ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of beliefs in teachers’ lives and how they work to focus and guide teachers’ decisions and actions. Teachers’ professional lives are multifaceted and complex. Underlying these complexities are multiple processes that are at play as teachers navigate their work within existing social-historical contexts. Transactions among the members of our immediate contexts and the places where those transactions occur create activity settings where cultural knowing is transmitted. The school also has a high population of minoritized students who receive free and reduced lunch and is embedded within a wider community where there exists a prevailing master-narrative that poor, Black students are intellectually inferior to affluent, White students. The chapter also focuses on three systems levels to describe our ever-changing transactions: self-systems, immediate contexts, and social-historical contexts. It presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
