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This chapter explores the emotional struggles and professional dilemmas of teachers as they deal with the on going failure of their learners in a poorly resourced school serving a low socio-economic community in South Africa. The chapter illustrates the resilience of teachers who are torn between conflicting impulses: the desire for their learners to do well while simultaneously wanting learners’ failure to be acknowledged and the pressure to conform to curriculum demands while simultaneously wanting to teach and assess in ways that are more authentic to themselves and appropriate to the social context.

Beatrice Avalos, Ph.D., is associate researcher at the Centre for Advanced Research in Education, University of Chile. She has journal and book publications on teacher education, educational policy in developing countries and gender issues focussed particularly on Chile and Latin America. She has worked and taught in universities in Chile, Britain, Canada and Papua New Guinea, and carried out consultancy work in Bangladesh and several Latin American countries on issues related to school improvement, teacher professional development and teacher initial education.

This brief history of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) documents developments and trends during the decade 2013–2023. To situate recent ISATT history, we begin with an overview of the association's first 30 years (1983–2012). The dominant theme of those early years was developing ISATT as a recognized and influential professional organization connecting researchers on teaching and teacher education from a growing list of nations and regions of the world. During the most recent decade, there has been a concerted effort toward broad internationalization through biennial conferences and regional meetings, and a growing network of national representatives from across the world. Also, the ISATT journal, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, the journal, which began in 1995, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles written by more than 1000 authors and coauthors, contributing to a growing body of knowledge about teaching and teacher education in many cultures. In the last 20 years and especially in the past 10, the locations of ISATT meetings have become significantly more diverse, following a trend of greater internationalization compared with ISATT's European and North American beginnings. At the same time, the number of ISATT members remains stable and small thereby preserving a collegial and collaborative tone in our exchanges. In sum, ISATT's recent decade finds the association intellectually healthy, successful in managing the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, and enriched by the proliferation of multinational points of view and styles of research.

This chapter elaborates a “pedagogy of narrative shifting” as conceptualized by Li, Conle, and Elbaz-Luwisch (2009) in a course that seeks to foster dialogue across difference in an Israeli university located in a highly polarized setting. The approach draws on personal life stories as a vehicle for examining multiculturalism in teacher education, in the context of the multiple and overlapping identities, conflict and narratives of exclusion that characterize Israeli society. For prospective teachers, the opportunity to tell an important personal story and to have that story heard and validated by others, contributed to both personal and professional development. Working with their stories in a small-group format allowed students to develop their own “internally persuasive discourse” (Bakhtin, 1981) in discussions of controversial issues. Prominent themes emerging in the work included “recognition” (Taylor, 1994) and “resonance” (Conle, 1996). Engaging with bodily experience and with the imagination helped participants to transcend limited understandings and create shared visions of their present and future. The course afforded a unique space for dialogue that can be adapted for other contexts, to allow teacher educators to engage with their students in new and creative ways.