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In this chapter, we outline the research presented by each of the contributors, who used narrative inquiry approaches that were grounded in long-term research, to examine teacher experiences of cross-cultural teaching. The authors write about cross-cultural experiences that cross temporal, spatial, and social-personal dimensions. Woven into teaching and learning experiences set across time and context were interactions with colleagues, peers, and community members that offered insight into rationale for pedagogical decisions about ways in which practices and curricular materials may be mismatched or well aligned, or unfolded with tension in their current professional contexts. This crossing of time, context, and across social-personal interactions added complexity in ways that highlight the need for research methodologies that support examination of experience that unfolded across time, space, and social-personal dimensions. The authors elaborate upon ways in which a narrative inquiry approached provided a theoretical foundation to highlight complexities and reveal nuances of cross-cultural teacher experiences. The cross-cultural features in these chapters, whereby teachers cross cultural boundaries when they assumed teaching positions in communities culturally different from those in which they themselves were educated and certified. We argue for the need for cross-cultural comparative narrative inquiry approach, that help to reveal complexities of these cross-cultural teaching and learning as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts.

With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the status of teaching has been moved towards the centre of concerns in the UK higher education (HE) sector. This interest develops further the notion of teaching excellence created through various institutional and sectoral schemes such as the Higher Education Academy (HEA) fellowship. Whilst excellence schemes and the TEF all highlight the importance of teaching, they also run the danger of reducing it to lists and simplified proxies.

This chapter argues that reductive characterisations of teaching, through metrics supporting the TEF, such as the national student survey, or ‘idealised’ descriptions of the foundational aspects of ‘excellent practice’, all lead to partial accounts of the teaching process. Such characterisations might lead to creeping performativity and increasing organisational attempts to control. An alternative account of teaching is proposed based on complexity theory. This sees teaching as emergent, multifaceted and contextually based. It refutes notions of ‘best practice’ and argues that any attempt to capture ‘excellent practice’ is to reduce the holistic nature of the processes that bring teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment together.

This paper proceeds from the basis that leadership can only be understood in context and by viewing it from the inside. In particular, it argues that the contextual complexity of small school leadership warrants attention from researchers, policy makers and system administrators and describes the nature of this complexity as depicted in the literature. It then reports a study being conducted in two states of Australia which examines the ways novice principals of small schools located in rural and remote areas make sense of, and deal with, the contextual complexity of their work. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the study for promoting understanding of small school leadership and for developing authentic means of professional learning.

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.”

The purpose of this paper is to investigate value co‐creation in assessing higher education (HE) teaching quality by acknowledging the influence of all interacting parties: teachers, students and general university service. The paper questions the appropriateness of student satisfaction surveys for assessing lecturer performance.

By introducing co‐creation and interaction between several stakeholders the paper deals with a complex problem which is best addressed through multiple approaches. The paper uses a literature review of HE quality together with empirical case study research of one university based on data from documents, student surveys and interviews with lecturers. The data are interpreted in the light of the recent theory of service (S‐D) logic and many‐to‐many marketing.

The paper highlights the complexity of HE service and recommends that EHEA assumes a co‐creation perspective. Resources are provided by lecturers, students and university service which require an interactive approach through which the parties integrate these resources. The information asymmetry between lecturers and students invalidates student satisfaction surveys as an instrument to assess teaching quality. The complexity of HE teaching cannot be boiled down to a single number that forms the ground for comparison between lecturers.

The paper offers a more valid perspective on HE quality by applying the concepts of value co‐creation and resource integration. It shows that the current one‐sided student evaluation of teachers is inadequate.

This chapter seeks to explain how lesson study can contribute to the growth of teacher expertise, enabling the participants to work together to address the complexity of teaching and grow what we call ‘pedagogic literacy’, a holistic but incomplete glimpse of what it means to be a teacher. The model proposed is not complete and cannot be complete given the endless complexity of the classroom. Lesson study, we conclude, is a vehicle for enabling teachers to grow their understanding of teaching and learning, while drawing on a complex web of underpinning interconnected dimensions that teachers develop throughout the varied stages of their careers.

Sustainability is one of the leading challenges of our age, and higher education plays a vital role in supporting the implementation of sustainability initiatives. There has been substantial progress in business schools introducing sustainability into courses with extant literature detailing case studies of sustainability education and student perceptions of their learning. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap in literature from educators' perspectives on their experiences of introducing sustainability teaching using specific teaching tools for sustainability.

This paper presents a case study on a sustainability teaching tool, WikiRate, that was embedded into business and management courses at seven higher education institutions from across the globe. Interviews were conducted after course delivery to gain insights into the practical challenges of designing and implementing a sustainability education activity.

The findings show that educators perceive sustainability as a complex issue, presenting a challenge to teaching in university systems whose normative curricula are rooted in instrumental problem-solving. Furthermore, educators described challenges to their own learning in order to implement sustainability into curricula including the need for compromises and adaptions.

This empirical study reports on educators' experiences embedding sustainability into their courses through an innovative teaching tool, WikiRate. This paper has implications for reframing how we can approach sustainability education and presents discussion ways to teach complexity without reduction or simplification.

Teaching excellence remains a contested term in English higher education (HE). This paper begins by reflecting on its complex and sometimes blurred meaning, charting the divergence between academic interests in the complexity and contextual questions relating to practice development and organisational and sectoral shifts which have been driven by managerialism, accountability and “top-down” ideas of change. The authors argue that this divergence, epitomised in the development of the teaching excellence framework, has led to a confused, if ubiquitous, use of excellence to identify organisational and sector-led ideas of what it means to deliver quality teaching. However, these frameworks have become progressively detached from the complexity of practice investigated by those interested in pedagogy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is a conceptual paper which brings together literature from teaching excellence, organisational science, time and HE to develop an alternative approach to pedagogic development.

Based on a critique of the current, confused conceptualisation of teaching excellence, the authors offer a different narrative which demonstrates how a reconsideration of the factors is important in developing critical and challenging teaching opportunities. Based on a “bottom-up” system focusing on dialogue, sustainability and “unhasty” time, the authors argue for a re-establishing of a holistic approach in HE providers based on emergent pedagogies as opposed to teaching excellence.

This paper demonstrates why teaching excellence has become conceptually fractured in an English context, and why a new approach to pedagogic development needs to be considered to establish a more positive and critical approach at both the institutional and sectoral levels. This paper outlines a possible approach to developing such renewal.

This chapter is an examination of research as teacher education. I present the experiences of preservice teachers/education students engaging in term-length research projects focusing on a student of a cultural or social background different from their own, while also documenting their own experiences of conducting research in their student teaching settings as part of their coursework. Recognizing the possibilities and addressing the challenges encountered by preservice teachers when engaging in research to learn about socially and culturally diverse students contributes to the body of teacher knowledge needed for all educators in an increasingly diverse local and global community. Students in the student teaching component of their teacher education program are professionally positioned to access firsthand the complexity and nuances of diversity in a school community. Examination of their experiences highlighted benefits of including research, namely narrative inquiry research, to engage preservice teachers in learning about issues of diversity and curriculum in ways that are highly relevant to their own teaching contexts, while at the same time, gaining a framework and assuming an inquiry stance that will serve them well throughout their careers. I also explore challenges of engaging preservice teachers in research to learn about diversity in classrooms and schools.

To appreciate the distance the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification program has come, and the speed with which it has traveled that distance, a glance at its first decade from the perspective of assessment development is essential. The particulars of the history of the NBPTS's assessment strategies and designs have determined in many ways the current assessment architecture: the evolution of the assessment's design reveals the growth in our knowledge of innovative assessment strategies and formats and their uses. In this chapter, I will briefly summarize the history of the NBPTS assessment program, then describe and analyze the earliest assessment designs, some intermediate approaches, and then the current iteration (commonly referred to as the next generation certificates). I will finally detail the current assessment architecture, connecting that architecture to both the history and the lessons learned from the initial assessments.