Teacher identity construction is seen as crucial for professional development and in readiness for adoption of pedagogical innovation. Based on life-history narrative study of three experienced CFL teachers, this chapter explores how the three teacher participants account for their experiences of constructing successful professional identities. The three teacher participants shared their stories of over 20 years of teaching Mandarin Chinese to non-native speakers in both the national school context in Australia and the international school context in Hong Kong. Their collective reflection on the process of constructing successful professional identities in Western-based school contexts revealed the complex and shifting nature of identity construction. The study finds that the processes of constructing a successful professional identity in Western-based school contexts are reflected in narratives of an effective blend of Eastern and Western cultural values and pedagogical practices. This “middle ground” notion of constructing professional identity has important implications for CFL pedagogical innovation in Western-based school context. Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.

The paper focuses on the close collaborative work our research team has been engaged in with two local schools to study how action research measures may help to facilitate the improvement of the Integrated Humanities (IH) curriculum through school-university partnerships. It attempts to understand action research as a form of cultural practice for education, and examines how such collaborative work with local schools may contribute to sustainable cultural work of education and intervene at different levels of the schooling practices. In all, the paper seeks to offer preliminary analysis and reflection on the re-orientation of Cultural Studies as a research and problem-solving, intellectual and critical project with a potential for long-term input to cultural policy-making. It also aims at examining the role of cultural studies practitioners as action researchers in the process of doing cultural work of education.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.534586]