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The first part of this chapter addresses the history and development of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) and its engagement with the global educational community. We provide an account of the context and background against which ISATT developed as well as information about the founders’ orientations and the actions that led to ISATT’s birth. The second part of the chapter uses patterns of topic focus as graphic indicators of the evolution of ISATT’s research interests expressed through publication titles.

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 study gathers the experiences of a group of academics who have chosen to take up temporary residence in the United Arab Emirates. It explores, from the perspective of the academic, the move from the familiar to the unfamiliar, determines the challenges they faced and what factors assisted in their integration into this new environment. The findings demonstrate that fundamentally, this desire to improve their situation drives the decision to relocate and provides the motivation to overcome the many challenges such a move entails. Those interviewed believed that expatriates are different and possess certain qualities which have helped them adapt. The differences identified were that they were able to find some inner strength or draw on previous learning so as to be able to reconceptualise the issue and find a way to mentally or physically address it. These academics had found a way to undertake a sociocultural reconceptualisation in order to make sense of the new world around them. These findings are from a limited study and begin to reveal insightful meanings to the movement and mobility of academics.