ABSTRACT
As seen throughout this book, culture is a conceptual moving target. Complex and powerful, it is an idea whose definition is contested and whose boundaries are mapped with difficulty. As a lived and living process of meaning and making meaning in contact with others, we all participate in learning and creating culture. The challenge for teacher education, then, is not only to acknowledge one’s own background and the backgrounds of others, although these are clearly important, but to wonder-to inquire critically into those backgrounds as they have helped shape, texture, and bias the ways we live our lives as teachers and learners. This is difficult work. Far from faking being Polish, this aspect of professionalism involves discovering one’s own life story-or that of another-by risking uncertainty about meaning and being open to possibility.
