| Traditional teacher education has ignored the realities of teachers' lives both inside and outside the classroom, failing to consider their existence within broader sociocultural circumstances. This study examines the professional development and transformation of four women teachers including my mother and myself in China and Canada through exploring our life experiences in socio-cultural contexts. We were all born in the Yangtze Gorges region of China. The other three lived and worked there until they retired. I lived and worked there for over 30 years.;In the data analysis, I searched for patterns and narrative threads that weave our lived experiences into stories. The stories intermingle with literature and my reflections to form a narrative inquiry.;Analysis indicates that our devotion to teaching career, our optimistic attitude to life, our success in overcoming many difficulties to become professionals, all stem from our knowing of the "Tao of life"; our sacrifices for communities and career are deep-rooted in Confucian philosophy---where priorities are country, family, and then individual---first other, then oneself. My professional transformation in Canada led me to understanding teacher as a curriculum maker, teacher development as both personal growth and professional development, and professional transformation as learning from relations.;In this study I attempt to express non-Western modes of teachers' knowing and being in the world, so as to provide a middle ground for dialogues among professional teachers and scholars from different cultural backgrounds, enabling them to understand each other and explore new versions of teacher education and development.;The study emphasizes the dialectical relationship between an individual's identity formation and social interactions. It employs narrative inquiry, because it is through narrative that cultures have created and expressed their worldviews and have provided social models to their members. I use my own autobiographical writings, my mother's autobiography and material from in-depth interviews with the other participants as qualitative data. I also collect photos of the participants' physical environments and artifacts, as well as documents about the history, politics, economy, geography and education in the region and China in order to present the "cultural contexts" for us. |
