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

Within this chapter, I use my early experiences as a special education teacher to story and restory how Othering shapes the lives of special education teachers and their students. The disability-as-deficit model labels those students who receive special education services as less than, as outside the norm, as Other. The stories of my early teaching career offer insight into this Othering and link special education subject matter knowledge with my identity as a sibling of an individual with Down syndrome that fuels my teacher knowledge. Clandinin and Connelly’s three-dimensional narrative inquiry space provides a framework to examine the back-and-forth intersections of sibling and special educator knowledge. An autoethnographic exploration results in a critically reflexive narrative that exposes overlapping pieces of Othered identities, and explains how my teacher knowledge situates me differently than my special educator colleagues. The three-dimensional narrative inquiry space also provides the necessary tension between subject matter knowledge and teacher knowledge to create a dialogue of Othering between special education teacher and student. This dialogue pushes the idea of Least Restrictive Environments within social-personal space, and can lead to multiple Othered voices speaking as powerful bridges to span the divide between general and special education, the norm and the Other.

Successful implementation of Response to Intervention frameworks in schools requires general and special education teachers to have well-integrated knowledge bases for providing instruction and intervention in reading and behavior. Implementation-focused approaches to changing teacher behavior, favored traditionally in special education, however, are unlikely to help teachers acquire such knowledge. In this chapter, we discuss the knowledge and practice that defines expert teachers in reading and behavior and how such expertise might be achieved through practice-focused approaches to initial teacher education and professional development.

Learning to teach subject matter topics that emerge as challenging for culturally and linguistically diverse students remains a key goal for prospective teachers. Teacher education needs multiple ways to guide preservice teachers (PSTs) for this work. One context for such teacher development is classroom-based teacher inquiry. I describe an innovation in teacher inquiry pedagogy that mentors PSTs in (a) mining multiple sources of knowledge for teaching challenging areas of content learning, (b) systematically analyzing knowledge gleaned from these sources, and (c) mediating through visual representations the overlapping, reinforcing, and sometimes conflicting ideas gleaned from sources, in order to advance conceptions and practice in content-based learning for diverse youth. I describe the pedagogy in practice, then use a case of one PST to illustrate how her knowledge evolved in learning to teach persuasive writing to early adolescent English language learners. It was in the knowledge sources interface, mediated by visual representations and written reflections, that this PST’s developing knowledge gained texture and depth.

This chapter outlines some of the challenges in assessing teachers’ subject-matter knowledge. After reviewing traditional ways of mapping a domain, such as job analysis and “wisdom of practice,” the author alights on the two constructs, depth and breadth, that have come to define how teachers’ subject-matter knowledge is conceptualized. He argues that these two constructs constitute an impoverished vocabulary that misrepresents the complexity of the subject-matter knowledge teachers most need for effective instruction. He proposes an expanded set of constructs – differentiation and elaboration, qualification, integration, generativity, and epistemological knowledge – that better approximate the complexity of a subject-matter domain and serve as a better guide for creating an assessment system.