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This chapter focuses on the importance of reflection for teacher growth. Through two case studies, life examples are given on the significance of embedding critical reflection already in initial teacher education. Teachers’ life stories were collected through in-depth “rivers of life” interviews. The interplay between teachers’ awareness of their life story and their subjective theories, and how this impacts on the teachers’ attitude and openness to change are illustrated. The findings indicate that reflecting on one’s life stories may play an important role in forming teachers’ beliefs and pedagogical practices and hence their attitudes to change. The findings also suggest that a culture fostering close reflective collaboration and collegial support plays an important part in developing teachers’ perspectives of their roles and that of their learners. The findings reveal that presuming a single work culture in a school may be an oversimplification as several subcultures may be at play in one institution and even within the same subject area. The findings should have implications for approaches and procedures in teacher education and for the induction of novice teachers. Although the case studies reported here are based on Icelandic data, they should offer insights and have relevance for teacher education and teacher growth not only in Iceland but also in other countries as well.

In this chapter, Cheryl Craig and Lily Orland-Barak, editors of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A), expound on the traveling pedagogies theme as well as the theory–practice chasm, and conclude the edited volume with a model capturing the nature of fruitful, contextualized international pedagogies. Throughout the discussion, they highlight connections between and among potentially promising pedagogical approaches documented by the contributing authors whose countries of origins differ. As authors of this chapter and editors of this book, they claim that promising pedagogies have the potential to “travel” to other locales if their conditions of enactment are locally grounded, deliberated, and elaborated. This contextualization adds to the fluidity of knowledge mobilization to contexts different from the original one. Furthermore, all of the pedagogies have a praxical character to them, which means they strive to achieve a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. At the same time, they address local complexities in a reflective, deliberative, and evidence-based manner while acknowledging connections/contradictions in discourses and daunting policy issues/constraints/agendas. Against this “messy” backdrop, a model for traveling international pedagogies is proposed. The model balances a plethora of complexities, on the one hand, with the seemingly universal demand for uniformity, on the other hand. Through ongoing local, national, and international deliberation and negotiation, quality international pedagogies of potential use and value become readied for “travel”.

This chapter consists of two reflective accounts from Slovenia. Both accounts are connected with Barica Marentič Požarnik, who in Part I of this 30th anniversary volume directly linked her personal professional development to the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) during its emergent years as an organisation. In this chapter in the fifth and closing section, Marentič Požarnik’s counterparts follow in the footsteps that their senior colleague and mentor planted and make tracks of their own. They crystallise how ISATT has affected their professional development and influenced their lines of research as they - and ISATT - press towards the future.