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A major challenge in teacher education in the United States is how to address the academic and linguistic needs of the growing numbers of emergent bilingual students. A second challenge is how to prepare predominantly White monolingual preservice teachers with little exposure to speakers of languages other than English to educate culturally and linguistically diverse students. With these two challenges in mind, this study examines how a course on literacy, language, and culture grounded in pedagogies of discomfort shifts preservice teachers’ deficit orientations toward emergent bilingual students’ language and literacy resources. Using Ofelia García’s (2009) definition for emergent bilingualism, this mixed-method study was conducted from 2011 to 2013 with 73 preservice teacher participants enrolled at an urban mid-Atlantic university. Quantitative data consisted of pre and post surveys while qualitative data comprised written responses to open-ended statements, self-analyses, and participant interviews. Findings evidence preservice teachers’ endorsement of monolingualism before coursework; however, pedagogies of discomfort during coursework provoke critical reflection leading to significant shifts in preservice teachers’ dispositions toward teaching language diversity in the classroom with implications for teaching emergent bilingual students.

In this chapter, the authors explore emotional discomfort and the use of live polling to enable business leaders on executive education leadership programmes to move beyond their emotional comfort zones, to facilitate self-awareness and enhance reflective practice. Openly acknowledging and discussing one’s leadership weaknesses produce emotions which are not always easily shared, especially among business leaders. Yet, identifying emotions and acknowledging discomfort is key for reflective practice and a common failure in many leadership development programmes (LDP). The authors reflect on their experience in designing and delivering a custom LDP commissioned by a UK-based corporate client. The authors draw on the pedagogy of discomfort, emotions in leadership development, and the use of audience response system (ARS) technology to enable and facilitate the development of learner self-awareness.

Engaging with the interconnected dynamics of the classroom, this chapter draws from Audre Lorde's “Uses of Anger” to consider how empathy may be cultivated as a soft skill for stronger interpersonal relationships. Jocelyn E. Marshall highlights the need for mutual vulnerability between instructor and student, where vulnerability is understood to be a mode of resistance in regards to patriarchal and hegemonic higher education institutions and learning standards. By braiding queer feminisms with interdisciplinary approaches, the trauma-informed pedagogy upholds radical empathy as the linchpin to Lorde's advocating of articulating anger with precision, listening intensely, gaining new insight, and enacting change. In creating spaces to practice and further develop empathy, the trauma-informed pedagogical approach aims to empower students with agency and equip them with skills for self-accountability and holding others accountable.

If the core purpose of transformative education is to challenge and reposition knowledge through a range of opportunities, then surfacing and attending to forms of student misconceptions (for example, through confusion, disequilibrium) are a necessary part of learning and teaching. We have come to understand that arriving at a clear view of a concept may involve a process of working through a range of misconceptions about a phenomenon or experience that may or may not create a threshold experience in a learner. We argue that the journey through conceptual change and thresholds requires a more nuanced emphasis on liminal spaces, where misconceptions and thresholds may reside. We offer a revised thresholds concept generic model that helps to identify student misconceptions as cycles within and through pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal spaces. Two practice examples demonstrate the application of this model: (1) teaching and learning botanical literacy through a technology-rich, real-time mobile app and (2) embedding and measuring cultural competence as a graduate learning outcome in Australian universities. Each context offers a specific emphasis on highlighting the need to make all liminal learning spaces safer, as learners surface and engage with conceptual change. The conclusion suggests that conceptual change in student learning offers a form of threshold misconception.

Humanity faces many crises – climate change, food insecurity, persistent poverty – what Brown, Harris, and Russell (2010) call wicked problems. These problems implicate us all, with possible solutions transcending disciplinary, organizational, and national boundaries. Therefore educators need to nurture graduates able to engage as future practitioners – and citizens – in seeking solutions which recognize “the personal, the local and the strategic, as well as specialized contributions to knowledge” (Brown et al., 2010, p. 4).

A model of service-learning which draws on the principles of social pedagogy, cultural-based learning and co-production provides the foundations for a more reflexive pedagogy, supporting the “development of student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion and altruistic behavior” (Zajonc, 2013, p. 83). This approach advocates that community organizations play a pivotal role in co-designing knowledge. Drawing on an applied research module at University of Wolverhampton this chapter will argue that by engaging community groups as co-producers of knowledge, learning can be extended beyond students to the wider community (Murphy & Joseph, 2019). Not only will this enhance the potential of service learning to benefit the community and the students, but it has the potential to produce graduates more sensitive to the needs of communities themselves.

This chapter traces one student teacher's (Joan) experiences of learning to teach English as a second language in a cross-cultural context during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The school-based practicum is a core component of many initial teacher education programmes. During this induction period, usually an 8-week block, student teachers are placed in local schools to learn how to integrate theories into practice in real teaching situations. Specifically, I uncover how Joan grappled with the tensions and complexities of teaching young learners from a different cultural and linguistic background, in a small elementary school situated in the borderland between Hong Kong (an autonomous region of China) and Shenzhen (a province of Mainland China).

Critical incidents from Joan's practicum experiences were analysed to uncover how she dealt with the tensions and dilemmas in confronting difference and marginalising practices while learning to teach English as a second language (ESL) in the practicum school. Implications on how to develop initial teacher education programmes so that student teachers learning to teach across cultural contexts can be encouraged to explore, confront and ‘deal with the emotional terrain of understanding difference’ will be discussed (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p. 123; Zembylas, 2010).

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

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 investigates the phenomenon of teachers' “entitled attitude” that manifested itself as resistance to change in the midst of a curricular reform in the Indian school context. For teachers long socialized into a teacher-centered culture, the change expected was nothing less than a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense. However, conclusions drawn from studies involving cursory surveys and teacher observation pinned the problem to teachers' “entitled attitude,” an unwillingness to exert themselves beyond the minimum level required by school policies. This view reflects a lack of acknowledgement of teachers as persons with values and the capacity to think and feel as potential agents of community practices such as schooling. My study investigates the wider sociocultural historical and political basis of teachers' putative “entitled attitude” informed by Lev Vygotsky's dialectical approach. It accesses the interrelated history of a teacher at a number of levels using the teacher's life history to create the narrative. This “genetic” analysis helps illuminate what the curricular change means to teachers inside out. The findings are used to unravel the nature of support that would help teachers realize their agency and sway them from using entitlement as a compensatory mechanism to deflect change.

Narrative-biographical perspectives have taken on a very prominent role in both the research on and practices of teacher education (both preservice and in-service) over the past decades. This chapter briefly situates and explains this “narrative turn,” and continues with the presentation and discussion of concrete pedagogical applications of narrative-biographical approaches. A storied example of one approach is followed by a general discussion of its educational rationale and the necessary conditions for its use. References are made to narrative language as a genre, its contextualized nature as well as the connection with (student) teachers’ developing sense of self.