This chapter describes the conceptualization and interactions of the Portfolio Group, a knowledge community of teachers and teacher educators with over a twenty-year history of collaboration. Formed in 1998, its story formed the model for the concept of the Faculty Academy. An overview of the Portfolio Group's members and collaborative activities…

This chapter begins with a troubling circumstance within which the concept of generous scholarship found expression. Presentation of background information and the research method further help to introduce the topic. Making miseducative experiences educative is the raison d'être of this work. A rudimentary conceptualization of generous scholarship…

We enter this book writing venture as members of the Faculty Academy, a multi-institutional group of teacher educators spanning post-doctoral, clinical, and tenure-track positions. Our group's deep history enables us to comprehensively examine our learning and leading along the teaching and teacher education continuum as well as over the passage…

Learning communities in education are constructive communication networks for all teachers. Their purpose is to promote professional development, especially for new teachers. Using grounded theory, this paper explores various learning styles identified among newly admitted teachers while participating in learning communities. Nine novice male…

This book traces the origins and activities of the longest-standing collaborative teacher group in education, the Portfolio Group. Each chapter documents, historically and conceptually, the main intellectual moments in the evolution of the idea of knowledge communities. Authors illuminate the expansive work, research, and the leading/learning…

This study revolves around an organically lived online community of Chinese elementary teachers. The teachers shared their reflective journals and engaged in conversations with the facilitators and also with their peers. Following one participant's postings over a span of thirteen months helped the research team to narratively explore how the…

This research narratively explores a veteran teacher's emotions and identities in varied teacher communities within and outside a rural school in China. Based on interviews, the teacher's one-year reflective narratives and conversational records with members of an online teacher community, this research constructs and reconstructs how varied…

Through the metaphor, "learning to teach in the 'eye of the storm'", a beginning teacher's experiences of teaching in one of America's diverse urban campuses become known. Three themes of global significance emerge: (1) the similarities and differences between professional learning communities and knowledge communities; (2) the morphing of "the…

In this article, tensions in teacher community arose when the school's "rainy day" policy was invoked in the middle of a class period, disturbing instruction on the athletic field and subsequently in the gymnasium. The narrative inquiry takes a multiperspectival stance towards competing commitments to educational policy, on one hand, and…

This narrative inquiry traces a beginning teacher's unfolding career over a six-year period in a diverse middle school in the fourth largest city in the USA. The work revolves around two conceptualizations: "stories to live by" and "stories to leave by." How these identity-related phenomena surface and play out in an…

The author examines 1 experienced teacher's image of teaching and how it was purposely changed--through external intervention and against the individual's will--from the view of teacher as curriculum maker to the view of teacher as curriculum implementer. Laura's account of the "butterfly under a pin" image, a version of the…

This article connects teachers' experiences of reflective school portfolio development to the idea of teachers' knowledge communities, the different groups and individuals with whom teachers negotiate meaning for their stories of experience, lived and told, and re-lived and re-told, over time. The reflective analysis makes the case that the…