, this teacher offered a peek into the lived experience of teaching in a classroom filled with students, the kinds of verbal, social, and interpersonal interactions that take place, and the values implicit in teacher-learner exchanges. The fifth and last provocation is a personal example culled from my work as a professor in my past university context that also contributed to my understanding of the unnamed concept. On the course appraisals at my last institution and on our annual curriculum vitae for salary purposes as well, a relatively new section about faculty members’ use of technology was introduced without consultation. While I use technology in gathering, identifying, and storing research data, frequently deliver multi-image PowerPoint presentations, and have helped to create digital narrative inquiries (Craig, 2013) (probably the first to spearhead a narrative inquiry team experimenting with the latter), I have been reluctant to use digital approaches to teach advanced research methods courses. In my personally held view of teaching and learning, more is learned through showing than telling. I reasoned my students would want to personally interact with me concerning how I conduct research rather than viewing “jazzed up” presentations reflecting the fruits of my labor. Thus, while I am comfortable with technology communicating understandings in one-off lectures, I am not okay with it totally becoming my face-to-face instruction. In short, I do not support evaluation technologies and/or research technologies becoming the curriculum of my classes, depersonalizing me as a curriculum maker, and overtaking in importance my developing relationships with students, our curriculum making exchanges, and what they subsequently come to know about teaching, curriculum, and research. When I combined these five scenarios, all pertaining to my vicarious and direct experiences as a researcher, I realized I had accumulated

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three stories (Israel, The Netherlands, US) that were given back to other researchers, which I used to qualitatively support my “proof of concept.” I also found two direct experiences (Daryl Wilson and his colleagues’ experiences at T. P. Yaeger Middle School, my own experience in my university context) championing the idea I felt was yet to be named in my research program. Using serial interpretation (Schwab, 1983) in an organic way, I discovered what Conle (1996) termed “narrative resonance” between and among experiences seamed together from a variety of diverse sources in my research pool. Still, I had no name for the concept taking shape and rising within me. About this time, I read a poem penned by the Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borge, who is “a planet unto himself,” an artist who “resist [s] categorization,” an individual who is “endlessly re-readable” (Parini, 1999, p. 1). Borge wrote: Beyond the name there lies what has no name; Today I… felt its shadow stir the aim… (https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poets/jorge-luis-borges)

Like Borge, I felt a shadow urging me to name something that puzzlingly defied definition. At the time, I recalled Vincent Van Gogh who asserted colors without names the foundation of everything (Van Gogh, 1885). I realized I felt as strongly about my unknown research phenomenon as Van Gogh felt about his unknown colors. I additionally remembered Pablo Picasso who declared that the best colors of the rainbow were the ones yet to be named (Juma, 2019). For a brief period, I thought the conceptualization I happened upon might need to remain nameless due to its obscure qualities. However, while flipping through Schwab’s scholarship one day, I serendipitously landed on a passage that instantaneously gave words, meaning, and life to the idea I was forming: He (Joseph Schwab) wants something more for his students than the capacity to give back to him a report of what he himself has said. He wants them to possess a knowledge or a skill in the same way that he possesses it, as a part of his best-loved self …He wants to communicate some of the fire he feels, some of the Eros he possesses, for a valued object. His controlled and conscious purpose is to liberate, not captivate the student. (Schwab, 1954/1978, pp. 124–125, bold type added)

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When the term, best-loved self, jumped off the page at me, everything chronicled thus far became crystal clear. I had discovered the missing piece. The interstices of the five stories provided palpable evidence— derived internationally, nonetheless—that teachers naturally gravitate toward teaching their “best-loved selves.” Daryl Wilson and his colleagues at T. P. Yaeger Middle School understood this, the teacher and superintendent in Ben-Peretz’s Israeli study knew this, the teacher candidate discussed in Pillen et al.’s Dutch inquiry had made sense of this, and the experienced American teacher Goodson interviewed was aware of this as well. I also had come to know it intimately through listening closely to the stories my students have given back to me about my teaching over the years. My students tell me that when I am “on my game” (their expression)—which I take to mean, enacting and exuding my “best-loved self” as part of my “story to live by,” they are more apt to gain rich insights into curriculum, teaching, and research. They, along with the others, reinforced the idea that “subject matter can come alive through the teachers’ passion, love and enthusiasm for it.” They reminded me that “the teacher herself can be the way in” (Rodgers, 2020, p. 67). I now further explore what Schwab meant by the best-loved self through traversing the breadth of his scholarship. This will set the backdrop for thinking about Schwab’s best-loved self in relation to other scholars’ contributions.

Probing the Best-Loved Self Early in his scholarship, Schwab began to capture the distinctive properties of human nature. The “human person,” he opined, is a “self-moving living thing” that is able to “produce Itself,” to “develop itself,” and to create a “personal history” not able to be duplicated (Schwab, 1964, p. 8). Later, when Schwab (1969, 1971, 1973, 1983) created “the practical—a language for curriculum,” he emphasized the necessity of diverse groups of people engaging in curriculum deliberations most likely around tables as suggested in Chapter 1. These individuals would represent different commonplaces of curriculum, all being equal in value (student, teacher, subject matter, milieu). Perhaps just as significant is that those conversing together would articulate “differing selves” (Schwab, 1983). On one occasion in 1950, Schwab entered into a heated debate with another professor at an Educational Testing Services meeting. The professor seriously challenged Schwab’s defense of teachers, saying teachers meeting together was nothing short of “pooling[s] of ignorance” (Westbury & Wilkof, 1978, p. 31). The professor openly scorned “talking

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… by teachers [mostly females?],” who “don’t know much about the facts of life” (Schwab, 1960/1978, p. 32). Schwab fired back, unequivocally defending teachers’ rights to have a say, further cementing his belief that teacher deliberations are “pooling[s] of diversities of experience and insight” (Schwab, 1969, p. 30). Also, in a curriculum handbook chapter (Craig & Ross, 2008), Vicki Ross and I examined metaphors of teacher learning by exploring the differences that Schwab forged between stable and fluid forms of inquiry. Like Dewey (1938), Schwab approached education through the growth metaphor. He asserted that people are not only products of their education, but products of the choices their selves make (Schwab, 1960/1978, p. 218). For him (Schwab, 1971), flexible inquirers who are able to interact in complex milieus (i.e., teacher-as-curriculum-makers?), are the result of “intelligent rebellion and self-education after [they] are trained…” (Schwab, 1971, p. 23) since they no longer “depend […] on the expertise and experience of others” (Bullough & Gitlin, 2001, p. xiii). Once again, we see “the self” figuring largely into Schwab’s understandings of how education happens. Even amid prescription, shared practices, and procedures, Schwab found spaces where the self makes choices. For Schwab, it was paramount that teachers be students of teaching (Dewey, 1904); that is, decision makers and “agent[s] of education, not [simply] of its subject matter” (Schwab, 1954/1978, p. 128). This is because students “are better known by no one [else] but the teacher,” because the teacher is the only one who actively “tries to teach them”; he/she is the only one “who lives with them for the better part of the day and the better part of the year” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245). This means the only plausible road to continuous improvement comes through teachers who reflectively turn on their practices alone and together: …only as the teacher uses the classroom as the occasion and the means to reflect upon education as a whole (ends as well as means), as the laboratory in which to translate reflections into actions and thus to test reflections, actions, and outcomes, against many criteria is he [sic] a good … teacher. (Schwab, 1959/1978, pp. 182–183)

Not surprisingly, Schwab also cast university faculty on a higher plane. He loosened their subject matter straitjackets as well, favoring a more organic, interactive role for professors. For Schwab, the faculty member

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…is a possessor and imparter of disciplines in quite another sense: mentor, guide, and model; ally of the student against ignorance, participant with the student in high adventures into the worlds of intellect and sensibility. (Schwab, 1969, p. 20)

Taken together, these passages sampled from Schwab’s research program writ large provide essential background that explains what Schwab meant by teachers teaching their best-loved selves—without their selves becoming the curriculum. For Schwab, human beings shape themselves through a myriad of near imperceptible decisions they make—and, through their ongoing sense-making of experience in context and over time, individual persons grow and change in order to more keenly contribute to curricular situations arising at the interface where the images of teacher as curriculum maker and teacher-as-curriculum-implementers meet. Through this approach, “education would not…separate…the intellectual from feeling and action, whether in the interest of one or…the other” (Schwab, 1954/1978, p. 108) because “alienation… [would] place[ ] them in active opposition to [education’s] purposes” (Schwab, 1983, pp. 108–109). This mirrors the Confucian belief that a person’s body, mind, and pursuits in life are an organic whole and subject to disharmonies if ripped away from one another (Li, 2006). As stated in the Guanzi, “harmony begets development, while disharmony begets none” (Li, 2004, p. 945).

Echoes of the Best-Loved Self in Others’ Scholarship As foreshadowed, Schwab was known for his disciplinary expertise in science. However, he had other arrows in his quiver that informed his intellectual contributions. One was his preparation as an English major in his Bachelor’s degree program; another was his work as a philosopher of education in the University of Chicago’s liberal arts program. Schwab’s broad interdisciplinary background made him a leader in curriculum reform in the disciplines as well as a chief critic of curriculum research itself (Connelly, 2013). Hence, for many, his “Practical 1” article (Schwab, 1969) was a breath of fresh air in a field littered with too many how-to-do papers. The two philosophers who heavily influenced Schwab were Aristotle and Dewey as already noted (Connelly, personal communication, 2006).

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From Aristotle, Schwab borrowed the four causes of contingent being— material, formal, efficient, and final—with the final cause being doing and acting (Connelly, 2013), and the efficient cause being the agent/s of doing. For Schwab, doing and acting took the form of “the practical, a language for curriculum” (Schwab, 1969) and the agents—the efficient cause—were teachers and students in their embedded relationships in classroom contexts. Schwab was also well-versed in Aristotle’s ideas about eudaimonia, the study of human flourishing (living well and doing well). Like Aristotle, Schwab believed that the unity of doing and making fueled human growth both ethically and socially. Through Dewey, Schwab borrowed Aristotle’s civilizational seed of education as growth and the related idea of ends-in-view, which, for Schwab, was living “satisfying lives” (Schwab, n.d., p. i). He also drew on Dewey’s distinctions between knowing and doing, and having and being. He recognized that Dewey’s theory of experience—particularly his notion of consummatory experience (the highest form of educational experience)—comes to fruition when “fulfilling teaching and truly educative experience walk hand-in-hand” (Oral, 2012, p. 161). This connection returns us to Aristotle and the meaning of eudaimonia. Sitting at eudaimonia’s core is Eros, “the psychic energy of creating and wanting that drives students’ desire[s] to learn …and supplies them with a love of knowledge that makes them want to learn throughout their lifetime[s]” (DeBoer, 2014, p. 2443). In other words, nesting students’ learning in the contexts of their lives is generative and life giving and infinitely more stimulating than rote learning of objective truths lacking in relevancy and applicability to their own lived situations. Also, the process of inquiry itself gained enormous traction as it travelled along the AristotleDewey-Schwab line (with a broad array of others in-between) to become a near-universal teaching, learning, and research method—despite its multiple, sometimes conflicting, iterations. Therefore, others’ ideas and conceptualizations resonate with aspects of Schwab’s best-loved self, given that their intellectual lineages—not unlike that of Schwab—reach back to Aristotle and Dewey. I now lay Schwab’s conceptualization alongside cornerstone conceptions of Dewey, Bruner and Csikszentmihalyi. I follow up with a more specific curriculum making connection with Oliver Sacks. For Dewey, Schwab’s idea of the best-loved self is reflective of a consummatory experience that “dissolves separations and heals splits…, [one where] distinctions of mind and body [would] drop away and

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[be] replaced by new feelings…convey[ing] both the resistances overcome as well as new understanding[s] gained,” as Grange (2004, p. 12) explained. Consummatory experience “run[s] its course to fulfillment” (Dewey, 1934, p. 35). It reaches its “apex of vitality” in Grange’s (2004, p. 14) view, when energies (Eros?) are transcribed and fusions blend. To Bruner (1979), the best-loved self that Schwab proposed would be a combinatorial activity “divorce[d]…from the ordinary” (Bruner, 1979, p. 23). Elements of surprise and feelings of affect would accompany the symbiotic experience. The combinatorial action would “place things in a new perspective” (Bruner, 1979, p. 20). The triumph “…take[s] one beyond the common ways of experiencing the world… [and produces] creative products with the power to reorder… experience and thought in their image” (Bruner, 1979, p. 22). Concurrently, the passion (Eros?) felt along the way expands with use. More importantly, human beings become “more likely to act themselves into feeling than to feel themselves into action” (Bruner, 1979, p. 22). For Csikszentmihalyi (1997), Schwab’s best-loved self emerges from the flow of optimal experience. According to Csikszentmihalyi, optimal experience [is] based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable (Eros?) people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 4)

In such an experience, “emotions, intentions, and thought do not pass through consciousness separately; [rather] they are…interconnected and modify each other as they go along” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 26). Further to this, “optimal experience is something [people] can make happen” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 3, italics in original) and occurs in teacher-student relationships, too (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). These qualities additionally resonate with Schwab’s curriculum commonplaces and his characterization of the best-loved self in action. These connections bring us to Oliver Sacks who serendipitously discussed what I perceive to be curriculum implementing and curriculum making as they relate to the self. Sacks (2017) compared the difference between borrowing—curriculum implementing—and making— curriculum living (à la Schwab, Clandinin, Connelly, Aoki)—in the following passage:

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All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. (Sacks, 2017, p. 142)

What is at issue in Sacks’ estimation is not “borrowing” or “imitating,” or being “derivative,” or being “influenced,” but what is at question is what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it within one’s self and one’s actions. I return once again to Sacks, “This has to do with how one…takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings (Eros?), places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own” (p. 142). For me, this is how acts of curriculum making cultivate teachers’ and students’ best-loved selves in the Schwabian tradition. When curriculum becomes expressed in “one’s own” way, according to one’s own sense of Eros, one’s best-loved self becomes animated, enriched and satiated. I leave this section by underscoring the importance of the best-loved self and its sister conceptualizations not just in the past, but also in the present as we push toward an unknown future. I especially wish to direct attention to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) Delors Report, which was released in 1996. That report presented four internationally agreed upon educational pillars: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be (Delors Report, 1996, p. 86). Sadly, UNESCO determined that a great deal of attention has been paid to knowing and doing, and precious little time has been given to living together and being. Joseph Schwab’s idea of the best-loved self acknowledges teachers’ being and living in community in profound ways. The best-loved self is exceedingly important because—(and I repeat myself here)—“the single most significant means of improving education…is through teaching” (Pollard, 2010, p. 1). Put differently, nothing is more important for students in schools than their teachers (Schleicher, 2018) and “the state of health possessed by [them]…at the moment… [they] teach” (Schwab, 1989, p. 3).

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The Best-Loved Self in My Research Participants’ Stories In this section, I highlight passages from the teacher stories I have featured thus far in this book, along with some others who worked alongside them. From the outset, I acknowledge that more is said about some teachers than others. For some, the backdrops for their expressions of their best-loved selves appeared in Chapter 1. For others, I supply additional background to substantiate the points I make. School Reform Studies T. P. Yaeger Middle School Daryl Wilson. I begin with Daryl Wilson, the research participant with whom I have worked the longest. Two occasions stand out—among others—where Daryl’s “best-loved self” rose to the fore. Interestingly, the first instance happened when Daryl’s students sat in cubicles prepared to write high stakes accountability examinations that were about to be administered. As their teacher, Daryl recognized the unavoidable situation in which both he and they were lodged. The shared predicament provoked him to write the creatively rebellious poem, Dare to be Different, which he subsequently shared with members of the literacy department: With your bowed heads this grey January morning, We set about another state test Careful to leave no child untested, behind The test cubicles box you in, neat boundaries Around your imaginations So you may not let them run lawlessly beyond the page We say the skills tests are the ones you will need To master if you are to live and prosper So for days, you put up with grueling silences, Give it your best shot, trusting as you are, Somewhere between failure and hope. From the back of the classroom just above your heads A framed dog poster is looming, the Dalmatian spots Have turned into living color With eyes that plead dare to be different. (Craig, 2010a, p. 204, italics in original)

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Despite Daryl and his students being on “the losing end of the stick” (his first principal’s expression) during mandatory testing, Daryl managed to maintain his narrative authority, to express his creativity, and to assert his democratic right to tell a counter-story ironically about being different while being forced to be the same. Daryl’s second occasion happened when Yaeger’s literacy faculty had lived through major brouhahas with the staff-developer-as-curriculumimplementer who required that they emulate her teaching with no interpretation or embellishment of their own. Consequently, they seriously questioned whether they could work with any consultants or staff developers in the future. Daryl, however, kept his own counsel. He found a literacy expert whose approach was significantly different from Yaeger’s previous staff developer. This new literacy expert challenged Yaeger’s literacy teachers—“in a good way” (Daryl’s words)—to develop tension and beauty in their written products through reflectively drawing on their experiences and enacting a writers workshop approach. Below is an excerpt from the essay Daryl Wilson authored as part of his writing workshop experience where he demonstrated how he wove beauty and tension as a way for him to learn how his students might endeavor to do the same in their writing products: ‘I don’t ever want to see you again. I hate you!’ I yelled from the porch as I slammed the screen door as hard as I could. My voice was quivering in unison with the door spring. I could barely make out their stunned faces at the dinner table. My body was shaking uncontrollably, heaving in time with tears that burned my cheeks. My father’s silhouette inside the door warned, ‘Don’t you even think about leaving this yard like you did last time.’ My stepmother had started to mumble something about a hickory stick. Their words trail off as Spot’s hot breath hit my leg, a welcome shock. ‘At least you haven’t turned against me, old boy,’ I think to myself. Together, we turn and face the promise of escape across the darkening yard where the green branches dance in the wind. In the flickering light of sunset we run as if on air, past the ivy twined oak toward the waiting shadows. (Craig, 2010b, p. 430)

After Daryl shared his excerpt and discussed his writing technique, his students took up a similar challenge using Daryl’s writing sample as their point of departure. One eighth-grade male wrote World of Blue, an excerpt from which I include below:

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Standing on the edge of the diving board at the local pool, wearing my green, yellow, and blue gecko patterned swim trucks, I stare down at the twelve foot deep water through my spiffy new goggles I got less than a week ago for my fifth birthday; wondering if I should disobey my mom, who was currently using the pool bathroom, unaware of my actions. Having made my choice, I turned around to get off the diving board when this annoying kid from my neighborhood, that I have always hated, started mocking me, ‘Chicken! Hey everybody look, Kyle’s too afraid to go off the board, he’s just a scare-de-cat’. I was simply annoyed by this, but it was enough to make me question my choice. I didn’t want to face my mom’s anger for going off the board against her will, but I wasn’t going to be known throughout the neighborhood as a coward either. So, I just looked the kid straight the eye and said, ‘How ‘bout you shut your trap, eh? I’m just getting ready to build up speed for my dive’. (Craig, 2010b, pp. 430–431)

After Daryl had inspired his 8th grade students’ essay writing through sharing his story of teenage defiance, Daryl brought his best-loved self as a department head full-circle by placing the long version of the student’s World of Blue poem above alongside his (Daryl’s) own story. In response, Daryl’s peers made it clear to him that his teaching example resonated with them – and that it, along with his student’s work sample, was a product to which they – and their students – [would] aspire. One colleague distinctly noted that his lesson was not a ‘zinger lesson’ – a fail-proof lesson that would work anywhere, any time – like the ones the [first] staff developer used to teach their students or the lessons they routinely carried back with them from summer training sessions. (Craig, 2010b, pp. 432–433)

Writing Workshop Teachers. Another expression of the best-loved self that traces to Yaeger’s literacy department is the teachers who co-authored the professional development poem shared in Chapter 1. The literacy teachers’ scholarship of teaching communicated their joint puzzle and engaged subject matter in a way that made their knowledge of learning to read public and accessible. Also, when they ended their poem, they threw the inquiry back on themselves as individual persons (she) before coming to a teacher of teachers’ conclusion (a “we” conclusion). This is evident in the poem that follows: She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. ‘Why, it’s a Looking-Glass book, of course!

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And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.’ And then we laugh, And breathe, And realize We will teach them to do What we do as readers To touch the text with our fingers, To question the text with our curiosity, To visualize the text with our pictures, To connect the text with our lives, And to enter that Wonderland that is Reading. And Alice knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. (Craig, 2010b, pp. 428–429, bold print added)

The aforementioned poem is a convergence of several literacy teachers’ best-loved selves lived out in a knowledge community (Craig, 1995a, 1995b, 2001) with one another. The group moved from creatively discussing She’s (Alices) to We’s collaboratively articulating their narrative authority (Olson, 1995; Olson & Craig, 2002). A shared love of reading, reading materials (i.e., Alice in Wonderland, professional development books), and readers (students) permeates the collaborative account and further binds the teachers in a community of shared writing and meaning. However, the literacy teachers’ collaboratively written poem was not the only example that stood out in the teachers’ renderings of student learning on that particular professional development day at Yaeger. Two other teachers steered clear of regurgitating state objectives and requisite corollaries: one in Yaeger’s humanities department; another in Yaeger’s foreign languages department. Male History Teacher. The first of the two other teachers was a male history teacher who wrote a poem from which I have excerpted the most telling stanza: My reflections thus far… Well…I centered myself more firmly within my life’s purpose… Namely, to love as many children as well as I can… I have discovered that if you try to love them more or better, They miraculously become more loveable and better…. (Craig, Keynote Address, 2015)

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For this teacher, his “life’s purpose” was not just his passion (Eros?), it was his calling and testimony (Patterson, 1991) as a faculty member. The teacher’s sense of giving and receiving pedagogical love1 in his subject matter interactions with students sustained him in his career—his “life’s purpose” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009). Also, as the teacher invested more of his best-loved self through pedagogically loving his student as learners, they reciprocated and moved closer to their best-loved selves, becoming “more loveable and better” in the history teacher’s view. This instantiates what happens when pedagogical love is given, received and synergistically spread from one curriculum-making situation to another. Female English-as-a-Second-Language Teacher. The second teacher I shine the spotlight on is an English-as-a-Second-Language teacher who worked in Yaeger’s Foreign Language Department at the same time. That teacher also did not parrot the state’s mandated curriculum by chapter, line, and verse. Instead, the Hispanic ESL teacher made herself vulnerable and openly revealed that: I am not certain that I can pinpoint…how I am getting better…I can definitely tell you that… I feel that I have become better, based on the reactions I see on the faces of many of my students…It is a certain look on their faces when they are learning…It’s a distinct look of self-satisfaction and understanding…The bottom line is that my heart tells me that I continue to get better at my craft. My students’ hearts and responses, I hope, would tell you the same thing. (Craig, Keynote Address, 2015)

Like the history teacher previously mentioned, this ESL teacher finds happiness in interacting with her English language learners. To her, the shared experience is cognitive, communicative, transactional, and expressive. In her view, the intensity of the experience swells to fulfillment and at its peak, a “certain look…of learning” is detected. In this example and the one that came before, “students come to know the content they are expected to learn through the life of the teacher” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009, p. 254). In other words, the teacher’s productive bent—a nonnegotiable part of a teacher’s best-loved self—inescapably shapes “how life comes to children” (Dewey, 1897, p. 79).

1 As an aside, pedagogical love has been attributed to Finland’s high rankings in international comparison tests.

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Cochrane Academy School Reform Bernadette Lohle. As readers already are aware, Bernadette Lohle was the lead art teacher at Cochrane Academy, an arts-based school located in a historically undeserved neighborhood with an unresolved desegregation case. Cochrane Academy was one of the six campuses with which I worked when a national reform movement established a local office in Houston. In 2000, Cochrane Academy was awarded a concurrent US Department of Education grant. I helped write that grant proposal which, in turn, allowed me to increase my time as the campus’s resident researcher. That grant expanded the curriculum of Cochrane’s arts-based campus and planted the interdisciplinary curriculum seeds of a new intermediate campus that completed the district’s K-12 arts-based feeder pattern of schools. Distilled to the essence, the US Department of Education grant was Bernadette’s dream-come-true. Cochrane Academy’s Grounds for Learning (i.e., Food for Thought Garden, Japanese Garden of Silence, Hispanic Plaza of Knowledge) enlivened Bernadette’s best-loved self. However, an aberrant event—September 11, 2001—tragically happened and everything changed in the US An unanticipated Ground for Learning subsequently emerged: The Shadows of New York mural, which similarly embodied Bernadette’s best-loved self and articulated her profound understanding of arts-based learning. Although the school mural was enormously educative for Bernadette’s diverse urban students, it created deep-seated acrimony between Cochrane’s principal and Bernadette, the lead art teacher. The rancor wore Bernadette down and eventually led to her leaving the campus. When I found Bernadette’s explanation for why she no longer wanted to teach at Cochrane, I learned that staying at the campus ran against the grain of her best-loved self as she explained below: I cannot do this anymore … I know I could stay at this school but I could not live with it. I have never been in a position where I have not loved what I do. No matter where [I am, it] has been a rich experience in what I believe in—I want to be inspired; I want all the best colors of a garden to grow in my classroom. I do not want survival. (Craig, 2006, p. 286)

Bernadette’s desire for “best colors”—which interestingly also appear in the Yaeger teachers’ Alice in Wonderland garden—reminded me of Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s love of known and unknown colors. Her yearning for a vivid experiential palette—an inevitable expression of her best-loved

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self that she had created and re-created in her art studio at Cochrane and on other campuses as well—formed a stark contrast to the bleakness of Daryl’s high stakes testing leitmotif at T. P. Yaeger. Daryl’s motif was rapidly overtaking Cochrane Academy and other campuses in her school district as well. Bernadette knew she could move to another school and “act her best-loved self into being” once again, which she did. Knowing from hard-wrought experience that the press for accountability and artsbased learning were on different teaching-learning trajectories, Bernadette Lohle transferred from Cochrane Academy to a primary International Baccalaureate School that had adopted a global curriculum. Cameron Day. Cameron Day was the unnamed beginning teacher who captured “the noise of learning” at Cochrane Academy in Bernadette’s story. He entered teaching after spending several years in the military. While abroad, his desire to teach increased in magnitude and became his passion, his oeuvre, his calling (his Eros)—the thing that kept him going when things in the Air Force got tougher than he ever imagined possible. After Cameron began teaching mathematics at Cochrane Academy, the mathematics scores of his primarily African American students skyrocketed to the point where all of the students he taught had acceptable or above-average ratings. Cameron also coached Cochrane’s sports teams so his work as a mathematics teacher equally became known in the region. Below is an account of Cameron’s best-loved self in action that was shared with me by a principal from a neighboring school district: You should have seen this white teacher interacting with this group of African American boys—his basketball team, you know—at Chili’s restaurant in Dallas. While waiting for their lunch, the teacher posed this tough mathematics problem and set two boys up to solve it: one student assisted by the teacher, the other student aided by the rest of the basketball team. What was going on was so dynamic and productive and contrary to common stereotypes held about minority youth and white teachers. … (Olson & Craig, 2009, pp. 559–560)

The principal continued: In fact, a crowd gathered around them … other teams as well as parents and four police officers having coffee as well. … All of us were stunned. All of this teaching and learning going on at Chili’s? Can you believe it? My spouse [a principal] and I [a principal] decided to sign our son up for

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his team. Both of us agreed that we would hire this teacher in a minute if he were employed in our school district. (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 560)

As it turned out, Cameron Day also told this story and many others to me. By Cameron’s fourth year of teaching, however, his self-satisfying narratives had begun to change key. He started to express concerns about school district practices that deeply bothered him. The most troublesome one was that his principal was never available to meet with him. Cameron explained the situation this way: That’s one of my main frustrations … I’ve got so much stuff going on in my classroom that is good and I cannot get an administrator to come in here to see it. … There is always some excuse, something going on. … In fact, most of my students did not even know who the principal was until the middle of last year. (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 564)

In the end, Cameron felt alienated from his principal who herself was overwhelmed with accountability demands. He also was alienated from his students because of the relational constraints that the state’s accountability system imposed on him and them. No longer able to engage his best-loved self in ways that seeded, nurtured, and sustained the best-loved self of his students, Cameron left Cochrane Academy to teach at a private school, one free from the mandates that public schools are required to fulfill by law. Taken together, the accounts from T. P. Yaeger Middle School and Cochrane Academy capture the character of their school milieus before and after the accountability agenda took hold and became institutionalized by virtue of federal law. These performativity policies (British expression, European Union expression) affected teachers’ identities, their relationships with others, and their career trajectories as they attempted to move forward on increasingly conflicted terrains more deeply etched by accountability imperatives that pummeled them both inside and out to the detriment of the individual and collective best-loved self of teachers. Teacher Attrition Study Anna Dean From Chapter 1, readers will recall that when Anna Dean began teaching, she joined a fractured literacy faculty with some members wanting

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to blueprint exactly what the readers/writers workshop staff developer advised and other members desiring to live workshop experiences in more self-directed ways. Anna felt pulled from pillar-to-post, but knew that the authoritative approach (staff-developer-as-implementer approach) her principal favored would win at the end of the day. At the same time, Anna was proud of what she personally learned about using the workshop approach to literacy instruction. As a beginning teacher, she eventually “figure[ed] out the ‘what’ and ‘how’ are the teaching points [of the workshop method]…and that connections (between the two) are the ‘why’ (Craig, 2014, p. 97). About the same time, a senior teacher— unbeknownst to Anna—praised her, saying Anna Dean should be named “teacher-of-the-universe,” given all that she had come through amid the literacy department’s rancor (Craig, 2014, p. 97). Soon thereafter, Anna proudly announced that she had “nailed workshop.” This was when “the stories she was attempting to live and tell about her use of readers and writers workshop were resonating with the stories her peers and assessor were giving back to her” (Craig, 2014, p. 97). This catalyzed what she was hearing about her practice and what she had come to know about herself as a teacher. At this point, Anna Dean’s best-loved self fully flourished. Unfortunately, her sense of things coming together was fleeting. The combination of a new school district superintendent, a new principal appointment and an almost 100% turnover of assistant principals in her building, became coupled with doubled-down accountability demands. Unfortunately, this led to a less-than-satisfactory approach to teacher evaluation, which caused Anna Dean to become an attrition statistic who later re-cast herself as an international educator, first working in China and currently in Britain. Ashley Thomas Although I had known Ashley Thomas since 1997, she did not become a participant in my teacher attrition study until she resigned from the profession before her anticipated date. When I began to interview Ashley in the early 2000s, she told me this: I made my decision to quit eight years ago … That was when … I was reassigned … My heart was never in teaching from that point onward … so I never gave leaving a second thought. (Craig, 2019, p. 198)

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Ashley’s statement caused me to want to know what had led to her reassignment and to her disenfranchisement as a “star teacher” (Principal comment, 1997), which is how she was first introduced to me by her first principal. In Chapter 1, I featured the broad contexts within which Ashley lived and worked. She was raised in a small community in the Texas Panhandle where her family owned a ranch that produced oil. Migrants helped harvest the crops grown in the area. The children of migrant workers attended the same campus as Ashley did. This was shortly after the desegregation of public schools in Texas was federally enforced. In her first years of schooling, Ashley taught Maria, a migrant peer, to read. She also witnessed “unjust” disciplinary practices in her school (Craig, 2019, p. 307). The seeds of Ashley Thomas’s social justice orientation trace to her early school experiences. Ashley then went on to attend a private high school in Dallas and completed her higher education at Wellesley College, Oxford University and the l’Université de Besançon. When the Texas economy lagged and she could not put her MBA to use in the business field, she returned to Houston and taught Amnesty classes to Mexican immigrants. After that, she became an English-as-aSecond-Language teacher in the public school system. At Yaeger, she championed ESL students like Li Lan, Anna Pedrana, Illich Mauro and Alejandro Rodríguez, all of whom attended research-intensive universities and landed excellent jobs. Ashley enacted her best-loved self with these and other Yaeger teens just as she had done in grade school with Maria. However, Ashley’s school district decided to reduce services to ESL students and terminated Yaeger’s ESL program. Because her lesbian lifestyle was accepted at T. P Yaeger, Ashley Thomas chose to remain there and teach Spanish instead. This meant that she instructed Yaeger’s International Baccalaureate students who tended to view their language requirement as a hurdle to overcome more than a life skill to nurture. This forced “choice” brought Ashley Thomas’s ESL teaching career to an end. When her ESL teaching position ceased to be, Ashley tragically lost her school-based opportunities to advocate for social justice, a non-negotiable part of her best-loved self. Then, six years later, when high stakes accountability measures rained down on her at Yaeger, she resigned earlier than expected, knowing that her oil royalties would provide a comfortable retirement, a privilege she recognized others did not have. Even more importantly, Ashley Thomas did not want the goodness of her teaching

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tainted by the accountability shenanigans going on in her school and school district. Combined, the stories of Anna Dean and Ashley Thomas provide an intimate look at how performativity policies were implemented by administrators seemingly lacking in leadership experience, subject matter expertise, and basic understandings of how to work with committed professionals. In the end, Anna Dean, the beginning teacher, and Ashley Thomas, the experienced teacher, both chose “stories to begin again by” (Craig, 2019, p. 213). Consequently, they became attrition statistics in the short-term because they did not want to leave the fate of their carefully tended vocations and their best-loved selves to questionable others. Both had come to know—through situations which should not have ethically happened—that the ethos (trust), logos (intellect), and pathos (emotion) (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1) of their circumstances were out-of-synch and probably beyond repair. China Study Abroad Study Shi Tan Shi Tan, a teacher in the Greater Houston area, participated in a Travel Study Abroad program that my colleague Yali Zou organized and that we collaboratively researched. Shi Tan was the only Mandarin speaking, Asian American teacher in the group. She was disappointed China was chosen as the study site as China was her parents’ homeland and she had already been there six times to attend school and to perfect her Mandarin. However, as Shi Tan socially interacted with her American peers and the Chinese nationals in China, her zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) shifted due to her new positioning as an Asian American adult, which contrasted with her previous positioning as an underage child of Chinese nationals. Shi’s learning landscape increasingly became one “where culture and cognition create[d] each other” (Conle, 1996, p. 146) and greatly enhanced the meaning of her life (Alexander, 2009, p. 923). A wound Shi Tan had carried since childhood—her less-thansatisfactory ability to do calligraphy due to her left-handedness—became healed because her perceived ineptitude as a stranger from afar (an Asian American visitor) was tolerated, despite it not being excused at home in Chinatown, the place where her influential grandmother (her elder) led the Chinese School. The powerful fusion of Shi Tan’s traditional Chinese roots and her new Chinese American cultural expressions came together

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in fresh ways to nurture and sustain her best-loved self as a teacher. Most importantly, Shi’s revamped “story to live by” demonstrated how life unfolded for her and how freeing it was for her to forgive herself for not meeting others’ expectations on her journey to become her best-loved self. Korea-US Comparison Study Helen Macalla Finally, we come to Helen Macalla, one of the American teacher participants in the Korea-US comparative study of physical education curriculum reform. Helen worked hard as a P.E. educator in a male-dominated field. As introduced in Chapter 1, she was named co-department chair of an experimental PE program with Randy, her male counterpart. Together, they developed an integrated PE program called “Hiding the Physical of Education,” which was PE without perspiration and seemingly endless repetition. This innovative program epitomized Helen’s best-loved self. However, the program was slashed after Randy moved to another campus to advance his daughter’s education and the school district returned the experimental campus to status quo programming. In deep despair, Helen conferred with her mentors who advised her to leave the profession rather than lose her passion for PE and being bitter for the remainder of her career. Helen then took up her second passion: exotic fish. However, one of the most challenging students Helen had taught showed up at Pet Smart (her new place of employment), reminded her of her impact, and begged her to return to teaching. As a person of faith, Helen felt that she was being asked to return to teaching by “the worst person in [her] life.” At this moment, Helen knew PE was her God-given “gift,” “her passion” and her best-loved self (Craig, You, & Oh, 2015, p. 8). When she returned to teaching, however, Helen did not want to build a P.E. program, to be a department chair or even a teacher-of-the-year. She simply wanted to enact her best-loved self through being a high-quality PE teacher and a high-quality mentor as she explained in her own words below: Helen: I have already built a PE program, so I have met that goal … I don’t care if I ever build another program. I don’t even care if I am never named Teacher of the Year. These things do not motivate me. Neither do I want to be PE Chair again … Researcher: Really?

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Helen: Just being my personal best is what motivates me … I just want to keep on learning. I want to be able to create things with my students, you know … I just want to keep on growing …

In a nutshell, this is how Helen’s best-loved self found expression—not only at one, but at two critical junctures in her career. Taken together, Shi Tan and Helen both dealt with elements of surprise—peripeteia—“a sudden reversal of circumstances” (Bruner, 2002, p. 5)—that brought their best-loved self to the surface. Shi Tan had been burdened by a childhood story that blocked her journey to her bestloved self. The deep-seated shame she felt for not doing calligraphy in a manner commensurate with her grandmother’s reputation never seemed to leave her. As for Helen, her retreat to Pet Smart was interrupted by the student she deemed the worst in her career. Shi Tan in China and Helen in Pet Smart were both afforded opportunities to live counter-stories that would lead them—each in her own way—to the narrative repair of the best-loved self (Lindemann Nelson, 2001). This is because counter-stories are: …told in dialogue with others [research team members]…And when [counter stories] are constructed by communities of choice [knowledge communities?] their dialogic nature is magnified, for they are then told together with other tellers, fragment by fragment, each person contributing to plot and character and what Aristotle…call[ed] ‘thought’. (Lindemann Nelson, 2001, p. 38)

I now turn the spotlight back on me and discuss my best-loved self across time and place. After that, I bring this book to an end.

My Best-Loved Self My best-loved self has appeared peripherally in my work and directly as well. On several occasions, others in my knowledge communities have named my best-loved self when I have shared particular stories of experience with them. I will start with resonances that took shape within my own work and then share how my best-loved self has been reverberated back to me through members of my knowledge communities, which I alternately call my communities of knowing.

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Let me begin by discussing a chapter I authored about Nelda Davis, a white Supervisor of Secondary Social Studies in the Houston Independent School District, who nearly lost her job because she worked with white and Black teacher professional development groups prior to desegregation policies going into effect in Texas (Craig, 2002a). My invitation to write the chapter came from Dr. O. L. Davis, Jr. (deceased) of the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Davis, who was the advisor of two of my professors at the University of Calgary in Canada, took me under his scholarly wing when I moved to Texas. I believe he invited me to write the Nelda Davis chapter because I had been a social studies supervisor in Calgary and had earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Brandon University (Canada) in addition to my three education degrees. More importantly, O. L. Davis knew that I needed to learn about the history of race relations in my new city of employment. I immediately accepted the invitation because I naively thought that historical research was less conflicted than the fieldbased research I was doing. My three-month sojourn to the Texas Room of the Houston Public Library proved otherwise. I learned how a President of the University of Houston had been removed from his position because he defended the academic freedom of his faculty. I came to know a Deputy Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District (who was married to a Latina) was fired because he supported minority education during the years just prior to desegregation. I became aware that members of the Houston Chapter of the Minute Women sat in the rear of classrooms and reported on anyone teaching the philosophy of John Dewey2 during the McCarthy era and that they did more of the same with preachers and teachers during the desegregation years. Further to this, I learned that an early T. P. Yaeger Middle School principal had been a member of an organized group non-violently opposed to desegregation. Additionally, I awakened to the fact that Nelda Davis had taught Dr. Diane Ravitch, the Assistant Secretary of Education during the administration of President George H. W. Bush. This is how I came to interview Diane Ravitch on February 23, 2001, the year that the No Child Left 2 When I first arrived in Houston, I puzzled over the absence of the philosophy of John Dewey, which was alive in my schooling and in my preparation from my bachelor’s degree in education to my Ph.D. degree program in Canada. Once when Elliot Eisner came to deliver a lecture in Houston, I broached the question of him. He tersely replied, “Different parts of the US; different educational philosophies.” It was nearly a decade later when I heard Dewey referred to as a “Yankee philosopher” at a local conference that the penny dropped for me.

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Behind Act became law under President George W. Bush, the former President’s son. Dr. Ravitch spoke glowingly about her experience of having Nelda Davis as a teacher. She also distinctly remembered the books blacklisted in her school library about that time. I then wrote the chapter for O. L.’s book and another article published in the American History Journal of Education (Craig, 2002b). Later, Dr. Ravitch left a message requesting me to call her. At first, I worried that I may have done something to offend her, although I knew I had carefully negotiated what she had to say in the Nelda Davis chapter. It turned out that Dr. Ravitch wanted to know how I had determined the first names of the females who attended Rice University who were both for and against desegregation. I replied that I had cross-walked information I had found in various newspaper and social columns cataloged in the archives (i.e., Mrs. Craig versus Cheryl Craig or Cheryl J. Craig). This interaction brought much satisfaction to my best-loved self because I value research rigor and I knew Diane Ravitch did as well. This research experience reminded me to remain close to my research phenomenon and to linger with it—until it is as lifelike as it possibly can be—to meet my best-loved self’s satisfaction. I now move on to “Why is dissemination so difficult?” (Craig, 2006), which chronicled my work with Bernadette Lohle. It included images of The Shadows of New York mural, which apparently were some of the first photographs published in the American Educational Research Journal. Researching and writing that manuscript was a challenging task, given the charged backdrop of the study and my concurrent desire to continue conducting research in the school district. I worked hard and long on that article but could not arrive at a satisfying conclusion. Then, I read Philip Jackson’s (2002) article on John Dewey’s 1906 Definition of Art and found that his scholarship resonated beautifully with what Bernadette sought to accomplish with the Shadows of New York mural. Jackson’s work also brilliantly explicated Dewey’s ideas about human flourishing: “…to feel the meaning of what one is doing and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact of the unfolding of the inner life and the development of material conditions—that is art” (Dewey, 1977, p. 292). As I continued to make sense of Jackson’s article, I came upon the following lines that synthesized the closing points I wanted to make about Bernadette Lohle’s commitment to and defense of arts-based practices: …to be engrossed with what one is doing, to feel meaningfulness, to undergo, even if only for a time, of the traditional distinction between

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inner and outer, subjective and objective, to feel at one with the object taking form under one’s own agency—that … is what it means to be artfully engaged… (Dewey, 1977, p. 174, cited in Jackson, 2002, p. 286)

I immediately chose the aforementioned lines to close my manuscript in a manner befitting of my best-loved self. But the story did not stop there. Philip Jackson read my AERJ article and immediately emailed me to say how appropriately I had woven in Dewey’s definition of arts-based practices and his interpretation of Dewey’s theory of art. Jackson added that my research formed a model that the field could use. Then, much later, Jean Clandinin and I were invited to co-chair Philip Jackson’s final appearance at the 2014 AERA meeting. I asked him to update his 1968 observation that “classroom life … [is] too complex an affair to be viewed or talked about from any single perspective [and how] we must … use all the ways of knowing at our disposal” (Jackson, 1968, p. vii). In the transcribed speech, Jackson replied that “we must use our understanding of literature, of poetry, of music to help us see classroom life.” He continued to explain: Our focus on being must be played the way you play a musical instrument by lifting different fingers to get different notes. We must play the full organ of our songs as observers, as former students and remember what it was like…to be a fourth grader. You know, to relive memories of schooling of our own and our own teachers. That’s playing our songs like organs… (Jackson, 2014, cited in Craig & Flores, 2020, p. 7)

He concluded: I do not think that there is a formula for how to do that. But you can tell when people are brilliant. They ask even [better] questions when they are playing themselves…The only way you can do this is to allow your imagination to be exercised… (Jackson, 2014, cited in Craig & Flores, 2020, p. 7)

Since then, I have taken Jackson’s words to heart. In every manuscript I have published, my best-loved self has dug deeper and attempted to see further in terms of consequences. Most especially, I have tried to bring policy more deliberately into curriculum and teaching | teacher education conversations, which is no easy feat, given the word restrictions and page limitations of most journals.

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My third story about my best-loved self has to do with three of my former Chinese visiting scholars referring to me as a “fish jump[ing] over the dragon gate.” Their quiet agreement about the resonance of this metaphor with my career trajectory sparked an inquiry that laid bare cover stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Olson & Craig, 2005)— veiled truths—with which I have lived since the beginning of my career in the US. It also spoke to the academic honors I received along the way. I latched onto the Asian metaphor because I was curious as to what my Chinese colleagues meant when they made the connection between it and me. I also was desirous of unpacking the metaphor because it was so different, for example, from the following metaphors I have unpacked: “dragon in school backyards” (oral tradition), “butterfly under a pin” (biology), “the monkey’s paw” (English literature) and “rainbow fish” (children’s literature). I learned that, for Asians, a fish transcending the dragon gate achieves high rank in career, wealth, and abundance, once it completes its task. To reach its goal, the fish must constantly swim against the current. The fish’s strength and persistence lie in its ability to navigate upstream. In Chinese culture, the dragon is an important male with unsurpassed power that acts in mostly neutral ways. However, when he is confronted, he behaves destructively. The dragon is male because the phoenix is female. The dragon and the phoenix comprise the Yin and Yang of Chinese mythology with “everything com [ing] into being with the harmony of Yin and Yang” (He, 2011, p. 244). As I began the inquiry that the Asian metaphor prompted, I distinctly remembered sitting with my former visiting scholars around a restaurant table in Shanghai. I immediately recalled something that Confucius had said: “…in a party of three people, there must be one from whom I can learn. I will select his strengths to learn and use his shortcomings as a reference for my self-correction” (人行,必有我师焉。择其善者而从之,其不 善者而改之). My subsequent investigation uncovered four narratives that marked particular experiences in my career: (1) theory-practice chasms, (2) gender issues, (3) ageism, and (4) working in a context where excellence not affiliation was the order of the day. In my view, the Asian metaphor compelled me to name experiences I had tucked tightly inside of me, which I had not previously shared. Revealing those unspoken narratives was like slathering healing balm on my battered best-loved self. My personal inquiry also spearheaded a like inquiry into career experiences among the Portfolio Group members (Gayle Curtis, Michaelann Kelley, P. Tim Martindell, Michael Perez, Donna Reid, Cheryl Craig)

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(Craig, Curtis, Kelley, Martindell, & Perez, 2020; Curtis et al., 2018). Two additional works specifically focusing on the best-loved self have been published by my former doctoral students since then. A chapter authored by former doctoral student, Michele Norton, captures “a sustainable and flourishing version of the best-loved self” (Norton, 2020). Furthermore, an article written by another former doctoral student, Jing Li, who returned to China upon successfully completing her Ph.D. program, probes a teacher-principal’s best-loved self in an online community in rural China (Li, Yang, & Craig, 2019) as earlier discussed in this book. I now transition to two keynote addresses where my best-loved self emerged in puzzling circumstances. One of the keynote addresses was in Kazan, Tartarstan in the Russian Federation; the other was in Sibui, Romania. In Kazan, my talk was titled ISATT,3 Reciprocal Learning and the Best-Loved Self , which is not unlike the themes I take up in this book. When I delivered the lecture, I sensed it was well-received. As I walked out of the lecture theatre, one of the English-speaking faculty members indicated that a senior Russian professor wanted to speak with me, and that a translator was being sought for our conversation to take place. Through the translator, the Russian professor informed me that he had enjoyed my lecture. He added that I was the most Vygotskian speaker he had ever heard. I knew Lenin, Tolstoy and Luria had studied at Kazan Federal University and that Luria had been a student of Vygotsky. I imagined that others on that campus would be continuing that famous line of research—perhaps even the professor with whom I was conversing? I thanked the professor profusely for his kind words. I knew he had paid me a high compliment, one that should have delighted my bestloved self. But I was grappling with a major puzzle: my intellectual roots are Deweyan and I had just been called a high-ranked Vygotskian by someone presumably in-the-know. When I returned to the US, I shared my nagging quandary with one of my trusted knowledge community members, Gayle Curtis, who belongs to the Portfolio Group and the Faculty Academy, and also works as a Post-Doctoral Associate with me. Gayle mulled over it and, about a week later, she shared her theory of what underpinned the convergence that was not resonating with my best-loved self. She explained: 3 ISATT is the acronym for the International Study Association for Teachers and Teaching.

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Cheryl, you know the effort you put into those keynote addresses. You pay attention to every word, every image, every intonation, language load, hand gestures, local research, national research, international research, the sense of a building inquiry, and so forth…Cheryl, you deliver your keynote addresses in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. (Curtis, personal communication, 2020)

Everything made sense to me once my puzzle was taken up in community. I later read an Educational Researcher article (Glassman, 2001) which confirmed that Dewey and Vygotsky had never met but that there were strong similarities and significant differences in their theories. Like Daryl’s colleagues who co-authored the readers and writers workshop poem, I “laugh[ed],” “breathe[d],” and “realize[d]” that the connection that had been made was probably true. It was my personal unknowing that created the perplexity and the predicament. The second keynote address that engaged my best-loved self was the one I gave at the ISATT Conference in Sibiu, Romania. For the first time in my career, I could not get myself to agree to present one of the five lectures that sat at the top of my list. I discarded the possible talks because: (1) one topic did not engage all audience members’ research methods, (2) another topic was too American, (3) still another topic did not engage both emotions and intellect, (4) yet another topic did not have enough of a sense of inquiry, (5) and so forth. The time-crunch had reached the point of ridiculousness. Clearly, I was self-sabotaging myself. Then, an unexpected reversal of a back room decision happened at work (peripeteia) that was exceedingly important to me then, but is quite unimportant now, given the tint of the moment has faded into oblivion. From my harrowing experience of betrayal, a new lecture took shape seemingly out of nowhere: Self, choice and action. Because this newly formed talk was so raw and “razed at the bone of life” (Popova, 2019, p. 5), it had a natural truthfulness about it. Even better than that, it revealed my generous scholarship mindset that had been percolating within me for years: Generous scholarship is a term I have coined to describe an academic view concerned with sense-making and problem-solving. Generous scholarship is not wishy-washy; neither is it self-absorbed. It does not easily give up or give in. Generous scholarship has to do with continuing to enact one’s best-loved self in highly constrained academic settings, while leaving room

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for others to enact their best-loved selves, which may or may not run counter to our own interests. (Craig, Keynote Address, 2018b)

Stirring the underside of my best-loved self additionally caused me to address “having” versus “being” in the Deweyan tradition in my career and in my places of work: Overall, I have learned again, again and again…that generous scholars focus on being, as Dewey (1977) advised, not on having or possessing the spoils of the academy. Having anything—awards, accolades, money, titles, competitive grants and research centers—is a tinny prize if the diminishment of one’s best-loved self is the price-of-purchase. (Craig, Keynote Address, 2018b)

I continued: It is okay for others to use their gender, their entrepreneurial research status, and their backroom connections…to game the system to their advantage in their places of work and/or in the academy-at-large. Generous scholars know what is happening with our students, our research teams and with our border-crossing colleagues is the priceless commodity that the world most needs and wants. All else is dross, self-adulation and unworthy of a world in need. (Craig, Keynote Address, 2018b)

Through reflection and minded action, I managed to transform a miseducative experience into an exceedingly educative one (Dewey, 1938), which led me to the uncovering of a hidden research underpinning and to identity markers (having versus being) that made my best-loved self sing. Finally, I share a recent editor story, which brings forward for introspection the China thread of this multi-stranded reciprocal learning series volume. The Faculty Academy book, Cross-Disciplinary, CrossInstitutional Collaboration in Teacher Education: Cases of Learning and Leading, was about to go to press in a different Palgrave-Macmillan series than this Palgrave Pivot one. Laura Turchi, Denise McDonald, and I edited that book. Each of us as co-editors was responsible for the initial reading of one-third of the manuscripts. Dr. Xiao Han’s chapter (2020), Bridging the East and the West: Reflections on learning, leading and life,

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fell in my basket. Xiao is my former doctoral student, my current PostDoctoral Research Associate and a knowledge community member whose input I value. In her chapter, she disclosed: One day, a Korean classmate told me that in order to make up for the weakness of qualitative research methods in the College of Education, Dr. Cheryl Craig… had been hired in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction [University of Houston]… My classmate emphasized that Dr. Craig was a student of Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, the founders of the narrative inquiry method, and I assured him, ‘then you are going to be under the careful cultivation of the true master of masters.’

Xiao continued to narrate how her Asian classmates perceived me, and what the Chinese professors with whom she currently interacts have to say about me: When we first saw Dr. Craig, we talked about how beautiful, elegant and approachable she was, and we discussed her warm smile. To us, her style was narrative. She exuded the old Chinese saying: ‘The style is the [wo]man (sic) (or like author, like book)’. More recently, my Chinese friends comment that Dr. Craig’s smile opens up like a flower every time they meet her. (Han, 2020)

When I read these passages, I was personally touched by what Xiao had written and very proud of the quality of her scholarship. As an editor, though, my inclination was to delete the passages because readers might think I used my power of position (employer, editor) to coerce her into saying such things. Before the sentences hit the cutting room floor, I consulted my fellow editor and Faculty Academy member, Dr. Denise McDonald, who knows Xiao well and is also one of my valued knowledge community members, as is Laura Turchi. Denise agreed to read the chapter and got back with me immediately. The first thing she said was that Xiao’s scholarship had improved the most of everyone in our group. Then, she reminded me of Xiao’s contribution (Bridging the East and the West: Reflections on learning, leading and life) and said: “Xiao is reflecting your best-loved self—as perceived by the Asians (Koreans, Chinese) she knows—and she is giving that story back to you.” Mic drop. My bestloved self felt lovingly corrected in a manner not unlike how Laura Thomas “corrected” her mother. I had nothing more to say but a great deal more to learn. In that pivotal exchange, I learned that smiles, style,

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and one’s own deliberative processes—in short, one’s way of being—build intercultural bridges. In that instant, I knew—through layered knowledge community interactions—that the embodied best-loved self sits at the heart of reciprocal learning. And, in that moment of insight, my tripartite research agenda, traversing four chapters, folded like a Chinese fan into one: this book. To end, I turn to one of my favorite, unceasingly re-readable poems, Late Fragment (Carver, 1989). I favor this selection of poetry because Schwab used the term, beloved self, in one old paper; the phrase, the best-loved self, in another; and the beloved best-loved self in yet another. Because the “best-loved self” lexicon first leapt off the page at me, I adopted the best-loved self term as the one I would use consistently in my scholarship. However, I have always known about the beloved self, which uncannily is showcased in Carver’s poem and eloquently speaks to the book journey I have been on. Carver begins Late Fragment by asking the existential question of whether one gets out of life what one anticipated, despite the peripatetic plot shifts that inevitably occur along the way. He then answers in the affirmative saying he did achieve what he wanted. Raymond Carver then throws the question back on himself and cuts to the quick by querying “And what did you want?” To call myself beloved, to feel myself/ beloved on the earth./

Raymond Carver’s final poem powerfully captures the long term end-inview and raises our consciousness as to where the best-loved self might ultimately lead. Even more importantly than that, it forms a ring-true end to Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-loved self working in unison with one another—in partnership and in harmony—for the betterment of students and humankind. So goes curriculum making, reciprocal learning, the best-loved self: so goes life—till death do us part.

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Afterword

As I wrote this book, I deliberately left a breadcrumb trail hinting at my research method, but never intentionally addressing it. I wanted to focus lightening rod attention on my three interlocking themes in the aforementioned chapters. I did not want to interrupt the natural flow of the prose by going off on methodological tangents. However, the time is ripe to explicitly credit the narrative inquiry research method for the insights, understandings, and connections it enabled me to make on this curriculum making (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Schwab, 1973), reciprocal learning (Xu & Connelly, 2017), and “best-loved self” (Craig, 2013, 2017; Schwab, 1954/1978) journey. Each original piece of scholarship referred to in this volume—other than the Nelda Davis work (Craig, 2002a, 2002b)—was conducted as a narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Narrative inquiry uses story to study teachers’ experiential narratives lived and re-lived in context. It accounts for the personal, the practical, the pedagogical, the curricular, the political, the institutional, the historical, the social, the familial, the cultural, the cross-cultural, the intercultural, the reciprocal, and so forth in its instantiations, as I have shown. What becomes animated in my narrative inquiries is dependent on what becomes drawn out of my teacher participants and me as we

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0

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collaboratively make sense of their (and my) experience-based, contextbound lives. Narrative inquiry first debuted as a field-based research method (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Xu & Connelly, 2010), but now includes autobiographical narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) as well. I mostly use narrative inquiry as originally intended in the fields of curriculum, teaching and teacher education and, more recently, comparative education. The Fish jumps over the dragon gate (Craig, 2019) article, prompted by my Chinese colleagues’ metaphor for my career, is a notable autobiographical turn on my part. Still, the study of metaphors as embodiments of teachers’ knowledge is no stranger to my research agenda as my articles about the “butterfly under a pin” (Craig, 2012), “teaching as a strand of pearls” (Craig, You, & Oh, 2017), and “data as [G]od” (Craig, 2020) make clear. In this work, I particularly take my field-based narrative inquiry approach up a notch by adding a “new” research tool to broadening (presenting an expansive research backdrop), burrowing (digging into particular teacher’s narratives), and storying and restorying (showing change over time). That new tool is an old one: serial interpretation (Schwab, 1983). I “borrowed” serial interpretation from Schwab’s research program and further developed it in my own work (Craig, 2018) and in studies undertaken with my research collaborators (Craig, Evans, Verma, Stokes, & Li, 2018; Craig et al., 2018; Craig, You, Zou, Curtis, & Poimbeauf, under review). In this book project, serial interpretation enabled me to “look across” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 13) and “talk across” (Stone, 1988, p. 5) multiple studies I have conducted to find new commonplaces of experience (Lane, 1988) relating to curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self. Serial interpretation has also offered ample opportunities for me to re-tell and re-live past experiences in light of new research revelations and others’ responses to them. Boiled to the essence, I blended several published studies in this work, with keynote addresses I delivered internationally and research texts created from school-based fieldwork in China. I then wove everything together and partitioned what fit best with each of my three research pillars with the first one—curriculum making—being divided into two chapters. As mentioned previously, curriculum making has been a part of my research agenda since my doctoral research studies with Jean Clandinin and my postdoctoral research with both Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly. The best-loved self was a mid-career addition to my research niche whose seeds trace to Joseph Schwab, Michael Connelly’s doctoral supervisor.

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Reciprocal learning is a recent focus added to my research repertoire. It arose from my seven-year participation as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project, which evolved from a previous sister school grant award (Xu & Connelly, 2017) and Shi Jing Xu’s doctoral research dissertation (Xu, 2006). The Reciprocal Learning Project allowed me to see more acutely through others’ eyes, to increase my understanding through walking in other people’s skins (Lee, 1960), and to further learn the intricacies and complexities underlying other people’s knowing, doing and being as they live in deepening reciprocity (Jameson, Clayton, & Jaeger, 2011) with one another. The reciprocal learning experience enriched my best-loved self, extended my knowledge communities (Craig, 2001a, 2001b, 2007), and expanded my worldview. Finally, readers may be interested to know that I wrote Chapter 3 (Reciprocal Learning) first because it fit seamlessly the Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education series. I then moved backward to Chapter 1 (Curriculum Making 1) because I needed to return to my curriculum and teaching-teacher education roots and come to terms with my mother’s death before embarking on Curriculum Making 2, which took me further afield to China. All the while, I read widely to build capacity to write Chapter 4 (The Best-Loved Self) because the best-loved self conceptualization is something I have personally attempted to live and an idea whose meaning I have wanted and needed to further elucidate in my research program. Finally, unraveling and relaying this scholarly adventure—and most especially writing about it—is my passion (Schwab, 1954/1978), my testimony (Patterson, 1991), and the fullest expression of my enacted best-loved self to date.

References Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Developing qualitative inquiry. Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1992). Teacher as curriculum maker. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 363–401). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14.

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Craig, C. (1995a). Knowledge communities: A way of making sense of how beginning teachers come to know in their professional knowledge contexts. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(2), 151–175. Craig, C. (1995b). Safe places in the professional knowledge landscapes. In D. J. Clandinin, & F. M. Connelly (Ed.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 137–141). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Craig, C. (2002a). Nelda Davis. In M. Crocco & O. L. Davis Jr. (Ed.), Building a legacy: Women in Social Education 1784–1984 (pp. 95–97). Washington, DC: National Council of the Social Studies. Craig, C. (2002b). Nelda Davis, the McCarthy era, and school reform in Houston. American Educational History Journal, 29, 138–143. Craig, C. (2007). Illuminating qualities of knowledge communities in a portfoliomaking context. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 13(6), 617–636. Craig, C. (2012). Butterfly under a pin: An emergent teacher image amid mandated curriculum reform. Journal of Educational Research, 105(2), 90– 101. Craig, C. (2013). Teacher education and the best-loved self. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 33(3), 261–272. Craig, C. (2017). Sustaining teachers: The best-loved self in teacher education and beyond. In X. Zhu, A. L. Goodwin & H. Zhang (Eds.), Quality of teacher education and learning: Theory and practice (New Frontiers of Educational Research Series). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Craig, C. (2019). Fish jumps over the dragon gate: An eastern image of a western scholar’s career. Research Papers in Education, 45(3), 290–305. Craig, C. (2020). “Data is [G]od”: The influence of cumulative policy reforms on teachers’ knowledge in an urban middle school in the United States. Teaching and Teacher Education. Craig, C., Evans, P., Verma. R., Stokes, D., & Li, J. (2018). A tribute to “unsung teachers”: Teachers’ influences on students enrolling in STEM programs with the intent of entering STEM careers. European Journal of Teacher Education, 42, 335–358. Craig, C., You, J., & Oh, S. (2017). Pedagogy through the pearl metaphor. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 49(6), 757–781. Craig, C., You, J., Zou, Y, Curtis, C., & Poimbeauf, R. (under review). Fishing for topics in teaching and teacher educations: Finding publishable research in large data pools. Craig, C., You, J., Zou, Y., Verma, R., Stokes, D., Evans, P., & Curtis, G. (2018). The embodied nature of narrative knowledge: A cross-study analysis of embodied knowledge in teaching, learning, and life. Teaching and Teacher Education, 71, 329–340. Jameson, J. K., Clayton, P. H., & Jaeger, A. J. (2011). Community-engaged scholarship through mutually transformative partnerships. In L. M. Harter,

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J. Hamel-Lambert, & J. Millesen (Eds.), Participatory partnerships for social action and research (pp. 259–277). Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt. Lane, B. (1988). Landscapes of the sacred: Geography and narrative in American spirituality. New York, NY: Paulist Press. Lee, H. (1960). To kill a mockingbird. New York, NY: J.B. Lippincott. Olson, M., & Craig, C. (2002). The development of teachers’ narrative authority in knowledge communities: A narrative approach to teacher learning (pp. 115–129). In N. Lyons & V. LaBoskey (Eds.), Narrative inquiry in practice: Advancing the knowledge of teaching. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Patterson, D. (1991). The eclipse of the highest in higher education. Maine Scholar: A Journal of Ideas and Public Affairs, 4, 7–20. Schwab, J. (1954/1978). Eros and education: A discussion of one aspect of discussion. In I. Westbury & N. Wilkof (Eds.), Science, curriculum and liberal education: Selected essays. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schwab, J. (1983). The practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do. Curriculum Inquiry, 13(3), 239–265. Stone, E. (1988). Black sheep and kissing cousins: How our family stories shape us. New York: Times Books. Xu, S. (2006). In search of home on landscapes in transition: Narratives of newcomer families‘cross-cultural schooling experience (Doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto, Toronto. Xu, S., & Connelly, F. M. (2010). Narrative inquiry for school-based research. Narrative Inquiry, 20(2), 349–370. Xu, S., & Connelly, F. M. (2017). Reciprocal learning between Canada and China in teacher education and school education: Partnership studies of practice in cultural context. Frontiers of Education in China, 12(2), 135–150.

Index

A Academia, 14 Accountability, 102 Active engagement, 109 Act of teaching, 47 Addresses, 2 Age discrimination, 24 Agency, 12 Agents, 13, 16 Ako, 9 Analects, 75 A problem-based theory-practice arrangement (theory → problem ← practice), 88 Aristotle, 125, 126 Arrogant perception, 84 Artfully engaged, 144 The arts, 26 Arts-based teaching, 26, 27 Arts-infused milieu, 59 Arts of the eclectic, 11

Arts program, 46 Asian American Study Center (University of Houston), 96 Assistant principal, 44 Asymmetrical reporting, 100 Attrition statistic, 46 Authority, 46 Autobiographical narratives, 12 Awards, 148

B Back-and-forth movement, 100 Backbone teachers, 63 Backdrop, 58, 68 B¯anzhuˇ rèn teachers, 63 Beginning teacher, 33 Beijing, 61 Beloved, 150 Beneficent researchers, 88 Benefit, 16

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning, and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0

163

164

INDEX

Bernadette Lohle, 17 Best-loved self, 77, 93 Bicycles, 58 Big data, 47 Blaming, 102 Bonus, 24 Book publishers, 23 Borge, Jorge Luis, 122 Boundaries, 12 Bruner, J.S., 126 Budget deficits, 43 Bush, George H.W., 142 Bush, George W., 143 Butterfly under a pin, 91, 145 Bu, Yuhua, 97, 104

C Café mama, 63 Calligraphy, 75 Call to teach, 37 Campus, 12 Canada, 62 Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project, 3 Career, 31 Career path, 45 Career trajectories, 136 Central district administration, 42 Centrality of the teacher, 12 Certain look…of learning, 133 Chair, 67 Changes, 12, 47 China, 3 Chinese language, 62 Chinese life, 59 Chinese national students, 70 Chinese screens, 69 Chinese teachers, 66 Chung-Ang University, 96 Chung-Ung University, 97 Civilizations, 84

Clandinin, D. Jean, 103 Classroom interactions, 15 Classroom space, 15 Cochrane Academy, 25, 87 Codified knowledge, 16 Cognition, 139 Collaboration, 3, 99 Collaborative research relationships, 85 Collaborative team partners, 99 Collaborators, 97 Collusion, 86 Colonization, 75 Combinatorial activity, 127 Commonplace of experience, 3 Commune, 58 Communities of knowing, 91 Community elders, 90 Compliance, 44 Computers, 96 Computer science, 96 Conceptualization, 118 Conduit, 14 Conflict, 41 Confucian tradition, 66 Connelly, F. Michael, 103 Consummatory experience, 126 Contested classroom space, 92 Context, 11 Contextualized inquiries, 108 Continuum, 94 Controversy, 41 Co-teach, 86 Country, 3 Cover story, 24 Creative products, 127 Creativity, 68 Crisis, 43 Csikszentmihalyi, 126 Culturally relevant, 75 Cultural norm, 72 Cultural stories, 100

INDEX

Cultural understandings, 73 Culture, 70, 139 Curriculum as a lived experience, 6 Curriculum decision, 9 Curriculum deliberations, 7, 12 Curriculum implementation, 46 Curriculum making act, 9 Curriculum materials, 6 Curtis, Laura, 91

D Daily grind of teaching, 74 Dalton, Benita, 85 Dance unit, 35 Data is [G]od, 24 Davis, Nelda, 142 Davis, O.L., Jr., 142 Day of the Dead, 67 Dean, Anna, 17 Death, 3, 150 Debate, 15 Deceptive simplicity, 105 Decision-making power, 47 Delors Report, 128 Demonstration team, 71 Department chair, 23 Desegregation, 89 Desiderata, 6 Destiny High School, 87 Development, 34 Dewey, J., 12, 59, 125 Dialectical (theory ↔ practice) relationship, 88 Dialogue, 84 Difference, 99 Dilemma, 86 Disciplines, 14 Discoveries, 11 Discretionary space, 16 Disharmony, 125 Dissemination, 25

165

Diversity of cultures, 26 Dragon in school backyards, 91, 145 Dumplings, 104 E Eagle High School, 87 Earning, 6 East China Normal University (ECNU), 103 Eastern societies, 100 The eclectic, 11 Educating girls, 104 Educational policy environments, 76 Education as growth, 126 Education as reconstruction, 14 Eisner, Elliot, 142 Embodied knowledge, 16, 96 Emotions, 27 Empty praise, 70 Enacted best-loved self, 159 Ends, 12 Energies, 127 English-as-a-Second-Language, 8 Erceptions, 88 Eros, 126 Eudaimonia, 126 Experimental PE program, 31 F Facial expressions, 70 Faculty Academy, 92 Fail-proof lesson, 131 Failure, 102 Faith, 32 Family, 3 Federal court order, 25 Federal government, 89 Feeling, 125 F¯engshuˇı (风水), 66 Fidelity, 30 Filial piety, 66

166

INDEX

Fish, 32 Flow, 34, 127 Folding wall, 86 Football, 33 Football unit, 34 Formative researcher, 87 Foyer, 98 Fragment, 7 Freeway, 62 Friendship Store, 61 Fulfillment, 127 Full-life of curriculum, 6 Fusions, 127 G Gender, 67 Generalists, 63 Generous scholarship, 147 Gifted-and Talented, 39 Global education, 94 Global pandemic, 14 The global—Western societies, 100 God, 32 Golden mean (中庸), 67, 101 Golden rule, 67 Good guest, 88 Good neighbors, 88 Good school, 87 Goodson, Ivor, 120 Good teacher, 5, 87 Grants, 148 Greater Houston, 8, 19 Grounds for Learning, 26 Grueling hardship, 74 Gu¯anxì (关系), 65 Guanzi, 125 Gymnasium, 36 H Half-life, 6 Handicapped students, 104

Happy teaching, happy learning, 71 Hardy Academy, 87, 92 Harmony, 63, 125 Harmony Elementary School, 101 Having and being, 126 Health, 128 Heights Community Learning Center, 87, 92 Henderson, Bob, 90 Hexie Elementary School, 101, 103 High caliber faculty, 43 High stakes accountability demands, 43 High stakes accountability test scores, 23 High stakes testing, 26 High stakes testing leitmotif, 135 Historical African American community, 90 Historical documents, 90 History, 26, 27, 90 Holocaust literacy unit, 22 Holocaust unit, 73 Homecoming, 90 Hope, 94 Houston Public Library, 142 Human being, 62 Human interactions, 75 Human relationships, 88 I Ideas, 128 Identity, 3 Image of leadership, 87 Image of principal as agent of China’s harmonious society, 101 Image of teacher-ascurriculum-implementer, 12 The image of teacheras-curriculum-maker, 12

INDEX

Immigrant, 2 In-between space, 106 Incheon, Korea, 97 Inha University, 97 Initiative, 13 Innovations, 14 Inquiry, 11 Inquiry-based teaching, 72 Inquiry method, 71 Instructional spaces, 36 Instruments, 77 Integration, 28 Integration of the disciplines, 26 Intellect, 125 Intentions, 127 International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (IBMYP), 35 International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT), 120 Interpretation of data, 99 Interventions, 48 Inventive metaphors, 91 Issues, 14 Italian Montessori school, 59 J Jackson, Philip, 77, 143 JD, 36 Jiàoxué (教学), 9 Jiayou (加油, 74 Judgment, 90 K Kèchéng, 5 Key shaping roles, 86 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 85 Knowing and doing, 126 Knowledge base, 15 Knowledge communities, 19, 93 Kosel/kotel, 104

167

L Lan, Ye, 63 Laoshi 老师, 101 Late Fragment , 150 Latinx Americans, 67 Lawsuits, 23, 89 Leadership, 47 Learner, 9 Learner commonplace, 7 Learning, 96 Learning with one another, 109 Lesbian, 8 Lesson, 71 Lesson plans, 27, 29 Life, 27, 94, 96 Life’s purpose, 133 Lifeblood, 3 Li, Jing, 146 Lived curriculum, 6 Lived metaphors, 91 Lived narrative, 12 The local, 100 Logistical (hierarchical) (theory → practice) relationship, 88 Logistic theory-practice relationship, 104 Loving acceptance, 84 L’Université de Besançon, 8

M Macalla, Helen, 17 Mandarin, 59 Mandates, 17 Mask, 84 Means, 12 Measurement, 27 Mega-narrative, 110 Mentor, 33 Mentor-mentee, 36 Mentor-teacher-as-implementer, 120 The mess, 99

168

INDEX

Meta-level, cross-case narrative analysis, 96 Metaphors, 96 Metaphors of lived experience, 91 Metrics, 25 Mexico, 8, 67 Miànzi (面子), 65 Middle school, 43 Miguel, 40 Milieu, 8 Milieu commonplace, 7 Minority-to-majority transfers, 44 Missionary, 75 Model, 14 Models of teaching, 18 Moment, 147 Moments of choice, 15 Money, 148 The Monkey’s Paw, 91, 145 Mother, 3 Mural, 28 Mutuality, 84, 100 Mutual learning, 105

N Narrative authority, 119 Narrative resonance, 122 Narratives of experience, 12 Narrative threads, 99 National Research Foundation of Korea, 96 National Science Foundation, 96 Nations, 76 Natural reciprocity, 9 New Basic Education, 63 New China, 100 New York, 29 No Child Left Behind Act, 41 Noise of learning, 28 Non-pearls, 35 Normal school, 15

Normal school tradition in China, 103 Norton, Michele, 146 Nunchi, 98 O Oath, 40 Objectives, 6 Oh, Suhak, 97, 104 One-child policy, 59 One-size-fits-all answers, 48 Online knowledge community, 74 Optimal experience, 127 Originality, 103 Oxford University, 8 P Parental story, 2 Parents, 23, 86 Parking lot, 36 Partnership model, 108 Passion, 127, 159 Pay-for-performance, 18 PE, 31 Pearl, 33 Pedagogical love, 133 Pedagogy as a strand of pearls, 99 People, 9 Performativity, 102 Peripeteia, 94 Peripherals, 121 Personal best, 141 Personalities, 10 Personal practical knowledge, 14 Perspective, 32 Physical Education (PE) teacher, 31 Physics, 96 Picasso, Pablo, 134 Pierogi, 104 Pillen, Marieke, 120 Plans, 17 Plenary, 2

INDEX

Poems, 73 Poimbeauf, Rita, 101 Points, 44 Policies, 8 Politics, 8 Portability, 97 Portfolio Group, 92 Power relations, 99 Power struggle, 27 Practicum experiences, 85 Prescriptions, 14 Primacy of schools and schooling, 75 Primacy of teachers, 4 Principal, 21, 23, 29, 46 Principal as lead teacher, 101 Principal as rebel, 87 Principal as teacher maker, 101 Private school, 42 Professional development day, 40 Professionalism, 44 Professional judgment, 47 Professional learning communities, 18, 19 Protocol, 38 Pseudo-team taught, 86 Purpose, 3

R Race relations, 89 Racial desegregation, 8 Rain, 36 Rainbow fish, 145 Ravitch, Diane, 142 Readers and writers workshop, 18, 39 Reciprocal empowerment, 108 Reciprocal Learning as Collaborative Partnership, 106 Reciprocal Learning as Comparative Achievement, 106 Reciprocal Learning as Comparative Education, 106

169

Reciprocal Learning as Comparative Pedagogy, 106 Reciprocal relationships, 85 Reciprocity, 16, 100 Reciprocus, 16 Reflection, 2 Regular classroom teachers, 63 Reigning interpreters, 101 Relational balance, 101 Relationship, 13 Reputation, 102 Research, 5 Research agendas, 87 Research assistants, 104 Research collaborators, 97, 118 Research niche, 85 Research surprises, 95 Research team, 97 Resource, 24 Richards, Henry, 91 Role-play, 71

S Sacks, Oliver, 127 Satisfying lives, 6, 126 Save face, 65 Scenarios, 121 Scholarship, 8 School change, 19 School district, 21, 23, 46 School district officials, 90 School leadership, 46 School reform, 7, 25 School reform movement, 87 School rules, 104 Schools, 3 Schwab’s ‘practical, 12 Schwab’s ‘practical, a language for curriculum, 6 Science, 27 The second Confucius, 60

170

INDEX

Second language learner population, 92 Segregation, 8 Self, 13 Sensibility, 27, 125 Seoul, Korea, 97 Serial interpretation, 96 Shame culture, 65 Shanghai, 61 The Shadows of New York, 28 Shaping force, 11 Shared pedagogies, 86 Shared space, 106 Shared voices, 108 Shelter, 36 Social cultural history, 100 Social justice, 138 Socially engineer, 48 Song Dynasty, 75 South Korea, 97 Special education, 104 Special education teachers, 45 Sports equipment, 96 Sports field, 35 Stability, 12 Staff developer, 21, 22 Stakeholders, 5 Standardized performance measures, 47 Standards, 11 Statistics, 47 STEM, 47 Stories to begin again by, 139 Stories to leave by, 119 Stories to live by, 91 Story constellations, 118 Storying and restorying of experience, 97 Strong teacher, 23 Structure of the disciplines, 10 Student-generated thinking, 70 Students, 8

Students of color, 8 Students of teaching, 13 Student transfers, 43 Subject matter commonplace, 7 Subject matter specialists, 63 Submissiveness, 65 Subway poetry, 73 Subways, 73 Summative evaluator, 87 Superintendent, 43 Sure interpreters, 101 Surface telling, 101 Surfing the internet, 73 Surprise, 94 Sweden, 63 Symbiotic relationship, 63 Synergy, 2

T Table, 5, 66 Takeaway points, 76 Tang Dynasty, 64 Teacher assessments, 22 Teacher attrition study, 8 Teacher commonplace, 7 Teacher community as a ‘braided river’, 96 Teacher education, 96 Teacher education matters, 4 Teacher evaluations, 18, 44 Teacher leadership, 24 Teacher lens, 8 Teacher quality matters, 4 Teacher research group, 63 Teachers, 4, 9 Teachers’ collaborative curriculum making, 98 Teachers’ practices, 14, 18, 46 Teachers matter, 4 Teacher-student relationships, 127 Teacher talk, 70

INDEX

Teaching, 96 Teaching “in the eye of the storm”, 38 Teaching as inquiry, 104 Teaching is a strand of pearls, 34 Teaching minority youth, 104 Teaching profession, 37 Teaching without words’, 70 Team teach/Team teaching, 33, 86 Template, 30 Tension, 39, 40 Test-driven culture, 68 Testimony, 159 Testing as curriculum, 91 Testing companies, 23 Test scores, 24 Texas, 8 Textbooks, 17 Theory, 11, 12, 46, 104 Theory of action, 14 Theory of experience, 126 Theory-practice 1-practice 2-policy relationship, 104 Theory-practice relationship, 88, 104 Thick reciprocity, 108, 109 Thomas, Ashley, 94 Thought, 127 Three-rung career ladder, 64 Tim, 86 T. P. Yaeger Middle School, 8, 17, 87 Traditional Chinese culture, 75 Traditions, 11 Transfer, 40 Translation, 76 Transnational research, 105 Transnational research projects, 98 Travel study abroad, 96 Tripartite agenda, 4 Truth, 103 Truthfulness, 147

171

Tyler, 12 U Uniformity, 63 University of Houston, 98 Unresolved failure to desegregate properly, 89 Unsettled decree, 25 V Value-added measures, 18 Vicarious experience, 73 Village crier, 104 Virtues, 67 Vision, 26 W Wailing Wall, 104 The Western Confucius, 60 Wilson, Daryl, 17 Woodstock, Howard, 90 Workbooks, 18, 23 World, 2, 148 World-traveling, 73 Wright, Charles, 90 Writers workshop, 23 Y Yáng (阳), 74 Yield to authority, 66 Y¯ın (阴), 74 You, JeongAe, 97, 104 Z Zone of proximal development, 139 Zou, Yali, 97, 104