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Teacher retention and continued teacher growth and development have long been critical global issues in education. The recent pandemic crisis and subsequent “great resignation” (Lodewick, 2022) have returned our attention to the need for positive and enriching educational landscapes that promote teacher collaborative reflection, knowledge, and growth in order to sustain teachers in the field. This chapter explores the ongoing teacher learning that has occurred within two knowledge communities (Craig, 1995b) in the United States. It begins with an overview of Craig's early work with teachers, during which her conceptualization of knowledge communities emerged. According to Craig, knowledge communities are safe, collaborative spaces that cohere around teachers' intra/inter-school dialogue and their storying/restorying (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996, 1998) of experiences. Additionally, knowledge communities (Craig, 1995b) begin with originating events, allow teachers' experiences (Dewey, 1938) to resonate with others in the group, feature reciprocity of members' mindful responses, and promote the development of shared ways of knowing. Equally important, knowledge communities evolve and change, fuel ongoing reflection in community, and bring moral horizons into view. Employing these knowledge community qualities as our lens, we examine the interactions of the Portfolio Group and the Faculty Academy. The Portfolio Group is a teacher/teacher educator/researcher group formed in 1998 during a US education reform era (Craig, Curtis et al., 2020). Its sister group, the Faculty Academy, is a cross-institutional, cross-discipline higher education group of teacher educators/researchers formed in 2002 (Craig, Turchi et al., 2020). Employing a parallel stories representation (Craig, 1999), exemplars (Mishler, 1990) from both groups show how teacher collaborative groups have the capacity to be safe spaces in which critical professional dialogue, reflective exchanges, and generous scholarship occur among members. Furthermore, they are nurturing spaces in which teachers can thrive and be their best-loved selves (Craig, 2013; Schwab, 1954/1978). These two groups exemplify the ways in which knowledge communities support teacher collaboration, promote ongoing teacher growth and development, and foster teacher sustainability.

This narrative inquiry centers on teachers' longitudinal experiences of policy-related reforms systematically introduced to T. P. Yaeger Middle School, a campus located in the fourth largest, second most diverse city in America. The embedded research study, with roots tracing back to 1997, uses five interpretive tools to capture six mandated changes in the form of a story serial. Special research attention is afforded pay-for-performance, the sixth reform in the series. The deeply lived consequence of receiving bonuses for his teaching performance prompted Daryl Wilson, Yaeger's long-term literacy department chair, to proclaim “data is [G]od.” Wilson's emergent, inventive metaphor aptly portrays the perplexing conditions under which his career ended, and how my long-term research project likewise concluded.

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 addresses a sensitive topic in the field of education: the relationship between and among narrative inquiry, critical analysis, and critical theory. It argues that narrative inquirers are critical – but not in the same way that critical theorists are critical, although they may draw on the same literature and terms. To make our point, we unpack three of our peer-reviewed articles and highlight our theoretical frames and research moves to demonstrate criticality in narrative inquiry. We specifically discuss (1) titles and topics, (2) research frameworks, (3) historical and contemporary data, (4) use of participants' voices (words and feelings), (5) themes, and (6) new knowledge. We mostly argue that narrative inquiry exists because of experience. From experience, everything else unfolds – including criticality – depending on where the researcher in relationship with research participants, takes the inquiry. This chapter explicitly addresses a lived issue known both inside the narrative inquiry community and outside of it.

Excessive entitlement, the enacted belief that one's voice, opinion, or assessment holds more weight than that of others (even those of one's own kind), and how it unavoidably rubs against their sense of their best-loved self, is the focus of this chapter. Some define excessive entitlement as a kind of greed where individuals in academia elevate themselves and lord their perceptions/stances over others. This work is situated in the academy and involves relationships and situations that arose between and among graduate students and professors as well as between and among professors and other professors. Wedged between conflicting agendas, individuals feel pulled from pillar-to-post as they experience differing phenomena and images playing out within themselves, some seriously challenging their images of the best-loved self. This fine-grained scholarship illustrates that although strides have been made around gender, professional backgrounds, ethnicity, and race in society, room for significant improvement still exists, most especially at the micro-levels where aggressions can still take place. This research reveals intertwined hegemonies in academia. Narrative inquiry – a storied method that unpacks stories – deftly skirts research issues by including fictionalization as a fourth analytical tool, joining the conventional tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. Using these devices situates the inquiry, burrows into stories of experiences, and illuminates shifts taking place. Truth is established through employing multiple research tools over time and gauging the extent to which the intersecting narratives ring true to those outside the research situation.

This chapter features our innovative endeavors to inquire into an African-American student's potentially sensitive stories in a methodologically fluid and ethically delicate manner through two generative methods: digital narrative inquiry and musical narrative inquiry. Through a meta-level “inquiry into inquiry” approach, this work explores how we engaged in the digital and musical restorying of the participant's “Wounded Healer” narrative and uncovered its dynamism, cultural richness, and nuances. We subsequently represented the findings in humanizing ways using multimedia and music. Drawing on the insights from exploring these novel methods of digital and musical inquiry, our work illuminates noteworthy elements of narrative research: generativity, transformativity, interpersonal ethics, aesthetic ethics, and communal ethics. Additionally, the potential issue of trustworthiness in fluid narrative inquiries is addressed.

At the virus' US epicenter, New York City, teachers experienced the impact of the pandemic firsthand in real time. Consistent with intensification (Apple, 1986), as school struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing social and educational landscape, socioemotional stressors and occupational responsibilities increase. Through the metaphoric (Craig, 2018) image of a candle, and using the tools of narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) – broadening, burrowing, storying, and restorying – we surface four teachers' lived experiences in a year filled with incredible grief and loss, socio-political-cultural trauma, racial strife, and personal-professional challenges to show their resolve and resiliency to persevere through and beyond burning out.

“Excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” is a nascent idea in teacher education. Ratnam chanced upon this notion of “excessive teacher entitlement” while trying to understand and find a language to characterize the perplexing paradox of teacher intransigence in the face of the adaptability required of them to address the intensifying issues of equity and diversity in this global multicultural world. The concept of the “best loved self” brought in by Craig as a perfect complement to “excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” helped them present the two in a yin-yang relationship. The authors in the five chapters of this section use the language of excessive entitlement to conceptualise and uncover the sources of oppression experienced by them in the situated dynamics of their institutional milieu. Their narratives tell how the naming of the phenomenon provoked them to become conscious of the presence of excessive entitlement in themselves and others accompanied by a liberating push towards realising their best loved self.

This chapter is a multinational policy analysis focusing on what happened in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, Canada, Portugal, and USA. It is a follow-up to the first two analyses which were also conducted collaboratively (2019, 2022). The studies are constant-comparative. The four-country approach illuminates policies and practices in what hopefully is post-Covid-19 times. Neoliberal approaches to policymaking and education in general ensure that the technicalities of teaching received heightened attention to the neglect of the well-being of teachers and the agency afforded them. The critical situation of the teaching profession in the post-pandemic time means there are teacher shortages as well as the lowering of working conditions for teachers. Turmoil and crisis are two words that describe the education sector and are clearly illustrated in the media and in research. While the need to invest in education, and particularly teachers' education and career prospects, is reiterated in policy discourse, it is far from being a reality as the four cases show. The pandemic has exacerbated the existing problems in the field of education, causing heightening concern about teachers' recruitment, working conditions and well-being.