Akiko Hayashi, in Teaching Expertise in Three Countries: Japan, China, and the United States, examines the factors that can influence the trajectory and experience of teachers as they learn and change. The Taktse International School in Sikkim, India, makes teacher professional development central in its mission, providing teachers with mentors and regular opportunities for workshops and reflection. In the two teacher narratives in this piece, we examine how the particular context of a school can be a central factor in teachers' development of expertise.
This article examines how precommitment encounters with teaching can reshape pathways into the teaching profession, as well as why a "teaching before deciding" approach may offer a critical response to the systemic challenges facing teacher recruitment, development, and retention. Our research chronicles exploratory teaching experiences (ETEs). Across the country, young people are finding their way to teaching not only through conventional preparation programs or emergency credentials but also through a wide range of exploratory encounters that allow them to discover teaching before committing to it. In two-hour Zoom workshops, we guided recent ETE alumni to craft 150-word micromemoirs of consequential moments from their exploratory teaching experiences. Memoirs were written to be oriented around how young people make sense of teaching through exploratory experiences. The micromemoirs reveal that the participants experienced significant personal and professional growth and came away with formative insights into the possibility of becoming a teacher.
This article examines the contradictions of democratic education in Kerala through a historical analysis of the first Education Bill proposed in 1957. Although Kerala is often celebrated for its emphasis on public education, the bill's rejection reveals how entrenched caste and class interests disrupted any promise of democratic education at the time. Using legislative debates and the writings of Joseph Mundassery, Kerala's first education minister, this article traces how the bill's provisions, aimed at regulating aided institutions and securing teachers' rights, were met with opposition from elite caste and religious organizations, ultimately leading to the fall of the first Communist government. Departing from celebratory accounts of Kerala's educational success, this article argues how the incomplete democratization of education under the first Left government enabled the unchecked privatization of educational institutions in the present and reinforced the caste and class hierarchies within Kerala's educational landscape.
