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This study aimed to investigate associations between the organisational and cultural contexts in which Chinese teachers work, the influence of these on their understandings of professionalism, and relationships between these and their perceived willingness and commitment to be effective in teaching to their best.

The research was part of a two-country collaboration between the universities of Beijing and Sydney into Australian and Chinese teachers' perceptions of influences on their professionalism in which research protocols were jointly developed and implemented. This paper focusses mainly upon the Chinese research but also refers to key differences between Australian and Chinese teachers' perspectives. Seventeen teachers in early, middle and later career phases were recruited from a convenience sample of primary and secondary schools in Beijing. Qualitative data analyses of individual interviews, and cross case comparative analyses were conducted.

The analyses of the data from Beijing indicated that almost all teachers emphasised their strong moral purposes and commitment to teach to their best, despite identifying the challenges of workload, school contexts and cultures and personal circumstances, which tested their resolve. In contrast, concerns about teacher autonomy and agency, which were common in the Australian study and other published research literature, were not highly visible in the Chinese data.

The authors acknowledge that this study was small scale and data were collected from a narrow sample from one urban region of China, and we should be cautious with the generalisability of findings to other regions and schools of China since there are significant discrepancies between developed coastal areas and large cities and the remote rural areas in China. Furthermore, interview data were only collected once, restricting insight to a snapshot in time. This research may be seen as an encouragement to researchers from other regions and countries to further explore the impact of socially situated understandings of teacher professionalism on practice. Future research could also benefit from utilising multiple data sources, longitudinal design and cross-cultural collaborations to further explore the challenge of defining teachers' understandings of professionalism locally while engaging with global perspectives.

The practical implications relate to (1) expanding conceptualisations of teacher professionalism by developing locally nuanced understandings of perceptions and enactments of professionalism in different contexts across the profession, which take account of the unique roles of national and local cultural contexts; (2) designing initial teacher education and continuing professional development programmes so that they take account of the influences on the professions' ideals and individual teacher identities, of the ideological and practical interplay in the workplace of structures such as mandated standards, and different socio-economic geographical settings (e.g. rural and urban); (3) designing leadership development programmes that take account of research on associations between school leaders' values, qualities and practices on school cultures and their effects on teachers' well-being, and capacities and capabilities to fulfil their understandings of being professionals and teach to their best.

The social implications relate to (1) further research on the associations between the effects of external policy demands on teachers' work and work–life tensions, teachers' sustained commitment and quality; and (2) further research on the impact of the collective influences of national cultures, broad-based policy conditions, personal values and the demands of particular schools, parents and students that influence teachers' experience, perceptions and enactments of professionalism in order to provide further insights into understanding the complexity of teachers' lives and promoting teachers' sustained enactments of professionalism in broad contexts.

The research findings, though tentative, revealed that the altruistic nature of their mission to serve students and the parental community was the dominant marker of professionalism for teachers in China, regardless of school structures, cultures, academic achievement imperatives and personal circumstance; and that their professionalism was informed by the socio-cultural formation of individual and collective moral responsibility, reinforced through national educational policies. These findings differed from the concerns reported by the teachers in the Australian study, which aligned with literature that suggests that teacher professionalism is being eroded through neo-liberal government policies, excessive workloads and performance-oriented cultures. Though the comparative data set is small, these findings suggest that whilst there are increasing policy convergences across nations, which seek to define teacher professionalism through their abilities to make improvements in students' measurable academic achievement, how teachers in different countries and cultures define themselves as professionals may differ.

The purpose of the paper is to provide a profile of Christopher Fox.

Christopher provides a short biographical account of his life thus far. He is then interviewed by Jerome. He describes how he has coped with serious depression.

Christopher claims that he owes his own life to two things, Philosophy and his close friend Helena.

The wide diversity of first person accounts shows the necessity of collecting them as they reflect the lived experience of people battling with serious mental health problems. The personal is often lost in the quantitative world of p values and statistical tests.

Christopher mentions being helped by numerous informal chats with peers rather than medication and focused psychological therapies.

While Christopher drew much sustenance from the works of Nietzsche, he was most helped by a friend who had been his learning mentor at school. Friendship can be critical in maintaining hope.

Like many before him, Christopher says he “learnt more about himself in the days where I sat in the garden (with peer survivors) than in the collective sessions of therapy, CBT or hospital visits”.

Effective teaching, while supplemented by best practice methods and assessments, is rooted in accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging content. As a foundation for history content, elementary educators rely strongly on textbooks and children’s literature, both fiction and non-fiction. While many researchers have examined the historical accuracy of textbook content, few have rigorously scrutinized the historical accuracy of children’s literature. Those projects that carried out such examination were more descriptive than comprehensive due to significantly smaller data pools. I investigate how children’s non-fiction and fiction books depict and historicize a meaningful and frequently taught history topic: Christopher Columbus’s accomplishments and misdeeds. Results from a comprehensive content analysis indicate that children’s books are engaging curricular supplements with age-appropriate readability yet frequently misrepresent history in eight consequential ways. Demonstrating a substantive disconnect between experts’ understandings of Columbus, these discouraging findings are due to the ways in which authors of children’s books recurrently omit relevant and contentious historical content in order to construct interesting, personalized narratives.

16th APRIL 1958 is one of the most important dates in the history of hovercraft for it was on that day that Sir Christopher Cockerell (he was knighted in 1969) first visited the offices of the National Research Development Corporation, then located in Tilney Street, London. During this visit he gave a presentation of his hovercraft invention and showed a film of a model hovercraft engaged in ‘round the pole’ tests to his audience of two key NRDC executives: Lord Halsbury, NRDC's Managing Director, and Mr R. A. E. Walker, its Secretary. Both were impressed with the thoroughness of Cockerell's brief on his invention. The next day, when the inventor had returned to his Suffolk home, he received a telephone call from Mr Walker telling him that Lord Halsbury's on‐the‐spot decision to finance foreign patent applicatiois on the hovercraft invention had been endorsed. NRDC's links with the hovercraft had been forged. The foresight of that decision is impressive, particularly now, some twenty years later, when the hovercraft invention has developed into a wide range of applications well beyond the scope of hovercraft ferries. Indeed, few people — even the inventor himself — could have imagined that so many products might result from those early experiments using a pair of empty food tins, an industrial blower and a pair of iron kitchen scales!

This brief history of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) documents developments and trends during the decade 2013–2023. To situate recent ISATT history, we begin with an overview of the association's first 30 years (1983–2012). The dominant theme of those early years was developing ISATT as a recognized and influential professional organization connecting researchers on teaching and teacher education from a growing list of nations and regions of the world. During the most recent decade, there has been a concerted effort toward broad internationalization through biennial conferences and regional meetings, and a growing network of national representatives from across the world. Also, the ISATT journal, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, the journal, which began in 1995, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles written by more than 1000 authors and coauthors, contributing to a growing body of knowledge about teaching and teacher education in many cultures. In the last 20 years and especially in the past 10, the locations of ISATT meetings have become significantly more diverse, following a trend of greater internationalization compared with ISATT's European and North American beginnings. At the same time, the number of ISATT members remains stable and small thereby preserving a collegial and collaborative tone in our exchanges. In sum, ISATT's recent decade finds the association intellectually healthy, successful in managing the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, and enriched by the proliferation of multinational points of view and styles of research.

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.

This paper aims to report multiperspective research on ten successful, experienced headteachers working in a range of urban and suburban schools of different sizes (with different school populations and free school meals indices of between 20 and 62 per cent).

A discussion combining narrative and analysis.

The research revealed that the headteachers sustained their success by the application of a combination of essential leadership values, qualities and skills and that these enabled them to manage a number of tensions and dilemmas associated with the management of change.

Illustrates that successful headteachers are those who place as much emphasis on people and processes as they do upon product: all had raised the levels of measurable pupil attainments in their schools and all were highly regarded by their peers. A key characteristic among the heads was that all revealed a passion for education, for pupils and for the communities in which they worked that this was recognised and appreciated by them, that they had translated their passion into practice, and that pupils' achievements had increased over a sustained period of time.